Im making a picrew and i know that Black hairstyles and fashion can be sorely lacking in them, so if it's ok I would like to ask you and your followers what are things you'd like to see in a character maker?
Question for the audience!
Me personally, brown skin tones that aren't just "beige, brown, and greyish-black". If you can present me fifteen different shades of white, I want the range of brown!
I want the front hairstyles to match the back ones. No more straight hair bangs with locs in the back.
@naylissah has multiple Black centered picrews if you'd like to study a Black artist who creates them!
One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!
As a neurologist, I’ll give you the pretty name for it: cognitive reserve.
The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.
As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.
We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.
Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?
Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.
TLDR: Yes. From the knowledge we have today, AI will increase the number and severity of dementia cases.
So a little over 2 years ago, I started a Pain Journal to document my pain levels and other factors that I thought may be relevant. It was a physical, paper journal that I carried around and wrote in.
I started this because I had a new doctor who was actually investigating my chronic pain, but I struggled to remember the Broad Trends of my pain when I went in for my appointments. There are apps for this, but I wasn’t vibing with the ways they tracked pain, and they had features I didn’t want. So I set up a paper journal. Imagine studyblr but for chronic pain. And now I’m going to talk about it!
FIRST, PICS!!!
This is the Rhodia Softcover Goalbook in A5 size with dot grid pages. I liked it! And I bedazzled it.
I talk about what I tracked and how under the cut. There’s a lot of info about my pain and aspects of my life at that point in time, which I don’t mind at all sharing and feel free to read it if you want! But I know that can feel a little invasive to read, so just a heads up.
The first thing I did was create a pain scale. I needed a way to measure and quantify the intensity of the pain and then communicate that to my doctor.
I put it at the very start of the journal because I needed it to be easily accessible. I looked at a lot of pain scales and cobbled this one together based on a bunch of different ones, with the pain levels defined by how perceptible the pain is and how it affects my functioning. I also wanted each level to have clear parameters to avoid confusion and to help me rate pain consistently and quickly.
I wanted this to be simple and easy to follow, so I decided to not include the type of pain in the scale. This only tracks the intensity of the pain. I also didn’t want to use comparisons to injuries as part of the definitions (like “the pain is as bad as a sprained ankle”, which a lot of pain scales use), because those are still subjective experiences. This is just what made sense to me, and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t line up with other pain scales as long as I’m consistent. And then I color coded it because that’s just Who I Am.
OKAY, NEXT UP is the monthly ‘habit’ tracker
I used a cute habit tracker stamp as a way to have a monthly ‘overview’ of some things I wanted to track. (Also I used these markers to make the dots. I love them.) Here are the things I’m tracking:
Pain - overall pain level for each day (marked with its corresponding color from the pain scale)
Stretches - how good I was about doing my physical therapy stretches each day
Cymbalta and Adderall - if I took my meds that day lmao (the Adderall shortage was BAD that month, I was out of meds for three weeks!!!)
Crafts - if I did any crafts that day. crafts are so important to me that NOT being able to do them bc of my pain is worth mentioning, but also sometimes doing crafts makes my pain flare up, so I wanted to track my Crafting Activity
Work - did I go to work that day
Aside from the pain tracker, these aren’t color coded. I just picked a color for the month lmao
Okay, onto the DAILY LOGS!!!
Feel free to zoom in and read my daily logs if you want. BEHOLD!
Things I tracked:
Weather - the daily high and low temps and what the weather was like (sunny, cloudy, rainy, etc). I had a suspicion that the weather affected my pain, so I wanted to track that
Sleep - when I went to bed, when I woke up, and roughly how much sleep I got. I had these cute phases of the moon stamps that I used to visualize the amount of sleep. just for fun <3
Today/Activity - just what I did that day. What the day was like. I mostly tracked work and how big the workload was that day
Relief - pain relief measures I took
Crafts - DID I DO A CRAFT. WHAT DID I DO
Pain Log - I sure hope I’m tracking this in my pain journal! Throughout the day, if I felt a New Pain, I would write what I felt, when, where, describe the pain (sharp, ache, etc), and assign it a level with the dot markers. That’s where the color coding came in! This evolved over time as I figured out what was the most useful way for me to record it. Also these were very quick notes made in the moment, which is why they’re so abbreviated.
I used a combo of stencils and stamps to make the daily logs. Every night, I would set up the layout for the next day’s page, and in the morning, I would fill in the weather, sleep, and activity sections. (I often added to the activity section over the course of the day, too.)
And then at the end of each month, I reviewed all this data and made THIS
There are two graphs: Sleep and Pain correlation and Weather and Pain correlation.
I wanted to see if my pain levels correlated with how much I slept the night before. I also wanted to see if my pain levels correlated with the weather (and I noted if it had rained, too). I’ll just let you look at the graphs instead of explaining them further lmao, but feel free to ask questions. These were interesting but there weren’t strong correlations imo.
The page after the correlation graphs has a cutout of a lil bald guy from some pain diagram I found. I chose that diagram just because I liked it. I went through my pain logs for the month and for every time I logged pain, I added a dot on the lil bald guy in the area I felt pain with the corresponding color for the pain level. This one was super helpful because you can really SEE where my pain is clustered and how intense it normally is.
And then I had sticky notes for other things I wanted to mention to my doctor during the appointment.
So yeah! That’s my pain journal! It was a lot of fun to make tbh and it was very helpful. I only kept it up for about 3 - 4 months, because my pain actually improved enough that I didn’t feel the need to keep logging it. But I did enjoy it during the time I did it and I like looking back on it.
I carried it around with me at work (so I could log pain as I felt it), and I think it helped my coworkers understand how much pain I was in and how much it affects me. I was literally always in pain, every single day, even if I didn’t show it. Some days the pain was very mild, but tracking it (and seeing my coworkers’ reactions to me tracking it) helped me understand that it is NOT NORMAL to be in pain all the time.
It was EXTREMELY helpful to take to my doctor’s appointments. Having a physical and very visual record of my health and other maybe-relevant aspects of my life to share with my doctor was just really helpful. It allowed me to communicate the situation better than just trying to remember what the past few weeks had been like, and it gave my doctor a lot of info to look at. (Maybe too much? lmfao.) Also seeing his face when I revealed my tome of data was really funny. I’m very normal.
And I will re-emphasize that having a clear, defined pain scale to refer to was really important. It gave us a clear frame of reference for our discussion, and I think it was a solid way to communicate a very subjective experience. The pain scale made sense to my doctor and we flipped back to it a lot during the appointment.
Anyways, there it is! My pain journal! If you made it this far, THANKS FOR READING!!!
Hey i’m a fashion design student so i have tons and tons of pdfs and docs with basic sewing techniques, pattern how-tos, and resources for fabric and trims. I’ve compiled it all into a shareable folder for anyone who wants to look into sewing and making their own clothing. I’ll be adding to this folder whenever i come across new resources
Updated just now with new hand sewing resources (mainly buttonholes) and textbook pdfs on fashion history, fashion illustration, and thinking through designs!
I'm reminded of that one part in Frederick Douglass's autobiography where he gets to the north for the first time and assumed, since they didn't have slaves, that everyone was about as poor as non-slaveowning white southerners. And they weren't! There were poor people, sure, but there were lots of people living very comfortably or in luxury.
He mentions how angry it made him, that not only were thousands and thousands of people suffering to create luxury for a few, but that slavery wasn't even necessary for wealth to exist. That's really stuck with me.
screenshot of a tweet by @pot8um: “Does anyone have that recent study that determined all 8 billion of us could be easily housed and fed with only 30% of the current global labor output and that our collective suffering is manufactured by capitalism...”
reply by @jasonhickel: “Yes: sciencedirect.com/... [a url that is cut off in the screenshot]” and an attached image of text:
“With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large creases in total global throughput and output. Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to” [text is cut off here].
Second image transcription:
Poverty is not an intractable problem that requires complex solutions, long timeframes and large increases in production and throughput that conflict with ecological objectives. The solution is straightforward. We need to actively plan to shift productive capacities away from capital accumulation and elite consumption in order to focus instead on the goods and services that are necessary to meet human needs and enable decent living for all, while ensuring universal access through public provisioning systems. We have framed this work around the concept of human needs, following the recent literature. However it is important to underscore that this approach is ultimately about far more than just satisfying material requirements for human well-being. Achieving decent-living for all is critical to enabling broader human capabilities, individual and collective self-realisation, full participation in society and politics and, ultimately, freedom.
Hm. Interesting. Apparently cortisol production depletes magnesium stores. And I have a lot of symptomatic overlap with magnesium deficiency. And it can apparently help migraine. And ADHD. I think I'm going to try supplementing magnesium glycinate. L-threonate sounds really interesting too as that's magnesium that can cross the blood-brain barrier and apparently is super useful for memory and shit.
Another visual demonstration that historical clothing wasn’t dingy and monochrome.
All of these colours can be obtained from vegetable dyes, producing different shades depending on what mordant (colour fixative - alum, different metal filings, different vinegars) was used. See here and here for examples.
Not clothes, but this was a palette developed by the National Museum of Denmark based on paint residue from archaeological finds for the purpose of painting a reconstructed hall.
Apparently, they can tell from the chemical composition that the colours wouldn’t be mixed with black or white to mute them, but be used in their brightest form. Bright yellow and red was achieved with expensive dyes (orpiment and cinnabar) and was thus fashionable. (Source in Danish)
Jesus Tapdancing Christ... THIS is a good welt pocket and the people who designed Simplicity 2895 ought to be blasted well ASHAMED of themselves for the crap way THEY wanted a welt pocket made. *SNARLS*
This is how I learned to do it and a good example of what you want to see in a short form tutorial: pinning, pressing, seam finishing, good fabric handling.
I would mention that you can make the pocket facing with a small panel of your matching fabric that is visible and the rest in a lighter fabric to reduce bulk. That's a lot of denim layers for comfort.
those embroidered thimble rings are GORGEOUS!!! how did you make them? :0
the shiiiinneeee, its so prettyyy!!!
tyyy!
I'm sorry, I'm going to infodump about them because I love them! the shine is because I use silk thread!
I'll try to illustrate this this because it's hard to explain, but ngl my photo taking is a bit sporadic so these are all from different projects!
so this is the base of them. a strip of card (if using as a thimble: measure around the middle of your middle finger) with a strip of BIAS CUT woven fabric wrapped around it.
then you need (a) padding and (b) to mark out a (usually even) number of segments. I'm doing 16ths at the moment, but 8 is probably the most common.
I've done a bunch of experimenting different ways of doing both of these, unsure on the best yet tbh! traditionally (a) is silk fibre
the first stitches, basically match up the lines in zigzag patterns. you can get an incredible amount of pattern out of sewing little zigzags. mine and all of these below are silk, but I've also used all sorts of thread, and even used 8/2 bamboo for a bracelet once
He’s got specific lacing advice for skates and tall boots and there are decorative patterns and I recently relaced my skate shoes for both a wide forefoot and less friction on the laces so it’s easier to tighten and loosen them but he also has lace-locking patterns so that shoes stay exactly as tight as you laced them the first time and it is just a VERY GOOD website.
Like. I’ve been buying shoes the wrong size because it’s often hard to find wide shoes but the lacing pattern for a wide forefoot means that my big hobbit feet actually fit into the previously too-tight running shoes and sneakers I had.
Bookriot 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors
Bookriot 100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors
ok let's do another one! this time we have Bookriot's 100 sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors.
just to pre-empt a few possible objections to the list, it was published in 2016 and:
JK Rowling's public transphobia downward spiral began in 2018.
All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells) was published in 2017 and Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) was published in 2019.
The Fifth Season (NK Jemisin) was published in 2015 & given that the editor included a different NK Jemisin I presume Fifth Season simply hadn't hit all-time classic status yet.
The editor stated upfront that they included 1 book per author.
I have no idea what We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson) is doing there given that it categorically is not SFF.
How many of Bookriot's 100 sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors have you read?
Drug arrives years after pandemic’s peak, but could still offer protection to vulnerable populations.
An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1.
The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.
In the waning phase of Trump’s reign, opportunities will open up for profound social change.
We explore the nature of the difficulties besetting his administration and propose starting places for those who aim to do more than simply remove him from power.
