remember remember the fifth of november

.. or any other date you want, really.. This is an OOC blog. If I am following you, an RP blog, you can find my WoW RP blogs and characters here. (Having been inactive on tumblr for some years, bear in mind it is not updated) ****Posts that are personal/blog, are not for reblogging.**** About me Medblr type posts tagged real doctoring

[quotefeeling]

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

— Aldous Huxley

[midnights-dragon]

In case anyone is having a bad night

(The best of this post and its reblogs, but with links that work)

Here is a website where you can scroll down to all the different levels of the ocean 

Here is a website where you can see the future of the universe

Here is a website where you can press a ‘make everything okay’ button, over and over, until things really are okay

Here is a website that you can read if you feel like a burden

Here is a website where you can look at strobe illusions (TW strobe/flashing)

Here is a website where you can cut stuff up (TW blood/sh)

Here and here are websites where you can play with sand

Here is a website where you can draw with macaroni and other fun foods

Here is a website where you can paint someone’s nails

Here is a website where you can grow a garden with emojis

Here is a website with hundreds of videos of people hugging you (rightfully dubbed ‘the nicest place on the internet’ because it really is, y’all, it made me cry)

Here is a website that will take you to other useless websites

Here is a website where you can make a tiny cat play bongo drums (and other instruments!)

Here is a website to help give you gentle reminders <3

Here is a website where you can grow a tiny farm

Here is a website where you can take a bunch of scientific personality tests

Here is a website of calm rain noise

Take a breath. It’s going to be okay, I promise.

[wickedsnack]

so as long as tumblr keeps this, here's the tumblr version of etiquette that was maintained when twitter's quote-retweets affected artist visibility/notes:

for art that someone has added reblog commentary to (or removed the caption from), reblog from the source

otherwise, avoid adding reblog comments to art (as this will affect the artist's notes/visibility)—utilize tags and replies to provide commentary (which artists will absolutely appreciate)

reblog comments are comments added to the body of a post, not the tags and not replies.

[solitairians]

listening to an album you used to love but overplayed for yourself after a really long time after the overplayedness has worn off and it sounds like it's supposed to again is the closest to being in heaven you can get during your mortal life i think

[thespoonisvictory]

Ursula K. Le Guin has truly, truly never missed even once

[ask-eliendre]

Kaelieth Stardawn, Legion Timerunner.

Art by StickerB

[sweeetestcurse]

Gris 05/??

[mug-of-beans]

“The old magic persists thanks to it’s unfathomable power.”

No, the old magic persists because the new magic can’t run the legacy spells I need to do my job, and keeps trying to install spirits I don’t want or need onto my orb.

[aqueerkettleofish]

Look, if the new magic didn't have a personality construct that kept trying to tell me which spells to use, maybe I wouldn't still be using the old magic.

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

Yes it had a deep blood cost, but at least it was a one time sacrifice and not this monthly bloodletting nonsense new age magic has

[wizard-archivist-official]

The old magic is robust enough to survive a decade of use and it's compatible with every wand, staff, scroll, and charm in our collection.

The new magic stops working after three days and every spell uses proprietary runes.

Our preferences, as an archiving institution, should be pretty clear.

[charlesoberonn]

You try to get guidance for the new magic and the king's sorcerers maybe will answer you in a few days with an unhelpful suggestion to buy the newest orb.

You need guidance for the old magic and a dozen retired middle-aged wizards will pop up to explain it to you rune by rune if necessary.

[thatsbelievable]

[pevensey-crane]

Kasten Pevensey-Crane, by StickerB.

[burins]

FDA will limit Covid vaccines to people over 65 or at high risk of serious illness, leaders say

The FDA announced it will limit access to Covid-19 vaccines going forward to people 65 and older and others at high risk of serious illness

hey! we thought this might be coming and here it is. and it sucks! mass vaccination is one of our best tools at preventing the spread of COVID. public comment is open until either the 22nd or the 23rd of May (I can't tell if the 3 days listed on the FDA website is inclusive or exclusive of today.)

you can leave a comment here:

you can leave an anonymous comment, but usually non-anonymous ones do carry more weight.

[headspace-hotel]

so many articles about Fast Fashion, not enough articles about what the hell is happening to the quality of clothes

Like okay. People own more pieces of clothing nowadays and they wear them a lesser number of times before throwing them out. BUT.

Why do we pretend like this is pure vanity or careless wastefulness, rather than forced by the qualities of the clothes themselves?

The other day, I was going through boxes of old clothes in the basement in search of fabric to practice sewing on. The difference in quality of the fabrics themselves is shocking! The worn-out old jeans from twenty years ago are MUCH thicker and tougher than anything more recent. My old baby clothes are made as sturdy as my work clothes from today.

In the past couple years, I have had entire seams rip out of clothes on the first wash. That's not normal!

Polyester blend shirts that feel cozy and soft when they are new, become scratchy and rough after 20 washes or so. I am trying to avoid polyester, but it gets harder and harder; the other day i couldn't find a single pack of crew socks that was 100% cotton. SOCKS!

Also, pilling is out of control. The newest pants I bought developed pills within a single day of walking around campus with a backpack.

These companies are trying to frog-boil us but touching clothes from twenty years ago, the useless crap of today would stick out like a sore thumb...

[hey-gray]

I used to caddy. I got around 35,000 steps (around 19 miles) on an average day of work. I bought 6 pairs of socks once a year, and they never formed holes in the bottom until I had already bought new socks. I still buy that brand of socks, but now I work a desk job. The socks I bought in February are already wearing thin.

I still have shirts I bought in middle school that I have worn fairly regularly that are hole-free, or only have holes where there is more wear (e.g. armpits). The wear on them matches pretty closely with the wear on shirts I got in the last couple years. One shirt I got new just a year or so ago is practically dissolving - big ass holes all over, including several in the middle of the chest.

These are not the only examples I have. I see no explanation for these facts other than a recent decrease in quality across the board. It's frankly ridiculous, and I want to do something about it, but I don't know what I can do. On an individual level, sure you can buy used, but even good quality clothing does eventually wear out, so not everyone can buy used. It seems like the only solution is producing good quality clothing, but how does an individual even work towards that?

[headspace-hotel]

I know there has to be real documentation of this buried somewhere in the abyssal detritus of the modern world....The companies made the choice at some point, to start using shorter staple length fibers, lesser quality fibers, less sturdy weaving, worse stitching...and the worse stitching is often pointed out by people who sew because it is visible, but i've never seen an analysis of it spanning the whole chain of clothing coming to be.

Personally, I've been experimenting with natural fibers that are alternatives to the usual ones. Dogbane (Apocyonum cannabinum) is the flax equivalent native to North America, and extremely promising, but it's far from the only one.

[thesingersews]

Peer-reviewed tags by @elprupneerg

I can confirm, it is getting harder and harder to find quality fabric for an affordable price. I can't even shop at Joann anymore, and they are the only option for a fabric store in most places that has any kind of variety in their apparel section and isn't owned by religious fundamentalists *cough* like hobby lobby *cough.* The quality of their fabrics has declined rapidly, even from before the pandemic! The only thing they have anymore is cheap synthetic fabrics, mostly polyester, and cotton which used to be decent and is getting worse by the year. AND they charge more for EVERYTHING now. AND they treat their workers like shit. (Like say what you will about hobby lobby and their fundie ideology but at least their pay scale starts at like $18 as opposed to Joann which was still paying $10.50 in 2022 and would never schedule me for more than 15 hours a week)

I know of a few boutique fabric shops but they either just have quilting cotton of varying quality or have prices that are plain unsustainable. Even the online shops I frequent are growing more questionable, and some mislabel their products so it's hard to tell what the fabric is made of or how much it weighs. The sites that are still mostly reliable for quality require you to shell out the cash.

There was one site, fabrics.com, I believe, that had a pretty good search feature and pretty affordable deadstock fabric, but it got bought by Amazon and eventually they shut down the website and subsumed it into Amazon marketplace, where it's impossible to search for anything and get reliable results.

It really is a textile wasteland out here.

[ariaste]

Couple of tips: First: All of the above is correct. Fabric quality has gotten worse. One thing you can do to keep your clothes going longer is DO NOT USE FABRIC SOFTENER!!!!!! Fabric softener works by gradually dissolving the fibers, which contributes to faster wear, holes in clothes, etc. FABRIC SOFTENER IS THE DEVIL. You know those Tide Pods? They're so convenient, right? Make sure you get the kind that is JUST detergent (the one-color kind), not the kind that also has the fabric softener in it (the kind with two or three "sections" of different color fluids). Second, a couple recs for online fabric stores I like: 1. If you're the sort of person who is already looking for fabric to buy your own clothes, then I'm gonna assume that you're not necessarily fundamentally against the idea of dyeing your own cloth, and therefore I will recommend dharmatrading.com as a great place to buy a huge selection of fabric of all fiber types (they've got everything from burlap to silk veiling). Most of it is undyed, but i think they do have some dyed silk fabrics as well. Their prices are really fair IMO, but yeah you will have to dye it yourself. (Dyeing not that hard, though, as long as you follow the directions and enter into it with a spirit of cheerful experimentation and willingness to be flexible on the exact, precise outcome -- at least the first couple times!) 2. fabricwholesaledirect.com -- all sorts of fabrics at wholesale prices, I've bought from them a couple times (velvet and flannel for curtains) and I've been reasonably pleased with the quality -- YMMV probably depending on what you're buying. They do sell by the yard, but if you're planning on getting a huge amount of fabric (ie: if you're making floor-to-ceiling curtains) then I recommend waiting for one of their big sales. I bought mine around Black Friday and the sale prices were bonkers.

3. Silkbaron.com for silks. REALLY great prices

4. wawak.com for sewing notions (buttons, thread, zippers, eyelets, etc etc etc)

5. tandyleather.com for leather and leather-related tools

6. Joanne.com -- yeah, their prices aren't as good as they used to be, but they do send out a lot of coupons and have regular sales, so you gotta make use of those for it to be worth it.

[thursdayplaid]

@elvencantation

[marzipanandminutiae]

if you live in the Boston area, Sewfisticated has discount designer fabrics for great prices- $10/yard 100% silk, for example. the colors/patterns can be limited, since it's bolt-ends from big fashion and design houses, but still worth looking into!

[nonasuch]

Don’t overlook quilting cotton, either — quilters won’t put up with poor-quality fabric, so anything considered “quilt shop quality” should hold up well. You can use quilting cottons anywhere you’d use lightweight or medium-weight wovens in garment sewing — they’re great for things like button-downs and structured dresses.

If you look for sales, there’s a ton of good stuff out there for under $10/yard. Hancock’s of Paducah and Brooklyn Fabric both have tons of good sale options. Small local quilt shops usually also sell online, and frequently have sales.

Most of my dresses are made with quilting cotton, although admittedly that’s more because no one will make the aggressively whimsical novelty prints I want in other fabrics. But I also paid $6-9 /yd for most of it!

[lauramkaye]

I suspect that this is also something of a cycle- the fewer people sew, the more companies can get away with shoddier construction. The fewer people know what fabric SHOULD feel like, the easier to reset the norm so everyone just expects to need to replace things frequently.

[homunculus-argument]

A story within a story where a mother sits her rowdy children down and tells them a story about a the world's sweetest, kindest mother who never lost her temper, never cursed and never yelled at her children, no matter how rowdy they could get. She would only gently, kindly told them to not do the dangerous things. One day she sweetly, kindly told her children to not go play at the riverbank, because it's dangerous and they might slip on the rocks, fall into the water, and die. Her children do not listen. They go play at the riverbank, where they slip on the rocks, fall into the water, and die.

And the sweet perfect mother of the story comes to the riverbank, sees that all her children drowned, and starts crying so bitterly that angels overhear her, and the angels say to each other, "she does not deserve this, this woman has never done anything wrong in her life, this should not have happened to her", and feeling great pity for her, bring her children back to life, and after that they always listened to their mother and lived happily ever after.

And the storyteller's children, who at this point are familiar with the concept that these stories are supposed to have some sort of a moral or lesson in them, interject to point out that their mother hasn't always done everything perfectly, she isn't always sweet, curses a lot, and as a matter of fact loses her shit at her kids all the time. She isn't like the mother of the story at all.

And their mother agrees: Her children are correct. She is not a perfect mother who has never done anything wrong. Angels will not have pity on her, and they will not bring her little shits back to life if they go to the river and die. So they better fucking not go get themselves killed in the first place.

[the-real-seebs]

this was forwarded to me by my kid and i gotta say that adds layers to the interpretation

[parisianqueen-deactivated202004]

During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

[maraeffect]

poor people deserve things they want, too. it is unfair to expect poor people to only buy things they “need”.

[enide-s-dear]

My grandfather used to tell me: if you only have 20 kr left, you buy grocery for 10 kr and flowers for the other 10 kr because you need a reason to live as well.

[netherworldpost]

“Why should rich people pay more” because fuck ‘em

“So you are okay for paying more when you have money” I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘em’ when relevant

[pedulum-chronometry]

“I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘‘em’ when relevant” is surprisingly powerful as both a statement and philosophy

[thoughtkick]

“If you persistently seek validation from others, you will inadvertently invalidate your own self-worth.”

— Dodinsky

[ask-naraenil]

Suddenly as I followed your growing shadow I was walking with you inside darkness.

As we hold hands until whenever that might be Just being together makes me cry.

As the wind becomes colder, winter comes closer. Little by little, on this path, comes the season when I had to let you go.

As I watch the first snowflowers of this year right now, In this moment that we share together, I want to give you my all. Do you know of my heart?

I wasn’t always so weak, I’m loving you like this but that’s all my heart can do.

If I was by your side, no matter what the task may be I feel as if I can do it. I get that feeling.

When the wind rattles my window and even the dark night awakens, I’ll erase even all your painful memories. With that bright smile.

With these white snowflowers falling endlessly, The sidewalk that we are walking on glows with a bright light, without even knowing that it’s changed.

Have I lived on for someone else? Wanting to do everything for them, I learned that that was love.

If by chance I knew where you were, I would’ve become a star in the winter sky and shined on you.

Even on days when you laugh and sad nights that are damp with tears, I’ll be by yourside always, whenever that may be.

As I watch the first snowflowers of this year right now, In this moment that we share together, I want to give you my all. Do you know of my heart?

Don’t cry, look at me. All I want to do is be together with you by your side. I won’t let you go this time.

Inside the snowflowers that fill this path and shower on us endlessly, little by little, small memories are being drawn inside our hearts Forever by my side you are there.