I need a polite and effective way to say "hey your heart is truly in the right place and your anger is often righteous but I think sometimes you’re getting recreationally mad about things that are frankly not worth the amount of energy you’re spending on them, and every time you do this you're driving yourself slightly more insane with nothing to show for it," and then I need a way to broadcast that message through a loudspeaker to roughly 30,000 people at once, and THEN I need a time machine to send that message to my past self lol. and maybe a second time machine in case past me tries to be clever and sabotage the version of me who comes through the first time machine
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
theres too many pokemon games where you play as a kid whos full of life and full of potential. there needs to be a pokemon game where you play as a college dropout who lives in a shitty apartment
your starter pokemon are trubbish, rattata and glameow. which symbolise the trash you keep forgetting to take out, the rats living in your walls and the stray cat you keep trying to befriend but it keeps hissing at you.
you guys dont get it its not supposed to be dark and edgy its supposed to be living in a mundane setting and slowly rediscovering the wonder in the world by going on a journey with a magical trash bag that is your friend, its about love and recovery and coping with the stress of your adult life with your friend who is made of sentient garbage
You get home from work. Finally. The sun's already set outside your apartment window. At least your apartment has a window.
You discard most of your work uniform in the corner with the other laundry and click on the TV before landing in your couch with a heavy sigh. The blue light of the TV floods the otherwise dark room.
"Joining us today for an exclusive interview is Red, four time Pokemon League Champion, who also famously disbanded criminal organization Team Rocket at least twice! Thank you so much for tuning in."
Pokemon league champion, huh? You think to yourself. You used to want that. A child's dream - it was silly, really....
You'd heard of Red - of course you have, you don't live under a rock - but this was the first time seeing them up close, no filter. They looked tired. They actually looked about your age.
"Now Red," the reporter continued, "You've already told us about your travels through the world, your experiences as Champion, and your fight against Team Rocket and similar criminal organizations. I know we're almost out of time but there's one last thing we'd like to hear from you - do you have any words for the future generation of Pokemon trainers? Any advice for those just at the start of their journey?"
The Champion waited a moment before answering: "Yes. I meet a lot of people. A lot of people who used to want to be trainers. And I understand, it's not for everyone. But, people say 'Oh, you're still going at your age?' or 'Oh, I wanted to when I was younger,' or 'Oh, I couldn't now, I'm too old.'" Red shook their head sadly. "These people are my age, maybe even younger. They're wrong. It doesn't matter how old you are and it never did. It doesn't matter if you never got a Pokemon from the local professor at ten years old. It's not just for children. It's for everyone. The bond between people and Pokemon is not something you miss out on just because you had to grow up."
Red pauses again, and you realize you're paying more attention to the program than you thought you were.
"Pokemon are everywhere. The world is filled with magic. It's never too late."
"It's never too late..." you repeat under your breath. Something about the Champion's words clicked inside your brain. The world is full of magic....
As if on cue, sounds from within your apartment catch your attention: Rustling in your garbage can, scrabbling inside the wall, clawing at your window.
Cautiously you approach your trash can. It smells terrible, but then again it always does. You slowly lift the lid, and the rubbish inside shifts to reveal a green bag with white eyes. You knew that Trubbish were born from waste and preferred unsanitary environments, but you didn't think it'd been that long since you took the trash out.
The Pokemon shuffles to try and hide and knocks the bin over in doing so, spilling itself out onto the floor. You chuckle a bit.
"I guess now the trash can take itself out," you joke. The Trubbish seems upset by the quip. "Oh no, no, it's ok," you correct yourself, trying to spare its feelings. You find this creature, born of rubbish against its will, to be relatable. After all, you didn't ask to be in this trash heap either.
"It's ok," you repeat, more softly this time. "I'm. I'm trash too."
The stench from the trash can starts to dissipate as the Trubbish's... bag ties? ears? perk up at the attempted sympathy.
[A bond has been formed.]
~~~
[INVESTIGATE WALL]
You'd always blamed the noises coming through the walls on the neighbors, but this is too close to deny: it simply isn't a human-made noise. You locate a crack in the wall that you hadn't noticed before. The sound is getting louder. The sound is getting closer.
A piece of drywall crumbles away. You have just long enough to think Damn, I'm not getting my deposit back, before a very startled Rattata leaps through the newly made hole and bowls you over. You land badly on your ankle and let out a cry of pain, crashing to the floor.
That's definitely sprained... you think, holding your injured foot as you lie there in temporary shock. The Rattata seems apologetic. It vanishes back into the wall for a moment.
You swear. At least you have a compression bandage in your first aid kit. While you contemplate how best to stand without putting yourself in further pain, the Pokemon reappears, carrying a small blue fruit in its mouth. It drops the fruit beside you and rolls it towards you with a paw.
An Oran Berry, you recognize. Of course - Pokemon eat berries when they're hurt. Touched by the gesture, or perhaps not wanting to hurt the little creature's feelings, you take a bite.
It tastes terrible, but you power through it; you've eaten worse. Either by the berry's healing properties or the Pokemon's kindness, your pain eases a little.
[A bond has been formed.]
~~~
[INVESTIGATE WINDOW]
You go to your window and struggle for a moment to pull up the tattered blinds. You see two glowing eyes in the darkness. A Pokemon? They certainly don't look human, anyways. As a matter of fact, they seem familiar. The impatient scratching continues.
You open the window. A small, cat-like Pokemon hops inside, as if indignant at being kept waiting. You recognize this pokemon by the notch in its ear as the stray Glameow you've been trying to befriend.
It hisses at you. Which, for this particular Pokemon, is typical. As you go to shut the window you notice that it's favoring one of its legs while it walks.
Is it injured? Did it come to you for help? You were pretty certain this pokemon hated you. But, sure enough, you notice a cut on the Glameow's leg as it hops up onto your couch, as if it already lived here.
The Glameow seems to be avoiding eye contact. It occurs to you that it may have had no where else to go. You rummage through your cupboards to try and find a remedy. You remember seeing on the news that lemonade can be used in place of medicine for Pokemon who are injured. Moo Moo Milk is better, but you don't have any. You stopped buying it because it always spoils before you remember to drink it.
You had exactly one can of lemonade left. You crack it open and pour it into a bowl. The Glameow hisses again when you offer it, but soon gives the liquid a sniff before drinking it slowly.
You never realized how quickly Pokemon could heal. After it finishes its drink, it allows you to pat it on the head...
... for about two seconds before it hisses again. Still, the little Pokemon doesn't try to escape. It simply curls up on your couch and falls asleep.
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.
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)
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.
turns out i wasn't making that up, his name is Dr. Toru Miyazaki! he also wrote a book called "The Day Cats Live To Be Thirty", so cats are kind of his thing.
apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.
As they age, almost all cats develop kidney disease, from which they eventually die. Just as in humans, kidney disease i
Dr. Toru Miyazaki’s AIM injection for cat kidney disease enters trials in 2025, aiming for a 2027 release. Greycoat Research supports the sc
whoa wait i actually read the articles and it's so much cooler than just that!!
dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!
although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!
on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.
furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.
annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D
man just think, not only could our kitties start living longer, healthier lives, but just maybe dialysis will become as rare and obsolete as the iron lung is for people. what a badass Dr. Toru is!
hey it’s ok if you lost your ai virginity back when you were uneducated. a lot of posts go like “reblog if you have never ever used generative ai and never ever will!!!” but it’s ok if you have used gen ai before and it’s even ok if you used to think it was cool, back before you understood what it really was and how it worked, either because no one had taught you about it and you discovered it on your own or because the only education you had received about it was from the tech bros. you’re not a burger with a bite out of it for having used ai. ok
It is 100 percent okay to stop using it today and join the "boo AI" club.
This isn't a purity thing. This is a "everyone stand with us against destroying the environment and giving asthma to poor people" thing.
Did you know that when one community says no to an AI data center, they specifically search out communities with fewer resources? Communities that can't defend themselves? And the pollution 100 percent affects their health and wellbeing, in addition to burning through our already scarce drinking water.
You can stop using character.ai today. You can say "I listened to the facts and stopped." And another thing: don't you think it's a bit more impactful to have used it, stopped, and then you're in a position to say how little it helped? How doing things for yourself improved your life?
not enough people understand that disability benefits are basically what it would look like if you turned "if you're too sick for school you're too sick for video games" into an official public policy
ok thank god there's so many fucking videos showing you how to do a ladder stitch like it's some kind of magic trick but here's the actual use case for it: closing a seam you can't reach the inside of. in all other cases, if you're fixing a ripped seam on pants, or on a tshirt, the ladder stitch is a messy, glorified running stitch.
i cannot overstate how good it feels to watch older movies where the actors were still allowed to look kinda weird and not be conventionally attractive. like it is genuinely healing
I feel like all the "they broke weird al" "weird al got serious we're so cooked" comments about the killing in the name cover are missing the point. that is not a broken man. comedy is politics. comedy has always been politics. weird al has been satirizing politics for a long time because he knows the court jester can say to the king what other people can't. by doing a serious cover of an explicitly anti-establishment song that his gen x and millennial audience knows by heart when he's built his career on parody, he's saying this can't be satirized anymore and he's saying it in a very deliberate way that his audience will understand. those aren't the actions of a broken man, they're the actions of a man who is trying to tell you something. are we going to listen?
You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.
Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.
And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.
Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.
On a related note, that post also opened up the world of naps for me. I used to think that napping was mostly pointless for me, because I'm pretty much incapable of falling fully asleep in the middle of the day. But when I redefined naps to include "lying down with my eyes shut for an hour," even if I just spent the whole time brainstorming fanfiction, that was often enough to get me from "exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep" to energized and refreshed
