Did you say shrubberies?

Comics, Illustration, Art, Multifandom. That should sum it up nicely. I'm bioc, by the way, always up for a good laugh and I do hope to upload some artwork very soon. So, let's see how this turns out.

[yesterdaysprint]

The Illustrated Book of Manners: A Manual of Good Behavior and Polite Accomplishments, 1866

[ashfae]

If the amount of happiness, immediate or ultimate, is increased by any costume, it is right to wear it.

[sockdreams]

THIS

[alexmey-does-an-arts]

[192nausikaa]

[septemberequinox]

that is some next level knot magic.

[elodieunderglass]

 it isn’t though!!! it’s because most relationships aren’t worth the effort. The “sweater curse” is actually most commonly called the “BOYFRIEND sweater curse.” Which=heteronormative, but the curse most often falls on a woman knitting a sweater for a boyfriend. Before she finishes the sweater, they break up - pop culture would have you believe it’s because the boyfriend freaks out do to the weirdness/clinginess of having a sweater made for you, but I think knitters are wiser than that.

It’s because after spending serious £££ on materials, and then HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF LABOR on the creation of the item, with every stitch a prayer of totally focused intent, creating a large display of technical skill - it is then gifted to a non-knitter who does NOT APPRECIATE the work/effort/skill/cost/TIME it took to make it, and in fact thinks you’re a bit weird and making a big deal out of a piece of clothing, and after they go “oh thanks” and shove your creation in the cupboard next to a sweater they got for £15 at an M&S sale, then they never wear your sweater because it’s too tight because when you asked them how their favorite sweaters usually fit they said “I ‘unno” and when you measured them for the fifth time and asked, rather tersely, if they had enough room in the chest, they said “I guess,” and then if pressed they say they don’t really like the sweater design, but then you point out that they were supposed to participate in helping you design it and they say they don’t really care about how things look, and when you say that you tried to match it to their other clothes so how can they hate it, then they say that honestly their mother still buys all their clothes because they hate going shopping, and that they hate all their other clothes too, well. That’s when a sensible knitter goes “Fuck this shit. And you know what? Fuck this man.”

This is what happens when someone posts in a knitting forum “Attack of the sweater curse!” - this is the usual story. It has a rigid plot. It is as old as myth.

That’s when you look at the time you spent and realize, “I could LITERALLY have written the first draft of a novel instead of doing this.” That’s when you go “I could have taken that £200 and bought myself a new wardrobe.” That’s when you go “I could have taken all that intent, all that willpower, all that creative force, and laid down some fucking witchcraft, all right?” That’s when you go “I basically spent 100 hours straight thinking about this bastard while making something amazing for him, and I have no evidence that he ever spent 10 hours of his life thinking about me.”

And “I could spend this time and energy and money in making myself an enormous, intricate heirloom silk shawl with just a touch of cashmere, in elvish twists and leafy lace in all the colors of the night, shot through with subtly glittering stars, warm in winter and cool and summer and light as a lover’s kiss on the shoulders, suitable for draping over my arms at weddings or wrapping myself in to watch the sea, a lace-knotted promise to myself that I will keep for my entire life and gift to my favorite granddaughter when I die, and she will wear it to keep alive my memory - but instead I have this sweater, and this fuckboy.”

The sweater curse is a lesson that the universe gives to a knitter at an important point in their life. It is a gift.

Knitting a sweater for a husband or wife generally doesn’t call down the curse, because the relationship is meant to be stronger than 4-ply.

(Although I say this, but I’ve taken over 5 years to finish a pair of mittens for my husband, because he casually asked me to do something customized with the cables, and I still can’t get the math to work on the right hand.)

[destinydiamante-deactivated2022]

this post is so much better with that commentary

[doctornerdington]

Fuck yes.

[jivin-jello]

Hey @elodieunderglass! How’re the mittens coming along?

[elodieunderglass]

It is 2020, we recently marked 9 years of marriage and no progress has been made

[emi--rose]

I was pretty sure I had a keeper when I married my husband - he was so appropriately impressed with my Estonian lace, crazy complicated, at least 25k beads wedding shawl. And then a year or two ago, I made him a super cool but also HELLA intricate cabled sweater in his favorite color. He doesn’t get excited about stuff ahead of time, but he dutifully let me measure him and check the fit, and as soon as it was on my blocking towel, he lost his mind with excitement. He wears it everywhere and proudly tells people his wife made it, and look, it’s got DNA on it!! He was so sad last spring because it got too warm to wear it. 🥲

Pictured: the sleeve of said sweater, the only thing Mr. Emi will let me put on the internet 😂

[intrepidheroine]

I had been married to my spouse for 2 years before I even contemplated making him a sweater. I had made him hats and scarves and ponchos, but no sweater because I didn’t want to get divorced.

But he loved everything I made him and showed off to his friends, so I had him pet some yarn and gave him a few options.

Readers, he LOVES that sweater. He takes such good care of it, tells every single person he neets that I made it, and confirmed the care instructions a bunch before washing it. So I made him another.

He now has three pullovers and a sweater vest. He is happy to try on pieces that have been safety pinned together and tells me where the fit is off. I am currently on month six of a cabled cardigan that I needed to redo for length, and he is so excited about it because it is exactly the color and pattern he wants.

Friends, get yourself a partner who will tell you their color, design, and fit preferences before you make them sweaters. It makes the entire endeavor worth it.

[wiseacrewhimsy]

I have so many crochet things made by Wife and I love and participated with all of them. In fact, whenever they ask for my opinion, they roll their eyes a little and are like, you like everything I make. Because I do!!

The sweater they made me is my fave. I get compliments on it constantly and am so happy to tell people My Wife Made It.

[raspberry-muffin]

So wholesome.

ut also.

@elodieunderglass how the mittens coming?

[elodieunderglass]

I made him a rainbow fairisle jumper!! We can call the mittens officially quits!!!

[batsandboba]

trying to eat healthy with adhd is like i have eaten nothing but mac and cheese for two days straight so today i ate a giant bowl of plain spinach

[charlesoberonn]

[narnia-and-the-north]

@josiah-glacier that’s too good to keep in the comments

[its-your-mind]

ADD IT TO THE BADASS QUOTE LIST

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

An interesting demonstration of how the human brain works.

But also something of a lesson regarding perception, and the unreliability of subjective perspective versus objective reality.

You can be extremely certain about how you perceive the world, your "lived experience," that which you "feel it in my heart." But that doesn't mean it's actually true. And it doesn't mean we have to endorse it, or ignore or outright deny objective reality.

That's a "you" thing, not a "we" thing.

[gauntletqueen]

I'm so sick of people saying water doesn't taste. Water fuckin TASTES

[mistral]

well what does it taste like then?

[gauntletqueen]

[ober-affen-geil]

You know, the place where I last worked wanted to use our reading room as backdrop for a filmed interview (we had a very pretty reading room). On the day the film crew was there, the audio guy came over to my desk which was at the edge of the space and said "Look, you can keep working 'cus you're not doing anything too loud, but in a minute I'm going to go over there and call for silence for 10-20 seconds, and during that time I need you to not make any noise." And I went "lol sure" but he clearly felt a little uncomfortable telling me to not move at my own desk so he explained; the purpose of those 20 seconds is to record the silence in the room.

It's so they have a patch they can edit "silence" over some extraneous background noise later (the phone ringing, me getting an email, the toilet flushing in the bathroom next door, the elevator coming and going, noisy student group, etc), but the point was that they can't just slap any old "silence" over a recording done in a certain room. They have to use the "silence" *from that room* or it will be jarring on a subliminal level to the people listening. Because silence has a sound, and it's a little different everywhere you hear it.

That's what water tastes like.

[professorerudite]

[alphagullofficial]

[ghoulgoon]

i think rickrolling is the only meme that gets objectively funnier with age. in 2009 you learned to anticipate it but in 2019 it happens just infreqently enough that i fall for it every single time

[ghoulgoon]

like people still make rage comics and doge jokes and shit but it’s always ironic (the real punchline is that you’re using an outdated format) or more in line with modern absurd internet humor. rickrolling is the only meme i can think of that’s been the exact same for a full decade- click on a link thinking you’re getting something else, get rick astley instead, and it’s still consistently funny

[miss-bubles]

the more time passes the more foolish you feel for falling for a rickroll as well. Like darn I learnt about this prank 10+ years ago how did I just fall for it now,

[myothertardisisonthemun]

Plus, as far as memes go, turns out it’s still incredibly popular 

[doggendoodle]

Nooope. Nope, you can’t get me. I’m not clicking on that link and you can’t make me.

[moxxie-by-proxxie]

[themodernmaccabee]

I am a fool for clicking

[thanatos-girl]

[lyteupthelyfe]

it’s honestly so, so fascinating—here’s a graph I found that estimates how many people have been rickrolled in the past decade!

[dimension20official]

In the latest Adventuring Academy, Aabria defends the brutal mathematical fairness over Brennan’s beloved clickety-clack physical dice

[1982brucespringsteen]

me, and i cannot stress this enough, and who

[spicymemesociety]

[hotvampireadjacent]

there’s a story in aesop’s fables, i think it is, about a human talking to a satyr or something. The satyr asks why the human is blowing on his hands during a snow storm and he says “to warm up” later inside the satyr asks the human why he’s blowing on the soup and the human says “to cool it down”

and the satyr has had enough and says “well I won’t have a guest that breaths cold air one moment and hot air the next” and tells the human to leave his house

[hotvampireadjacent]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

- Haa is hot because your breath is warm from your lungblood

- Hoo is cold because, while the air is still warm, you’re blowing it at a greater pressure by blowing it through a smaller hole, and the effect of the windchill is greater than the effect of the slight warmth in the air

[zeconster]

That story always pissed me off, because while people generally interpret it as “don’t be double-tongued” or “avoid those who are inconstant”, my interpretation was “satyrs are FUCKING STUPID”.

[sonicskullsalt]

It doesn’t matter if you say haa or hoo. Your breath is at about body temperature. That makes it warmer than the cold wind outside and colder than the hot soup.

[sonypraystation]

my ancestors seeing me shrug off a diarrhea session

[agoddamn]

[bogleech]

People in the notes confused because they're so accustomed to running water they don't know how close diarrhea might have otherwise come to killing them if they've had it even once lol it's killed more humans than just about anything in history

[catgirlforeskin]

We’re the granddaughters of the bowels you couldn’t irritate

[kinka-juice]

Mine would be baffled that I've gone 5+ years with bloody diarrhea. Inflammatory Bowel Disease has probably always existed, but they didn't have treatment.

I do want to specifically shout out Dr Thomas Latta, who is the person who gave us IV hydration, and pretty much magically cured cholera with it in his first attempt. From his diary:

I attempted to restore the blood to its natural state, by injecting copiously into the larger intestines warm water.. trusting that the power of absorption might not be altogether lost, but by these means I produced, in no case, any permanent benefit.. I at length resolved to throw the fluid immediately into the circulation. In this, having no precedent to direct me, I proceeded with much caution. The first subject of experiment was an aged female. She had apparently reached the last moments of her earthly existence, and now nothing could injure her – indeed, so entirely was she reduced, that I feared I should be unable to get my apparatus ready ere she expired. Having inserted a tube into the basilic vein, cautiously – anxiously, I watched the effects; ounce after ounce was injected, but no visible change was produced. Still persevering, I though she began to breathe less laboriously, soon the sharpened features, and sunken eye, and fallen jaw, pale and cold, bearing the manifest impress of death's signet, began to glow with returning animation; the pulse, which had long ceased, returned to the wrist; at first small and quick, by degrees it became more and more distinct ... and in the short space of half and hour, when six pints had been injected, she expressed in a firm voice that she was free from all uneasiness, actually became jocular, and fancied all she needed was a little sleep.

Diarrhea can very easily be death by dehydration, especially when you can't consume oral fluids (Cholera causes extreme vomiting as well). Not only did we solve part of the problem with clean water, the other half was learning how to put clean water into our bodies (with salt).

Also fun fact, Thomas Latta was active in England at the same time as John Snow, the father of epidemiology, also in response to the Cholera epidemics at the time.

[sonypraystation]

[severeannoyance]

Throughout history, so many people have worked so hard to alleviate human suffering, misery, and death. You will never know the names of all the people who have spent their life’s passion to take care of you, someone divided from them by decades, even centuries, someone whose existence they’d never know, whose name they’d never hear. But they did it, all the same.

I think this is an important thing to keep in mind.

[assiraphales]

I think what modern filmmakers keep forgetting (especially disney affiliated productions) is that actors used to have a much more hands on and involved part. they weren’t just reading lines handed to them in a dark alley ten minutes before filming. they suggested script revisions and could improvise lines on the spot bc they knew their characters.

[assiraphales]

if mark hamill says “that’s not my luke skywalker” that’s a problem. if temuera morrison had insight into boba fett’s character the producers shouldn’t have just told him to deal with the script he was given. if seb stan was concerned about the lack of closure in the steve bucky relationship that’s an issue! the insane levels of secrecy and treating actors like the only thing they are good for is regurgitating lines is so detrimental to modern film/television

[prokopetz]

Something to bear in mind is that this isn’t our first turn on this particular merry-go-round.

Back in the early days of Hollywood, when vertically integrated monopolies were the norm and studios, distributors and theatre chains were all owned by the same parent companies, actors were basically treated like cattle, locked into exploitative multi-film contracts, routinely kept in the dark and lied to, and – apart from a handful of the very largest stars – had very little creative input. This would remain the case until a series of massive antitrust lawsuits in the 1930s and 1940s forced the studio monopolies to break up.

Now we’re seeing a shift back toward all film production being controlled by a tiny handful of companies, that routinely employ abusive booking practices to push the theatre chains around and exercise de facto control over theatre booking decisions in spite of technically being unaffiliated – and we’re also seeing a shift back toward how actors were treated under the old studio monopolies.

Like, this isn’t just a problem with the cultural zeitgeist. It’s not just a matter of people forgetting how to make good films. There are concrete economic incentives that lead to this sort of behaviour – and just like the first time around, it’s probably not going to get solved any way other than at legislative gunpoint.

[spiced-wine-fic]

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]