fantasy and fandom prone

sideblog

[frostedmagnolias]

Beaded Gown with Flower Inserts

1930s

Whitaker Auction

[lavidaextraordinaria]

What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?

[frenchshower]

My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually

[thepioden]

Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire very very slowly.

[sarah-mcelroy-deactivated202601]

[femonologue]

What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.

[optimysticals]

I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.

[alessariel]

@brainsforbabyjesus

[brainsforbabyjesus]

okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).

We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.

[digitaldiscipline]

The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).

This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.

[violent-darts]

OH HOW I LOVE THIS POST. It makes me so much happier about being alive. I AM BURNING VERY SLOWLY. *hugs it*

[cannedcream]

And once again, the internet makes learning history and science a thousand times more interesting than school ever did.

[tsvrcm-deactivated20161229]

I love shit like this.

[department-of-fagriculture]

I was totally having thoughts along these lines and along comes tumblr to pretty much sum it all up. Bravo~

[madeofmxxnlight]

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

[mrsugden-dinglefirst]

The love of his life, his world, his everything 🥹❤️

[aaronandrobert]

[findingcasualmagic]

he definitely didn't forget. he spent six years replaying each and every one.

[quotefeeling]

“Move on. It’s a chapter in your life. Don’t close the book, just turn the page for a new chapter.”

— Brooklyn Copeland

[notgreatbob]

''i wasted those years'' who cares. you lived the only life you could've lived in those moments

[callmezeemonic]

You did the best you could with all you had and knew. That was then. Here is now

[steveyockey]

Why are men obsessed with women obsessed with ‘Heated Rivalry’?

On who owns the romance genre and what's actually being fetishized in everyone's favorite gay hockey show

Indeed, if there is a fetish angle to Heated Rivalry, I actually don’t think it’s a sexual one. For the most part, the fervor around the show’s sex scenes feels similar to the fervor around the straight sex in Fifty Shades of Grey or Outlander or Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” or, hell, even Hot Priest saying “Kneel” on Fleabag—less exclusive to gayness than to a broader appreciation of onscreen horniness. (The Skins approach, if you will.) No, if anything, Heated Rivalry is part of a fetishization not of gay sex but of the inner emotional lives of men in general. Because “girl culture” has never just been Mean Girls and Little Women and When Harry Met Sally, it’s also male-centric stuff like Newsies and The Outsiders and Dead Poets Society too.

That’s because we live in a patriarchal society where men are treated as the default. So women naturally want to understand the male experience they’re surrounded by and yet separate from too—especially straight women, to whom men are simultaneously oppressors, pursuers, and objects of desire. It’s a confusing reality, and exploring fictional stories of male desire (whether of other men or of women) provides a safe space to work out those contradictions. Plus all that cultural baggage means it can be especially thrilling to watch stories of men who defy patriarchal norms by charting a different, more empathetic path—not just with women but with each other as well.

It’s the reason straight teen girls fawn over sensitive boy bands while straight boys don’t do the same with empowered girl groups. From a young age, women are encouraged to imagine the three-dimensionality of men in a way I’m not sure men are ever really encouraged to do with women. And while there maybe is something kind of fetishistic about that, it’s a fetishization of a sort of idealized form of “he’s not like other boys” male empathy, rather than a specific sexual orientation. Sex and shipping can be a part of that experience—because sex and shipping are a cornerstone of female fandom in general—but it’s not the sole focus. A big reason women love Heated Rivalry is because it’s about two men being incredibly sweet and vulnerable with one another. Just as a big reason women love Newsies is because it’s full of loving, supportive male friendships.

[redstonedust]

pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

[bincliff]

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

[haemey]

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

[charl0ttan]

huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while

[charl0ttan]

something earth shattering going on here

[emily84]

this is why one of my favorite all-time paintings is Ship in Stormy Seas by Ivan Aivazovsky... he was really onto something there

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time

[is-there-a-boat]

THERE IS A BOAT BY IVAN AIVAZOVSKY!!

[clayandsorcery]

Ivan Aivazovsky could paint glowing water. One of the GOATs for sure.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

The real impact of AI at university level that I've watched in real time is how so many students come onto courses now - including Masters level - who straight up don't know how to analyse/evaluate things anymore. They just accept whatever they first read/hear completely uncritically. Every time you point it out you have to coax them into Actually Thinking.

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

Ngh. Yelling at the choir here, I know, but NNNNGH

[ecrivainsolitaire]

I can't be the only one who thinks this isn't a problem with AI, it's a problem with a for-profit college system that pushes inadequate students through in order to extract debt from them while failing to stop the progress of the illiterate. Back in the day you'd be laughing out of 7th grade English if you delivered something like that, let alone a master's degree. These people should have flunked out way before AI was invented, and forced to repeat half the curriculum in order to graduate, and only then be allowed to move on to the next stage. AI has become a scapegoat for all the growing problems the education system had long before its invention; it's the same as blaming phones or Wikipedia. The reason these students shouldn't have a master's isn't because they became stupid overnight in November 15th, 2022; it's because they were already stupid and no one educated it out of them, so the moment they found a shortcut to avoid using their brains they forgot what little they already contained. But just like with phones and Wikipedia, everyone will just blame the new tech and those damn kids on their internet, and absolutely nothing will be done to prevent dangerously ignorant people from eroding the meaning of a university degree because extraction tuition money is more profitable than giving a shit.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

No.

This, as I said in the post, is a noticeable and significant problem in the last two years. It is affecting students who were fine three years ago, and now aren't. It is a very specific issue that is affecting very specific skills, including previously very intelligent people

This is already attested in the literature. Meanwhile, the for-profit education system has not changed in the last two years

Additionally, prior to the last 2-3 years, I had failed one student ever, and flagged one student ever for plagiarism. This year we've had to deal with five separate plagiarism cases on the Masters course alone, all of whom admitted to LLM use. Not one of them can analyse information worth a damn; all of them had excellent prior undergrad scores.

This is an LLM problem

[pedestriansteppers]

William Eggleston

Girl with Red Hair, Biloxi, Mississippi 1974

[hope-for-the-planet]

The DIY Diehards Building Green Infrastructure from Scratch

Renewable-power renegades are constructing their own wind turbines — and making it easy for others to follow their lead.

From the article:

On his return home, Schreiber wanted to spread the word. The next year he held his first wind turbine-building workshop, founding PureSelfMade, a nonprofit to teach people how to make their own wind turbines from scratch. Ever since, Schreiber, who returns to Scoraig every year to see Piggott and other friends, has been offering courses, usually for groups of between eight and 20 people, on how to make wind turbines from scratch, including rotor blades and custom-made generators, and setting up the basic electrics. Although outputs vary depending on locations, most turbines could power several appliances, but not an entire home. Often they are connected to batteries to store energy for when it’s needed. In the context of volatile energy prices, the pressing need to shift to renewable power, the limits of centralized electricity systems and the risks of relying on foreign supply chains, there’s growing demand for communities to become energy self-sufficient. Until now, so-called “small wind” has been a relatively overlooked local provider. But for Schreiber, the “DIY approach” brings with it a level of reassurance and freedom. “Instead of big industry, I prefer the more grassroots way,” he says. “I like the idea of decentralization. With a lot of chaos in the world, it’s better to be self-sufficient, to have a reliable energy system at home.”

PureSelfMade is expanding into selling parts kits for DIY wind turbines as well as detailed guides. Most of the materials for their designs can be purchased at a local hardware store, and the wood blades are biodegradable when they need to be replaced.

[robronbrainrot]

"And thanks. For not letting me bottle it. And for being here."

[byjove]

There are certain period pieces where it is obvious the writer and director had little to no knowledge about the period it is set in and no desire to grasp the historical complexities which is….fine. But maybe stick to contemporary bullshit if you’re too lazy to immerse yourself into research and trying to understand what life would have been life for people living in that period. This isn’t about anachronisms, I love the occasional creative anachronism, this is about the persistent flattening of history and recreating it with your dull, stuffy stereotypes of historical periods through a 21st century lens.

[byjove]

An example would be people complaining about characters of color in European period pieces, the idea that there was this overarching cultural and ethnic hegemony until recently is not historically accurate and depicting history that way dulls it. Wuthering Heights was written 180 years ago and adaptors still don’t want to acknowledge Heathcliff was not white even though his race and the racism he experiences is important to the plot. You also see this in the misogynistic way female characters are treated in many period pieces, simply chattel made to breed, no research into what agency women actually did and did not have at that time or their day to day lives, they’re not people to the modern writer, just miserable creatures made to suffer.

[marzipanandminutiae]

speaking of misogyny specifically, people never want to understand the nuances of it

a woman can work outside the home, have hobbies, marry for love, be happy bucking the status quo or happy having it work out for her...and still be subject to crushing social norms and structural inequality

a Regency-era housewife who adored her husband and wanted a big family and took pride in running the home and furthering her husband's career was still oppressed

a Regency-era lady portrait-painter like Sarah Biffin (who was also disabled!) could exist and have a career even though that oppression existed

really every oppressed minority faced a complicated dance of finding the loopholes and the ways society would bend or break to let them do what they wanted, because those ways did exist most of the time- OR they found joy and happiness even in the face of oppression, in what lives they WERE allowed by the world they lived in. and all of that nuance is worth learning about and honoring fully

not flattening it into, to go back to our example of women, "if women were happy with the status quo, they had no brains at all, and if they rebelled they'd be locked in asylums 100% of the time or whatever"

[ginkgocrown-old-blog]

I showed this post to my boyfriend and he tried to take his shirt off like a girl and 

uh

yeah

[castielsteenwolf]

Out of the 82k notes my post got this is by far the best comment holy shit thank u for being u

[wingscanspeak]

So i tried it both ways and uh

i mean how do you do the first one without pulling out all your hair?

[zorobro]

this made me laugh really hard….

and it made me realize that girls and boys pull their shirt off differently. /amazed

but seriously I think girls just do the cross arm thing because of HAIR like demonstrated 

[wingscanspeak]

So one year, one URL change, and a hair cut later, I decide to try again… FOR SCIENCE! 

Its not science unless you write it down so 

[30secondstocalifornia]

First method:

Well done, i guess…

Second:

I fucked up

Girls… how?

[ohshititsmama-deactivated201812]

I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW WE CAN HAVE SUCH DIFFERENT WAYS OF TAKING OFF SHIRTS AND SO MUCH DIFFICULTY DOING IT THE OTHER WAY

[iprayforangels-deactivated20220]

I FIGURED IT OUT!!!!!

It’s all in the way that girl/boys shirts are made.

Girls shirts have less armpit room then boy’s do and are generally shorter so pulling it off over your head is more practical because by lifting your arms all the way up you make enough room for the sleeves to just slip off.

Boys shirts have more room and are generally longer so it is easy to slip them off over your head.

but if you take a girls shirt off like a boys shirt you will get your arms caught because there isn’t much armpit space.

and if you take a boys shirt off like a girls shit you will still have your head in it when you’ve lifted your arms all the way up because of the shirt’s length.

It has nothing to do with us. It is entirely to do with how our shirts are made. I figured it out for you. YOU’RE WELCOME!

[prince-cake]

bless you

[wingscanspeak]

look what is back on my dash. Jesus.

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[trickythedino]

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

[pinche-aquarius]

Keep up the great work, lads

[mayax81]

[snakebites-and-ink]

I love how this addition would be absolutely incomprehensible almost anywhere else but we know exactly what it means