I very much agree with these suggestions. Forcing myself to write was the way I could finally start to become an active rather than a passive user of the target language.
taylor price

izzy's playlists!
Today's Document
Claire Keane
Jules of Nature

oozey mess
RMH
tumblr dot com
occasionally subtle
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Game of Thrones Daily

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shark vs the universe

Kaledo Art
ojovivo
$LAYYYTER

★
Cosmic Funnies
Sade Olutola
KIROKAZE
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@tea-inquiries
I very much agree with these suggestions. Forcing myself to write was the way I could finally start to become an active rather than a passive user of the target language.
I wish depression were an emergency. I wish someone could take one look at how sick I am and go “oh my god, we need to get you to a hospital!” and then when we get there I get rushed into surgery and the surgeons say “it’s a good thing you brought her here when you did, this is a seriously advanced case” and then they put me under and spend the next ten hours pulling metres of long, sticky black strands of gunk out of my body, throwing it immediately into an incinerator so that it can’t infect anyone else. And then they could stitch me back up and I could rest a few days, and when I leave the hospital everyone can see how much better I am and they congratulate me saying “well done, you’ve been so brave, I’m so glad you’re ok. I love you.”
Sister post to The Vitamin
my tentative TBR for the trans rights readathon (17th-31st of march)!
Skip Google for Research
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
OP: A seasoned clothing insider with 16 years experience takes you shopping and shows you how to pick the right clothes—details that show the clothes aren't worth the price. (cr 多多服装经)
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.
日本語 Study Approach
I access the below tools from different devices, so try them out and see if it works for you.
📖 Discord
🖋️ Notion
📄 Google Docs
🎧 Spotify
🔗 Resources Post
Sign Languages (isolates)/Language Families used in Europe
Light Blue: French Sign Language family
Light Red: Swedish Sign Language family
Dark Red: British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language family
Brown: German Sign Language family
Pink: Albanian Sign Language
Purple: Macedonian Sign Language (unclassified)
Grey: Arabic Sign Language family
White: Iranian Sign Language
Dark Green: Turkish Sign Language
Orange: Armenian Sign Language
Light Green: Maltese Sign Language
Please be aware that the "opt-out" choice is just a way to try to appease people. But Tumblr has not been transparent about when has data been sold and shared with AI companies, and there are sources that confirm that data has already been shared before the toggle was even provided to users.
Also, it seems to include data they should not have been able to give under any circumstance, including that of deactivated blogs, private messages and conversations, stuff from private blogs, and so on.
Do not believe that "AI companies will honor the "opt-out request retroactively". Once they've got their hands on your data (and they have), they won't be "honoring" an opt-out option retroactively. There is no way to confirm or deny what data do they have: The fact they are completely opaque on what do they currently "own" and have, means that they can do whatever they want with it. How can you prove they have your data if they don't give everyone free access to see what they've stolen already?
So, yeah, opt out of data sharing, but be aware that this isn't stopping anyone from taking your data. They already have been taking it, before you were given that option. Go and go to Tumblr's Suppport and leave your Feedback on this (politely, but firmly- not everyone in the company is responsible for this.)
Finally: Opt out is not good under any circumstance. Deactivated people can't opt out. People who have lost their passwords can't opt out. People who can't access internet or computers can't opt out. People who had their content reposted can't opt out. Dead people can't opt out. When DeviantArt released their AI image generator, saying that it wasn't trained on people who didn't consent to it, it was proven it could easily replicate the styles of people who had passed away, as seen here. So, yeah. AI companies cannot be trusted to have any sort of respect for people's data and content, because this entire thing is just a data laundering scheme.
Please do reblog for awareness.
its official: tumblr is selling our data to Midjourney
Internal documents obtained by 404 Media show that Tumblr staff compiled users' data as part of a deal with Midjourney and OpenAI.
we'd been hearing rumors about this for a bit but now its open and out there. some details from this article
it goes without saying, but if @staff goes through with this its going to be an utter shitshow and im all but certain the website will not survive it.
everyone go enable this immediately. it can be a bit hard to find because “visibility” is under blog settings instead of general settings or privacy. you have to do this individually for each separate side-blog
if you can’t find it on the app then the update probably hasn’t rolled out to you, and you’ll have to go through the web browser. what a truly wild way/time to implement this
HEY YOU! Did you already go into your settings to opt out of Tumblr selling your stuff to train AI? You better do that now!
Go to your settings, scroll down to your blog settings to Visibility, and check “Prevent third party sharing for blog name”
You will have to do this for each blog you have. Do this. Don’t let anyone sell your art, writing, and other content to train AI.
Ways to Live in Direct Opposition to Capitalism
I am by no means an expert in any of these things I’m gonna talk about, so keep that in mind! I am just making a compilation of things I know of that we can do to lessen the stranglehold the capitalist lifestyle has on us while enriching our lives, our surroundings, and the lives of others. Please add anything I miss or correct anything I may be getting wrong! Anyway here goes!
Use what you have, fix what’s you can, make what you can, accept from others, thrift what you can, and finally purchase as a last resort.
This is advice I have seen float around here a couple of times that can apply to a lot of things including clothing, furniture, food, and more besides. It’s meant to be done roughly in that order as it applies to what you’re wanting/needing/doing. It’s about preventing waste, promoting self-capability, having a heightened reliance on your community, and consciously rejecting the ingrained habit many of us have to just purchase things or services.
Here’s where you can read about growing an indoor garden!
Here’s where you can read about sewing things yourself!
Here’s an online site for giving and receiving items for free!
Here is where you can find a local Mutual Aid to get things from, learn skills from, give do, volunteer for, etc. (in the U.S.)
Be politically active! (from a U.S. perspective)
Vote for every election. Know your representatives and those who will be competing in the next election. Vote without ignorance and without falling for unfounded claims. While operating within the system that actively oppresses us will not bring about the future we want, it can serve as damage control (preventing worse candidates from taking office) and it can potentially create a national atmosphere more open to change.
Here’s a good article about getting more involved in the U.S. political process.
Here’s a site that will show you how to register to vote, when and where elections are held, and more!
Here’s good advice on finding protests in your city!
Here’s some readings on unionizing! It’s your legal right to unionize!
Here’s a more user friendly site for learning about unions!
Be active within your community!
Developing strong, motivated, capable, knowledgeable, and inclusive communities is the ultimate way to combat the relentless and bleak present and future. When you’ve worked on the things above and have gotten good at it (or even if you haven’t gotten good at it yet), start spreading what you know and what you can do with others!
Give your neighbors, coworkers, and friends some of the vegetables you’ve grown.
Invite your community members to volunteer events.
Talk to folks about how to vote, when you’re doing it, etc.
Take part in Mutual Aids to teach what you’ve learned or whatever you may be an expert in! Invite neighbors, friends, and coworkers when you take part in the Mutual Aid!
Accept your community. Take them for who and what they are. Discrimination is the enemy of cooperation. You have much more in common with everyone in your community than a single billionaire or corporation. We’re all passengers on this spaceship earth.
Do it one step at a time!
Obviously we can’t do all of these things at once. Do what you can when you can, and you’ll start to notice real change in your life!
Our online communities where we talk about our visions and hopes are fantastic, but they have little impact if we don’t actually get up and do the real work that change requires.
Want to be better, and keep hope for the future!
Harbor and nourish that desire to be a better person and to be the change you want to see in the world. You need to be hungry for a better future if you plan to make it through the rough times when everything feels pointless and without hope. Reach out to others when you’re down, and be someone others can lean on when their lives get hard.
That’s it! Please interact with this, spread it to others, and add your own thoughts and ideas! It’s important that we do the real work to get the change we crave!
Just finished a book I wanted to share cause I think some fellow Solarpunks might like.
Green Rising by Lauren James is set in the modern world where people aged between 9 and 20 have suddenly developed the power to grow plants, and are such named "Greenfingers"
It follows three different teenagers with such powers.
Gabrielle Ventura, climate activist, anarchist, leader of Climate Rebellion and the first person to develop the powers in the middle of a protest.
She uses this publicity to help spread information about climate change and ways to combat it and proclaims the powers must of been given to them specifically to fight climate change.
Hester Daleport, daughter of the owner of Daleport industries who's main export is oil.
She starts a team of greenfingers as a cover up when her own powers act up in a meeting but throughout the book she learns the real impact of what her fathers company is doing and Fights to stop it.
Theo Carthew, son of a fisherman in England who was already struggling, then looses all income when their boat is crashed by an unmarked Daleport rig.
Theo takes a job as one of Hesters greenfingers to keep his family afloat and is the main person to help expose her to the companies impact.
While it doesn't speak on every important topic relating to this it does touch on the consequences of trying to help when being informed and causing more harm.
And how big risky actions could have no or even negative impact.
(Highly reccomend this post by @thefloralmenace for more information on that)
TW for Body horror (plants growing in and over bodies) but I think that's the only one.
Okay so, how exactly do Password Managers work?
Because I'm pretty sure that giving some random corporation all my passwords would just make it EASIER for my personal info to get leaked.
I mean it is genuinely complicated; I don't know if you saw my explanation about dominoes yesterday, but basically you're not giving the company your information. You are creating an account with a company and they are handing you a tool that is extremely securely encrypted to store your passwords in. The company never has access to your passwords, or to the key you use to unlock your account. What they have access to is the cryptographic hash of your key to prove that it is you trying to access the account, but they can't reverse engineer the key that you use.
It's the same sort of process that encrypted email services like ProtonMail use. It's zero-knowledge storage. All that the password manager company is storing (in the case of a good password manager like Bitwarden) is up to 1gb of encrypted data for free users. They don't have access to your information. They couldn't get into it if they wanted to. All that they know about you is whatever information you used to register for the service and broad information about creation of the account.
Part of the reason that I recommend Bitwarden is that it is both open source and pretty widely used and recommended.
Open source security products are often considered more secure than closed-source tools because they can be examined and tested at the source-code level by *anyone* to check for vulnerabilities and holes in the security. Functionally what this means is that you have very smart, very motivated, and very security-conscious people testing products like Bitwarden for flaws and reporting them immediately.
I'm not great at explaining cryptographic hashing so I'm in a position where basically all I can tell you is "Trust me it works, and if that's not enough you have to go do some reading about hashing because I can't explain it." This is the barrier that a LOT of people have to using a password manager, and it's frustrating because genuinely, it is not something that people who work in security worry about *at all.*
When we're working with security the concern about password managers is *never* that a zero-knowledge company is going to have a leak. The concern is that data might actually be stored in plaintext (something you don't have to worry about with bitwarden because if that was the case everyone on the forums would be screaming their heads off at all times, and they are not) or that a phishing campaign is going to trick a user into handing over their password to the password manager.
But yeah, when you start using a good password manager with zero-knowledge storage, you aren't handing your data to a company. What's happening is that the company is handing YOU a tiny safe. The tiny safe has a ten-thousand-digit combination lock that you set the code for, and the company has no way of figuring out that code. They're hoping that you will pay them for the safe. And if you forget your code, you're screwed - the company can't get you access because, again, they have no way of getting the code. They don't store it, they don't see it, they don't know it, they can't produce it if ordered to do so at trial, and they can't reset the code.
cool new language resource i just discovered: lingotrack! it functions somewhat like polylogger, allowing you to log your activity for languages, but, more than that, it has an explore section where you can find media that's in a particular language, such as books, tv shows, films, etc! one of the hardest things when you reach a more proficient level of a language is finding media in that language to engage with, so i think this is probably a good resource, or at least a place to get started. besides the explore function, there's also collections of media/resources, and a library function where you can add your own resources. it does require you to have a paid account to log study time for multiple languages (the free version allows you one primary language), but the other aspects seem to be available to free users in their entirety!
Best language learning tips & masterlists from other bloggers I’ve come across
(these posts are not my own!)
THE HOLY GRAIL of language learning (-> seriously tho, this is the BEST thing I’ve ever come across)
Tips:
Some language learning exercises and tips
20 Favorite Language Learning Tips
what should you be reading to maximize your language learning?
tips for learning a language (things i wish i knew before i started)
language learning and langblr tips
Tips on how to read in your target language for longer periods of time
Tips and inspiration from Fluent in 3 months by Benny Lewis
Tips for learning a sign language
Tips for relearning your second first language
How to:
how to self teach a new language
learning a language: how to
learning languages and how to make it fun
how to study languages
how to practice speaking in a foreign language
how to learn a language when you don’t know where to start
how to make a schedule for language learning
How to keep track of learning more than one language at the same time
Masterposts:
Language Study Master Post
Swedish Resources Masterpost
French Resouces Masterpost
Italian Resources Masterpost
Resource List for Learning German
Challenges:
Language-Sanctuary Langblr Challenge
language learning checkerboard challenge
Word lists:
2+ months of language learning prompts
list of words you need to know in your target language, in 3 levels
Other stuff:
bullet journal dedicated to language learning
over 400 language related youtube channels in 50+ languages
TED talks about language (learning)
Learning the Alien Languages of Star Trek
.
Feel free to reblog and add your own lists / masterlists!