Lotusblossom7

Illustrator and Designer

[magicalgirlastarion]

[systlin]

So my sister wants to start sewing more, because

a. She’s 5′ 11″ and can never find pants long enough for her legs or shirts long enough for her arms.

b. She hates synthetic fibers as much as I do and it’s difficult to find natural fiber clothes that aren’t made of cotton

c. She’s a biologist and would physically fistfight microplastics if given half a chance

So her gift from mom and dad for her birthday was a sewing machine. Not a super expensive one but a good solid serviceable one.

And recently she asked “So where do I GET wool or linen and thread that isn’t polyester” and mom was like ‘go ask your sister’

And I, of course, crashed into the group text like “GET A PEN I HAVE WEBSITES FOR U” and honestly I’m thrilled about this

[systlin]

“Where did u get all this”

“Bets, u know I’m a 15th degree blackbelt of buying shit on the internet”

“oh yeah tru”

[hermesmuse]

Op can may we inquire about the website list

[systlin]

Linen; https://www.graylinelinen.com/

cotton and Silk thread; https://redrockthreads.com/

Linen thread and wool fabric; https://burnleyandtrowbridge.com/ (they’ve got wool stuffs and worsted wool fabric for $15 a yard! I just got three yards of navy worsted wool I’m making a constellation winter skirt from)

More linen thread and wool; https://wmboothdraper.com/ (just ordered wool broadcloth to make a coat)

Silk fabric (THE best place to get silk lining fabrics and raw silk fabric):https://www.dharmatrading.com/

A varying assortment of wool and silk and cotton and even some leather, use coupon code  spring2020 for 50% off your full order, worked yesterday when I bought some stuff there; https://metrotextilesnyc.com/

Wool. You want wool coating for under $20 a yard? Sure you do. It’s here. Not a huge variety of colors, most are black or brown, but hey https://www.fashionfabricsclub.com/Catalog?refinementIds=4096748&Keyword=wool&pageSize=16

[elenorasweet]

As a woman who is 6’ and overheats easily and has an easier time in natural fibres: I fucking get it. I found I didn’t have much time to make clothes recently, so I started commissioning a sewster to make me some. I have two full-length skirts now, one linen and one wool, and they’re so comfortable and I love them so much, and they’re absolutely worth it. I plan to get more, but I’m saving up.

[catgirl-techsupport]

Saw a post like this with negative outlook so I asked for it to be fixed

[maikaartwork]

Artists, let’s talk about Instagram commission scammers

There’s been a huge rise in commission scammers recently, mostly on Instagram. A lot of new artists don’t know what to look out for, so I figured this might help people.

How they begin

Usually the scammer will write to you asking about a commission. Something deceptively cute - mostly I encounter asks about pet portraits, with one or two photos sent. They’ll probably try to sell you a sweet little story, like “It’s for my son’s birthday”. They will insist that they love your artwork and style, even though they don’t follow you or never liked a single piece of your art.

What to look out for:

Their profiles will either be private, empty, or filled with very generic stuff, dating at most a few years back.

Their language will be very simple, rushed or downright bad. They might use weird emojis that nobody ever uses. They will probably send impatient “??” when you don’t answer immediately. They’re in a crunch - lots of people to scam, you know. 

They’ll give you absolutely no guidelines. No hints on style, contents aside from (usually) the pet and often a name written on the artwork, no theme. Anything you draw will be perfect. Full artistic freedom. In reality they don’t really care for this part.

They’ll offer you a ridiculous amount of money. Usually 100 or 300 USD. They’ll often put in a phrase like “I am willing to compensate you financially” and “I want the best you can draw”, peppered with vague praise. It will most likely sound way too good to be true. That’s because it is.

Where the scam actually happens

If you agree, they will ask you for a payment method. They’ll try to get to this part as soon as possible. 

Usually, they’ll insist on PayPal. And not just any PayPal. They’ll always insist on sending you a transfer immediately. None of that PayPal Invoice stuff (although some do have methods for that, too). They’ll really, REALLY want to get your PayPal email address and name for the transfer - that’s what they’re after. If you insist on any other method, they’ll just circle back to the transfer “for easiest method”. If you do provide them with the info, most likely you’ll soon get a scam email. It most likely be a message with a link that will ultimately lead to bleeding you dry. Never, and I mean NEVER click on any emails or links you get from them. It’s like with any other scam emails you can ever get.

A few things can happen here:

They overpay you and ask for the difference to be wired back. Usually it will go to a different account and you’ll never see that money again. 

They’ll overpay you “for shipping costs” and ask you to forward the difference to their shipping company. Just like before, you’ll never see that money again.

The actual owner of the account (yes, they most likely use stolen accounts to wire from) will realize there’s been something sketchy going on and request a refund via official channels. Your account will be charged with fees and/or you get in trouble for fraudulent transactions. 

You will transfer the money from your PayPal credit to your bank account and they will make a shitstorm when they want their money back, making your life a living hell. They will call you a scammer, a thief, make wild claims, wearing you down and forcing you into wiring money “back” - aka to their final destination account. 

Never, EVER wire money to anyone. This is not how it’s supposed to go. Use PayPal Invoice for secure exchanges where the client needs to provide you with their email, not the other way around.

You can find more info on that method HERE.

What to do when you encounter a scammer:

Ask the right questions: inquire about the style, which artwork of yours they like, as much details as you can. They won’t supply you with any good answers.

Don’t let the rush of the exchange, their praise and the promise of insanely good money to get to you. That’s how they operate, that’s how they make you lose vigilance. 

Don’t engage them. As soon as you realize it might be a scam, block them. The sense of urgency they create with their rushed exchange, and pressure they put on you will sooner or later get to you and you might do something that you’ll regret later.

Never wire money to anyone. Never give out your personal data. Never provide your email, name, address or credit card info. 

Don’t be deceived by receiving a payment, if you somehow agree to go along with it. Just because it’s there now doesn’t mean it can’t be withdrawn. 

Here is a very standard example of such an exchange. I realized it’s a scam pretty fast and went along with it, because I wanted good screenshots for you guys, so I tried going very “by the book” with it. 

Please share this post, make it reach as many artists as possible. Let young or inexperienced artists know that this is going on. So many people have no idea that this is a thing. Let’s help each other out. If you think I missed any relevant info, do add it as an rb!

Also, if you know other scam methods that you think should be shared, consider rb-ing this post with them below. Having a master post of scam protection would AWESOME to have in the art community.

[harmalite]

CLADISTICS ruined my life

[aquaticpaleo]

yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

The choice is this: 

Birds are reptiles 

Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT 

That’s it, that’s the choice 

[shadybacon]

What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Nope 

Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds) 

So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles 

birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily. 

[shadybacon]

But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles? I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification. 

And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals. 

So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing. 

[anais-ninja-bitch]

don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.

[virovac]

Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it. 

You are technically a fish.

[haltraveler]

IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all

[aethersea]

hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed

[haltraveler]

Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this 

The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators. 

[alexaloraetheris]

This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.

[knitordeath]

I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.

Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.

[theclockworkjudas]

…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles

…which evolved from amphibians

…which evolved from fish.

[invisible-goats]

*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken* BEHOLD A LIZARD

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

you could have left the feathers on this time tbh

[dee-the-red-witch]

It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.

[generouslyandrogynousdragon]

Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.

[emi--rose]

May I recommend the book “why fish don’t exist” by Lulu Miller

[the-haiku-bot]

May I recommend

the book “why fish don’t exist”

by Lulu Miller

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[weird-ecologies]

[castametric]

this is a confession to the star wars fandom because I have to get this off my chest. last summer just for fun I taught myself to read aurebesh and. you fanartists have Got to Continue putting the most Hilarious stuff into the background of your art because it is literally my favorite thing

here’s a couple of excellent things I’ve read since I started keeping a list just last month:

- “I hate drawing lightsabers”

- “Idk what to put here”

- “stupid fucking sign”

- “eat paste, it’s good”

- an entire news article on a phone screen which I actually found really impressive

- a few funny misspellings but the best one so far was ahsoka somehow becoming “asock”

- wanted poster of obi wan that read “wanted for fashion crimes”. the caption translated it as “wanted for high treason”. like blatantly lying to my face. love it.

- door on a ship was labeled “cake storage”

- “shopping list: frogs, hair gel, lightsaber polish”

and my personal favorite:

- “if you’re reading this you’re a fucking nerd”

[vinceaddams]

best thing about tumblr is seeing pictures of Weird Creatures I’d never heard of before

[hermeticbridgetroll]

Tufted Pigmy Squirrel. I learned of it recently and was immediately delighted

[vinceaddams]

Oh my goodness!! I’d never heard of it either, and am also delighted!

[headspace-hotel]

Learning about plants has made my biopunk novel much more complicated like damn now I have to think about all the species and stuff

[headspace-hotel]

Generically vague settings are ruined for me forever. do y'all have any idea how specific the plant life in an area gets???

[headspace-hotel]

*Stares at the plants in novel set in fictional place with suspicion and criticism*

[headspace-hotel]

actually, i wanna talk about nature tropes in fantasy/otherwise "speculative" media because fiction has these stock tropes about nature that are so universal throughout everything from books to video games, and it turns out that they have nothing to do with reality

For starters, did y'all know that (with the exception of one species) cacti are ONLY native to the Americas, and deserts on all other continents have NO CACTI?

[mischievousquokka]

Does that mean that Africa, in similar situations, mostly has spiky shrubs (without those water-consuming green things called leaves) and yams-like storage roots?

Or are there further concepts?

What does Australia do?

I know about succulents, and that they're also fairly common in the Alps (I don't know if they're native there, but the local name, "Hauswurz" - literally "house root" or "home root" - indicates as much).

Which aren't deserts in the narrower sense, but also not exactly known for rich flora, due to the altitude, low amount of topsoil, and cold.

Have you reached a level that permits you to see patterns that shape plant life in an area? It sounds a bit like you're in an area of frequent enlightenment...

[headspace-hotel]

Well the thing about plants is that they are much, MUCH weirder than animals are about radically altering and reshuffling their basic body forms and plans over the course of evolution, even within the same genus.

If you saw this plant, what would you assume its closest relatives are?

If you answered "violets," good job! This is Viola atropurpurea, from the same genus as your common backyard violets.

This is weird. Can we talk about how weird this is? This is like if tigers and lions shared the genus Panthera with some kind of tiny aquatic salamander-like thing.

Cacti are a specific plant family. Succulent plants have convergently evolved approximately a billion times and come from (almost) every corner of the plant family tree. The universality of cacti as the iconic Desert Plant has much to do with the average person not knowing the great variety of desert adapted plants, and mentally categorizing unrelated succulent plants as cacti because "cactus" is the closest word they have.

Desert plants are weird y'all. A ton of them look like weird mushroom- or barrel-like bulges and tubes. Like, just look at this thing.

This is called "Sand Food" and it's edible

This is Yareta and there are no photos of it that are like "Yeah that is a normal, real thing." (It's not moss! It's a flowering plant!)

[gottalottarocks]

Hi I saw your reply on a post about weird things people believe in (in terms of science) and you wrote about that unless one stands on a volcano, its solid rock down to the outer core and I had to google it because I was always taught that THE MANTLE IS LIQUID not by movies but by SCHOOL and now I learn it's a case of 'technically-' and I'm shaking so, uh, thanks.

Hello! Sorry I sat on this, I wanted to respond with this earth structure diagram I've been working on. I think most public schools in the US do a terrible job of teaching geology and it actually drives me insane lol. Also, if learning the mantle is not liquid blew your mind, then this is gonna blow your mind too...

The mantle is green!

This is a pretty quick and dirty diagram, but I wanted to show the earth in a way that we don't usually think about (usually it just looks "hotter" as you go toward the center). Here are some earth facts I wish everyone knew:

The Crust - relatively super thin, very brittle, mostly granite, and things get weird where the crust transitions to mantle and where plates collide (might make a second post on that).

The Mantle - primarily made up of a rock called peridotite, which has lots of olivine in it and is blasphemously green. Also the mantle is pretty much all rock, maybe a little magma here and there, but it's pretty minor. But because all that rock is really, really hot it can deform plastically and it actually undergoes convection (it moves!) Mantle upwelling (shown in that lighter green) is actually a huge driver of plate tectonics.

The Core - made of an iron and nickel alloy, the outer core is liquid (because it's so hot) and the inner core is solid (because the pressure is so high). This dual metallic core generates Earth's magnet field (our planet is one big magnet). We also suspect that inner core has Widmanstätten patterns, similar to those we find in meteorites.

So yeah, hoped you liked some more earth facts 😅

[gottalottarocks]

I was not expecting so many responses and y’all have some great questions so here’s round 2 lol

@zscribez the deepest hole that humans have ever dug is the Kola borehole which is 12.2 km deep (like a third of the thickness of the crust)... so how tf do we know what the interior of the earth looks like!? We look at how earthquakes move through the earth:

So an earthquake happens and it sends out a blast of shock waves. P-waves push and pull, while S-waves shake, shake, shake. Since you can't really shake liquid in a way that propagates a wave, S-waves cant move through the liquid outer core, but P-waves can move through both liquids and solids. (So yes while the mantle is very hot and can deform over long timescales, it is definitely a solid).

After seismographs and global communication became a thing, geologists were able to figure out that earthquake waves were traveling in weird ways that could only be explained by a layered internal structure. Shadow zones are areas where you don't see any waves and they were one of the first big clues that something was up

Also, the speed of these earthquake waves depends on how dense the material is, so these waves will travel faster through a dense iron core than the granitic crust.

So by measuring how fast these waves moved we figured out what the material each layers was made of, paired with observations of rocks at the surface that were exhumed from the mantle

@x-cetra The reason magma or lava coming out of a volcano glows is because it's so hot it's emitting electromagnetic radiation, so it doesn't need any free oxygen to glow. It's kinda like how the sun isn't actually on fire (no oxygen in space). I believe the same type of magma at the same temperature will be the same color regardless of how deep it is.

@decayed-foundations so I think we need a physicist for this, because the color of the glow depends on the material and the temperature, and black-body radiation starts at red and goes to orange, yellow, then white. So the true color will be related to the level of radiation emitted and whether it overpowers the natural color, which may also change with depth.

@acidhues Rest easy tonight my friend

[bubobubosibericus]

OP you're explaining this all excellently!

Actually, I bet almost every geologist has at least one piece of mantle hanging around at home. Look:

That green chunk is a blob of peridotite straight from the mantle!

It couldn't really mix with the rest of the magma and instead got carried along for the ride when this basalt started its journey. And now it's part of the dutch coastal defense. Cool right??

Certain kinds of magma are a bit like oil and water, so occasionally you get droplets of one type inside magma of another type like this. There's a whole field of study dedicated to figuring out what droplet formed when down to the individual mineral crystals the lava is made of. We can use that knowledge to trace back the formation process of magma all the way back into the mantle!

[badsciencejokes]

Dude has a death wish

[vergess]

Delighted to announce this bird is real and is a corvid.

Truly the family that just keeps giving.

[haropla]

I haven’t seen it in the notes yet, so afaik, here’s the source of that video! So now you can see the funny poison bird much more clearly.

It was taken by a biologist that studies birds so it seems like he knows what he’s doing. For the most part. Here’s his caption:

[krystal-prisms]

You all know that he 100% licked his fingers after handling that bird

[totally-original-artist]

[openworldadventurer]

[nerdlingwrites]

I can’t leave this in the tags, I’m sorry.

[ruby-white-rabbit]

@owlkat

[vincent-van-gtg]

[fitnessdesire]

Can’t risk it

[laderdesders1]

The duck of creativity. I waited so long for it.

[patroklos52-deactivated20250724]

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

[parksrway]

being the creator of your own blorbo is so fucking hard I have to do EVERYTHING around here

[thediktatortot]

Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.

We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.

The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.

Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.

Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.

There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.

Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.

We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.

[violettenouvel]

Let OP talk, they’re absolutely right.

[lokihiddleston]

[sandmandaddy69]

[woefully-undercaffeinated]

This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.

[jesuisloupseul]

Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.

Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"

So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.

No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.

[funnelcloudd]

Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up

[commodorez]

It's a few dozen kilovolts of charge stored in a CRT, but that's what flings the electrons from the guns at the back to the phosphors on the screen. The key is to discharge the tube safely before servicing, and when you've got to do certain calibrations while it's powered on (like convergence alignment), you use insulated tools and follow the one-hand rule: only let one hand into the chassis at a time. The idea is not to give the electricity a path to discharge from one arm through your heart out the other arm. I tend to keep one arm behind my back while working on CRTs as a result.

[nathalia-sod]

@modmad​

[modmad]

been tryin to tell people for years CRT tvs are cryptids

[dduane]

Too easy to believe. Anybody else remember when you turned the TV off, and the image collapsed into a little white eye-looking dot that faded slooooooowly away... looking at you all the time?

(shiver)

[shitpostinguniverse]

[angstbotfic]

yes and

and 

[sic-semper-hominibus]

[rebel13lion39]

[kimbureh]

speaking of Ao3 not being a social medium:

it will always need money. It’s an archive. Even if they meet their yearly donation aim now without any problem doesn’t mean it will be like this in 5 years, in 10 years, in 80 years. Yeah you read that right. Ao3 is an Archive. It intends to be available forever. Like a library. Because Ao3 *is* a library. If you want to keep your library, you wouldn’t cut its budget just because it did well last year. Maintaining a library creates running expenses. The purpose of an archive is to preserve data indefinitely, and this costs money.