The final way is within you.

Genderqueer Trans Femme; Buddhist; anarchist. I like to journal, make visual art and music, and books [which I'm trying to post about more]. Utterly unremarkable person, really.

[pinkbowsandstripedsocks]

[edwardspoonhands]

Honestly, Tvyek is pretty miraculous. It’s permeable to water vapor but not to water, it’s nearly impossible to tear, but can be easily cut. It’s cheap and made entirely without binding chemicals. In addition to being used for wristbands, it’s used to wrap construction sites to keep out water during construction, for tear-resistant envelopes at Fed-Ex, coveralls for mechanics, and my wallet, actually.

Fun tip, though it looks like paper, Tyvek is plastic, and cannot be recycled with paper.

[fairypsychicarchive]

[andromedafalls]

holy fuc

[piisbetterthanpie]

I didn’t even know it had a name

[frostedshadow]

WHAT

[sigmaleph]

there's a trope, common among other genres in superhero fiction, where a lone scientist or a corporation or such manage to come up with an invention that is way outside the usual tech level of their setting, and continues to be way outside the tech level. only one entity can make the super serum or mind control chip or laser gun or whatever. they don't mass produce it and nobody else independently discovers it, it's a thing they can do, not a thing their society can do.

and the thing that tickles at my brain is, it'd be interesting as a worldbuilding premise to keep the huge leaps in capabilities done by individual actors but get rid of the lack of replicability. start with a world like ours and say, ok, we're on the cusp of the mad science revolution, people are starting to come up with all sorts of previously-impossible technology, but once invented it's out there. every military has to adapt their doctrine to super soldier serum and laser guns. there's a cure for cancer and the protocol has to account for the one in a twenty chance it'll turn you into a werewolf. your neighbour moves in and she's made of metal and you're not sure if it's a full-body prosthetic or if in the last month when you stopped keeping up with the robotics news they made robots who are people. and it's definitely rude to ask. teleportation halfway across the planet is not cheap but like neither are planes and it does have a lower carbon footprint.

and like, it's not surprising why this doesn't happen by default, right. 'what would one guy being able to teleport mean in a world like ours' is a completely different kind of question to think about than 'how does teleportation reshape society, after accounting for the six other ways society has been reshaped in the past year'. it'd be hard to write. but it would be fun.

[pulpchamber]

A conventional superhero story could be totally compatible with the tech being replicable, if the superhero comes to find out they've been fighting primarily so their handlers can hold a monopoly on the tech. As in the super serum macguffin WILL change the world, countless others WILL discover and replicate it, but the hero's job is to halt and control that process, and the only reason they aren't being actively hunted down themselves is because they're an asset.

The above sort of conundrum is one reason I've always had such an affinity for X-Men. It's innately more interesting to me when superheros have to deal with a world where powers are unpredictable and disruptive, and multiple interests need to deploy force and conspiracy to shape change towards their ends, because that's just factually closer to how super impactful innovations work IRL -- they ARE replicable, people will replicate them more or less unpredictably if there aren't boots on the ground to stop them.

We don't live in a world where one world power built nukes and the others said "wow damn that looks impossible better not try it" and it's difficult to imagine any world where that would be the reaction to an emerging asset like superheros.

[dramatic-dolphin]

one of my biggest problems with "i transmigrated into medieval fantasy and started the industrial revolution" stories is that they always act like it's possible for one guy to do that just by Knowing Things Intelligently With Their Big Brain, meanwhile i'm always screaming about "the material conditions!!!!" internally. knowing things intelligently won't help you if you don't have the necessary infrastructure, or access to enough raw materials.

[pulpchamber]

It would honestly be fascinating to see a time travel plot where the main character is very educated in science and engineering but knows almost no history or political economy and just sorta, unthinkingly recreates colonialism because it speeds up the process compared to actually trying to share the valuable tech. Engineering the material conditions to make an industrial revolution happen might not be that difficult, but doing it in a different way from how it was historically done in the world where it really happened....maybe not so much, at least would take a degree of diplomatic work that would amount to achieving world peace.

[pulpchamber]

How A Grade 12 Loser Became Head Overseer of The Potosi Silver Mines

[dramatic-dolphin]

one of my biggest problems with "i transmigrated into medieval fantasy and started the industrial revolution" stories is that they always act like it's possible for one guy to do that just by Knowing Things Intelligently With Their Big Brain, meanwhile i'm always screaming about "the material conditions!!!!" internally. knowing things intelligently won't help you if you don't have the necessary infrastructure, or access to enough raw materials.

[pulpchamber]

It would honestly be fascinating to see a time travel plot where the main character is very educated in science and engineering but knows almost no history or political economy and just sorta, unthinkingly recreates colonialism because it speeds up the process compared to actually trying to share the valuable tech. Engineering the material conditions to make an industrial revolution happen might not be that difficult, but doing it in a different way from how it was historically done in the world where it really happened....maybe not so much, at least would take a degree of diplomatic work that would amount to achieving world peace.

[eroscestlavie]

I need to stop replying to “how do you make friends in your 30s?” threads because all my answers boil down to “you have to want to know people instead of have friends” and I don’t think people wanna hear that

[pulpchamber]

Many people have, I fear, not fully understood the wisdom of what's sometimes called a bystander intervention.

Standing up for others is the only path to a more accepting society because the concept of "standing up for yourself" still ends up being incompatible with the targets' wellbeing -- it gives oppressed people a choice between 1. Habitually not standing up for themselves and having their trauma amplified by lack of intervention is, or 2. Habitually standing up for themselves and having their trauma amplified by hyper-vigilance and a constant feeling of threat. Fear, repression, helplessness, aggression, every conceivable agentic response that an individual can take to stand up against being bullied or dehumanized 'for themselves' is a form of coerced self-harm, and maintained as habits can take years off your life.

What's more, the social value of standing up for yourself functionally neutralizes that of standing up for others. It cannot, in practice, be held as good to stand up for someone else who's being bullied, when there's always the remote possibility that they're only dehumanizing other people as a way to "stand up for themselves." This is not true if the social value we try to put into practice is that it's always unacceptable to dehumanize others, even if you're legitimately hurt, feel they deserve it, or think it doesn't matter because the target is so insulated. The harm isn't being done to the target. You are not being criticized for the social justice equivalent throwing a water balloon at Ted, he probably did deserve it -- it's the shitting in the pool aspect that's the issue. It's the general condition of cultural discourse where marginalized people face existential no-wins that radically impact our wellbeing, and the fact that one approach makes the other impossible while a more constructive approach only has the power to say give reasons why you should cut out.

[filmphotofranz]

Ppl who say that trans identity is pointless bc you will supposedly never get validation offline are always showing how intensely online they themselves are bc there are a lot of adult trans ppl out here just having normal tedious adult lives

Like yeah im weird and gay and yeah i live in constant fear of the government, but im also just like, an entry-level professional in my field with corny cishet work friends and arbitrary deadlines to meet for my department. Trans people aren't permanent children, we are teachers and managers and pencil pushers and nurses and truck drivers. Yeah idk ill "never be a cis woman" but i will be somebodies freshman history prof who was always late grading papers

[pulpchamber]

And because I know part of our oppression is a shared likelihood of unemployment and social isolation, I do want to say specifically -- people are a lot less awful offline. I know people personally who've actively unlearned transphobic beliefs to respect me because I'm part of their lives and consistently show up. There was a time in my life when I expected relative strangers to do the same thing with no comparable history of knowing a trans person and needing to choose viscerally whether to be an asshole to someone they *know.* That expectation made me miserable because it turns out most people just do not put in that labor for strangers. Should they? Sure, but there's not much of a track record to indicate many will. That's WHY socially isolating trans people works so well as a mode of oppression.

[fulda-gap-express]

If I'm elected as your president in 2028 I promise to bring back the Western Interior Seaway.

[fulda-gap-express]

North America peaked with this design and every change since has been worse.

[luidilovins]

[grrrrrrrbarkbarkbark-deactivate]

NONONONO NO. NO. DO YOU WANT ANY OF THIS FUCKING SHIT BACK?

[prof-grace-aspen]

Pretty babies come swim in w ater with big fish water is fine with big fish in come taste interior seaway with big fish

[pulpchamber]

It'll be fine. We just introduce hippos. The aquatic megafauna comes to the shores, the hippos keep them busy by being competent fighters and Deinosuchus goes home bruised by satiated.

[phaeton-flier]

My opinion on the "birthrate crisis" is that it's a problem that almost certainly solves itself. In the long term we raise retirement ages as helathspan increases and have higher productivity to make up for a worse worker/pensioner ratio. In the medium term you can get new adult workers you don't need to pay to raise via "immigration".

What if my country doesn't want to let in foriegners

Then your old people have a revealed preference to live in squalor and misery till they die over seeing a brown person, I guess. Seems like a bad trade but w/e

[bobodenkirkisgay]

[eebie]

I just ate one

[eebie]

You can lie when you name things

[pulpchamber]

I wasn't always here. But thanks to Purdue Global, I came into existence as a meta-fictional representation of a real dental hygiene graduate. Also thanks to Purdue Global, I will stop existing when they cut to the black man in a suit and tie to talk about the ease and convenience of self-paced online classes. Thanks, Purdue Global, for letting me know the sweet void of nonexistence!

[pulpchamber]

The horror in concepts of the Backrooms is ultimately kind of silly when you think about it -- there are equivalent phenomena all around us that we barely freak out about at all.

I'm never going to personally explore all of Earth, the place I've always been trapped and doomed to die. Clearly an infinite labyrinth you'll never find the exit besides death to shouldn't be innately frightening: I already live in one for all pragmatic purposes. Is the infinite labyrinth scary because I don't have food or water? I mean...deserts exist. I'm probably dead before I get out of literally any desert if I somehow no-clipped to the exact middle of it. The mold monsters? If I ever became homeless I could be forced to live in an urban desert full of people just denying me food and water and threatening my life with a mixture of passive neglect and active malice. Ohhhh....ok I think I get it now actually: it's the unpredictable yelling.

[stillnaomi]

we've never seen socialism existing on its own terms. every socialist project has existed under a constant state of siege by the capitalist world, which is determined to overthrow it. when you scoff that the state has never withered away in any Marxist-Leninist country, you're really scoffing that global capitalism hasn't been defeated yet, because that's what forces socialist projects to maintain their state. you might as well be scoffing at people for not floating while gravity still exists

[pulpchamber]

Doesn't comparing capitalism to a basic law of physics kind of...undermine the entire point of revolutionary theory? I struggle with the idea of starting a project on the premise these forces CAN be overthrown, then responding to criticism of those projects with "Well obviously we couldn't overthrow them." If the overthrow of global Capitalism is necessary for revolution in any one place to exist "on its terms" then it is *necessary for it to exist at all and part of that project itself.*

[stillnaomi]

there's a somewhat frequent criticism of ML projects from anarchists that the state hasn't withered away yet in any of them. this post is pointing out, in a frivolous and lighthearted manner, that it can't wither away while the conditions that make it necessary still exist: the need to suppress capitalist forces; the sole reason for its existence. that doesn't mean that the revolution has failed. people have overthrown the political control of the capitalist class over these places and that's progress. but revolution in no single country or group of countries can completely eliminate the threat provided by capitalism. while that threat continues, the state, in some form, has to exist in a way that's equal to protect from the level of threat. as more of the world is controlled by socialism, the state can begin to wither away in proportion to the weakening of capital's threat, but as of now, capitalism is still a massive and powerful enemy. that the socialist state hasn't withered away in any noticeable fashion in these countries is completely in line with marxist theory, so saying as criticism that it hasn't yet withered away is misunderstanding marxism. that the light hearted reference to a law or physics didn't convey this to you isn't surprising; you're correct that it doesn't live up to rigourous scrutiny

hopefully this makes sense. this one has barely slept 4 hours in the last 40

[pulpchamber]

I'm less oriented to rebutting theory here than praxis -- if the prior understanding held by someone trying to refine and implement Marxist theory includes certain compromises and resemblances to Capitalism before any state project is embarked upon, the resulting impetus will be to make more and more compromises until eventually the system can't hold. Leninism internally describes this as being "attacked" or "compromised" by Capitalism, which frankly I think is something of a rhetorical trick when so many of the structural factors in the USSR's eventual collapse could equally be characterized as Marxist-Leninism compromising *with* Capitalism -- and I tend to lend more credence to the latter interpretation because many of those compromises were anticipated and preemptively excused BY Soviet theoreticians prior to them coming up in practice.

Does that confirm ML theoretically? Sure. But only in the same sense that stepping off a cliff would quickly prove the theory of gravity. A praxis that confirms its root theory by not being workable under its tenets *does* confirm the theory -- but it does so by disproving itself as a workable interpretation. The failure IS the confirmation here: theoretical soundness can be laundered into pragmatic efficacy, but not honestly.

[northstareclipse]

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

[pulpchamber]

What gives me some hope is that conflicts which are currently blamed on those personality traits are very often products of systems not accommodating them. Positive social change is not something separate from learning to accommodate and find a place for people who are hard to be neighbors with, and the accommodations likewise aren't an extra challenge -- they're something that if we haven't achieved that, we just didn't do the thing. It's not an extra hurdle but an aspect of one highly multidimensional hurdle.

[stillnaomi]

we've never seen socialism existing on its own terms. every socialist project has existed under a constant state of siege by the capitalist world, which is determined to overthrow it. when you scoff that the state has never withered away in any Marxist-Leninist country, you're really scoffing that global capitalism hasn't been defeated yet, because that's what forces socialist projects to maintain their state. you might as well be scoffing at people for not floating while gravity still exists

[pulpchamber]

Doesn't comparing capitalism to a basic law of physics kind of...undermine the entire point of revolutionary theory? I struggle with the idea of starting a project on the premise these forces CAN be overthrown, then responding to criticism of those projects with "Well obviously we couldn't overthrow them." If the overthrow of global Capitalism is necessary for revolution in any one place to exist "on its terms" then it is *necessary for it to exist at all and part of that project itself.*

[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.