Words to Reference

Just a place to store things to read later. Tagged meticulously. Note: THIS IS A SIDEBLOG.

[grapnel]

An example of why one should use the Oxford comma.

[shot-thru-the-art]

Someone just reblogged my dancing ghosts with “#digital art” and it doesn’t matter at all but I’m still fighting the urge to dm them “they are very much not digital! They’re chicken wire, tore my jeans, and left me covered in small, bleeding scratches! I got a tetanus shot about it!”

No computers were used for these - partly because I like using my hands and partly because I have genuinely no idea how to do digital animation anyway. It seems like witchcraft.

These are life-sized because I have very little experience with figure drawing/sculpting so I just used my husband and I for proportion measurements. (Which meant I was chasing him around going “come back! Let me measure your femur!”)

Video description: green light on a chicken wire sculpture of a dancing couple. It’s turning in the wind outside at night so they (hopefully) look alive.

[ladydei]

I saw another version but I'll def reblog this one.

@shot-thru-the-art can I ask: the wire they're hung from, does it just go anywhere the wind blows? vs being on some sort of tumbrel (I think it's called?) that spins them, I mean.

This is the most amazing thing, IDK how anyone could think it's digtal. It's too perfectly imperfect.

Tho I am sorry about the tetanus shot <shudder>

[shot-thru-the-art]

Hi! The ghosts are hung on an arial yoga rig thingy that can spin and sway in the wind without tangling the ropes supporting it. It catches moderate winds but because it doesn’t have a lot of surface area it doesn’t sway or spin in every small breeze.

For this video I went up and shoved it to make it spin.

[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.

[emmaklee]

[messeretrevelyan]

[yesterdaysprint]

The Coffeyville Daily Journal, Kansas, April 30, 1896

[t3acupz]

before neil banging out the tunes there was czar scraping the strings

[reasonablywittyatbest]

Whenever I think about students using AI, I think about an essay I did in high school. Now see, we were reading The Grapes of Wrath, and I just couldn't do it. I got 25 pages in and my brain refused to read any more. I hated it. And its not like I hate the classics, I loved English class and I loved reading. I had even enjoyed Of Mice and Men, which I had read for fun. For some reason though, I absolutely could NOT read The Grapes of Wrath.

And it turned out I also couldn't watch the movie. I fell asleep in class both days we were watching it.

This, of course, meant I had to cheat on my essay.

And I got an A.

The essay was to compare the book and the movie and discuss the changes and how that affected the story.

Well it turned out Sparknotes had an entire section devoted to comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. Using that, and flipping to pages mentioned in Sparknotes to read sections of the book, I was able to bullshit an A paper.

But see the thing is, that this kind of 'cheating' still takes skills, you still learn things.

I had to know how to find the information I needed, I needed to be able to comprehend what sparknotes was saying and the analysis they did, I needed to know how to USE the information I read there to write an essay, I needed to know how to make sure none of it was marked as plagerized. I had to form an opinion on the sparknotes analysis so I could express my own opinions in the essay.

Was it cheating? Yeah, I didn't read the book or watch the movie. I used Sparknotes. It was a lot less work than if I had read the book and watched the movie and done it all myself.

The thing is though, I still had to use my fucking brain. Being able to bullshit an essay like that is a skill in and of itself that is useful. I exercised important skills, and even if it wasnt the intended way I still learned.

ChatGTP and other AI do not give that experience to people, people have to do nothing and gain nothing from it.

Using AI is absolutely different from other ways students have cheated in the past, and I stand by my opinion that its making students dumber, more helpless, and less capable.

However you feel about higher education, I think its undeniable that students using chatgtp is to their detriment. And by extension a detriment to anyone they work with or anyone who has to rely on them for something.

[sleepymccoy]

I can remember being in computer class right before history and someone in the last ten minutes mentioned the class presentations we had next period and I was like.. fuck man I fully forgot

So I had a passing knowledge of ww2, as much as anyone, so i figured that I could bluff the context around Churchill and just get some of his details down and I'd be fine.

So I pulled his Wikipedia up and read it. Didn't have time to write a speech, this was gonna be adlib. Then I jumped on google images and pulled a picture that reflected one thing from each of his Wikipedia sections (like, early life (picture of a train set) education (Churchill graduating) early war (you get the idea).

Bunged the pictures into a powerpoint and read the Wikipedia again with the powerpoint alongside, adding subheadings to jog my memory. Pulled a couple links from the bottom of the wiki for the bibliography, opened and skimmed to make sure they weren't wild, and saved the damn thing

We were lining up outside class for history and the guys in the class are telling some classmates about how I'd just smashed out my whole presentation. I asked everyone to let me go first since the knowledge wasn't gonna last long, I was going off having just read Churchill's wiki lol

They all agreed (champions) and one of the girls said she'd read up on Churchill a bit on her presentation about the Queen, so she promised to nod or shake her head if I was completely wrong.

I presented. I know I spent a minute on each slide and spoke relevantly. I remember at one point saying Churchill excelled in school, saw my classmate was shaking her head, and pivoted to say he didn't do well with formal education but got into some of the extracurricular activities that'd benefit him come war time. She nodded. I continued lol. One of the lads complimented me on that one afterwards

I don't think I learnt much about Churchill with this study. But I absolutely learnt about public speaking. I was using skills in research and apply my contextual knowledge. I also learnt to rely on classmates, even tho we weren't friends at all she had my back because it was easy and kind and cost her nothing

I got a B+ and a comment about being one of the more engaging and charismatic presenters (that would've been the adrenaline, and my classmates were watching fascinated to see if I could pull it off lol).

The main perk of my presentation was the energy, which wouldn't've been there if I'd ai'd a script to read. And I wouldn't have this fun memory

[kedreeva]

I remember getting in a philosophy class in college (one I just took for fun), and realized that there was a paper due that day that I had 100% forgotten about writing. I lied and told the professor that I had forgotten to print it, but I had my laptop with me for note taking, so if he'd give me 5 minutes after class I would run down to the computer lab and print it off and bring it up. He said that was fine, presumably because I couldn't write a coherent paper in 5 minutes.

But I COULD write a coherent paper in 45 minutes, which is about the time it took me to slap together a dirty outline and fill it in, the way I had been taught to do in high school in my writing class. It wasn't gonna win any awards but it meant a B+ instead of a zero, and it meant I had an opportunity to work under pressure and practice skills I had learned. Skills I STILL use to this day, skills I have taught to others. Skills I use to help others edit papers. Skills I would not have and certainly wouldn't have been able to hone if chatGPT was doing it poorly instead.

That's MY B+ bullshit essay. I earned it fair and square, along with the bragging rights to having written it under my professor's nose.

[hearthawk]

I learned how to be a First Draft Wonder for most of my school papers. I knew the formula to make a decent paper, because it was drilled into me in High school taking AP lit and having 'essay quizzes' where we would spend a class period writing a short essay (BY HAND LE GASP) about our topic.

I am so good at papers, I know how to find the relevant information, I know what a reliable source looks like, and in college, I could lock myself in a study room and knock out a several page paper (with references) in just a couple hours.

ALL WITHOUT AI. I used my brain, the skills of information gathering I was taught, and my ability to use books and bibliographies to my advantage. Today, I can write up something tidy for work in a little bit of focus time.

I may not be able to influence the Youth. But I will beg all of you students to not become overly reliant on having some machine do that thinking for you so you can scroll Tiktok longer. Your brain is meant to be exercised, lets use it.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Yeah, that all tracks. You wanna know how I wrote an entire nonfiction book? I used the exact same skills I learned in school for writing essays--come up with a topic, research what you don't already know, make an outline, use the outline to structure the piece of writing, fill it in. It's just that this time I wrote 70,000 words instead of, say, 500-1000.

I think my first essay was....third grade? Maybe second? And I wrote hundreds of them just through high school, to say nothing of all I wrote in getting my Bachelor's and Master's degrees. Some of the essays in primary and secondary school were, quite honestly, bullshitting, because they were on topics that didn't interest me and I hadn't yet learned to use my then-undiagnosed anxiety, autism, and ADHD to trick myself into putting real effort into something I found boring. Even the low-effort essays still got me great grades, and they still helped me hone my writing skills. And they did eventually give me the tools to get me to focus on less-fun necessities.

Would I have been able to do that if I had had access to genAI and decided to use it? Doubtful. Would I have been able to write an entire book that was published by one of the Big 5 U.S. publishers? Nope. Because even if i had managed to trick them into thinking an AI-generated manuscript was my work, I wouldn't have survived the editing process without blowing my cover, and I certainly wouldn't have been able to show my expertise in the subject matter.

Even if you never do any work as a professional writer, writing teaches you ways to use and exercise your brain. It helps you to examine material critically and communicate it to others. You are cheating yourself of so much if you just wimp out and use CGPT.

[gwydionmisha]

I have a high reading rate and a high comprehension rate. In grad school they told us the the profs would each assign reading as if that was your only class it was on purpose. There was literally no way to read everything for classes on top of all the papers and thesis work. For me, can't read everything was about 80-85 percent of the material which was above average.

One of the tricks for articles is read the summary, introductory paragraph, and conclusion and speak early in discussion to show you know what the article is abut.

Another trick is divide articles up with friend(s) and brief each other.

Both in my upper division Medieval History undergraduate classes and in my graduate classes, we'd periodically get assigned the same book for a different class, which was helpful. I could skim my old notes and not reread it or just pick out certain chapters. (Not textbooks, but medieval lit type things. This would happen with classics, philosophy, theology texts, across different under graduate and graduate degrees. It happens).

Usually if I had to skip something important, I'd take notes on the class discussion and it was fine. I was an active class participants, my papers were generally early and heavily well resourced. This can buy you a lot of slack in college when you need it.

One time I got assigned "Little Flowers of St. Francis" and I didn't have time that weekend, so I skipped it. I listened in class, I made good notes. (Paraphrasing things makes them stick in your head the way just reading or listening won't. ChatGP can't stick things in your head the way writing things in your own words will.)

I truly intended to read it, but the back half of semester is busy and I also had two language classes in a full course load and papers and...

I actually used it in an essay question on an exam. Brother Juniper reminded me of the holy Fool archetype from Buddhist writings. I could easily remember a bunch of illustrative stories from class discussion I could use as evidence. I got a perfect score. She could not tell I hadn't read it.

I meant to read it over break, I really did, but there was a bunch of more interesting reading to do and breaks are always too short.

Over the ourse of the last wo under grad years and my medieval Masters program, it was a bout 50/50 it'd get assigned in whole or in part for one class or another, across multiple proffs.

The second time, i didn't even try to read it, but my hand was up in class with relevant comments and opinions. I'd casually reference something in a paper or essay here appropriate. A year went by and then another.

Eventually about a decade after it was first assigned i sold my copy away having never cracked it open.

I am convinced none of the people who assigned this book ever had a clue i hadn't read it.

I am not convinced this was cheating. I knew the information. The information was correct and i was using it correctly with my own spin.

My quality notetaking, my skill at chunking information with other disparate information, my skills at writing essays and papers, all of that was mine from long practice.

My brain doing the work.

LLM stuff slides right through you like olestra. It doesn't give you skills and it's such a passive way to do anything. Active note taking, active thinking, active writing, that builds skills.

[elljayvee]

One of my colleagues can say to me, I need a basic understanding of the research on [topic] for a meeting later today, help? and I can have them a one-page brief with a list of references inside of an hour. On one memorable occasion a colleague had to take over for someone else unexpectedly without context 10 minutes before a meeting and by the time she logged on to Zoom I had her a bulleted list of recent findings in the field and a short summary of the historical context.

Sure, ChatGPT would be faster, but the difference is, I'm right and ChatGPT is frequently not.

[bewbin]

LETS BRING BACK 1337 SPEAK 

[bewbin]

why do i even try 

[bunney]

I THoUGHT YOU MEANT THE YEAR

[esoanem]

my l0rd, t3h p34s4nt5 4r3 r3v01t1ng! W3 mu5t s411y f0rth 4g41n5t th3m 4thw1th!

[addamatic]

Happy ten years of being so old no one knows what 1337 is

[adurot]

I have just learned that Mountain Goats are NOT, in fact, actual Goats.

[adurot]

I have never heard of this band. I AM in fact referring to the animal.

[adurot]

But wait, there’s more!

[adurot]

[puddox]

saw someone including "Mandate of Heaven" as one of those christian terms tumblr likes to use to sound profound. which i get where you're coming from but t☝️hat one is chinese

[yuriinullification]

holdon

what the fuck is going on in this site's backend

[mrsandman42069]

[segamascott]

[supreme-leader-stoat]

This is true but I'm gonna be controversial for a second and say that I feel bad for jocks who get hit with The Injury™️too. The Injury™️ fucking sucks, man. Having something that everyone praised you for when you were young suddenly betray you and having to grapple with both a sudden loss of ability (whether it's something that can be recovered from or not) and figure out what your future looks like now that the one you had imagined for yourself (whether it was actually realistic or not) feels like it's been snatched away is brutal.

[evilwriter37]

Yeah, like, maybe we shouldn't be shaming/making fun of people for either of these things!

[hanfu-mermay]

紅樓夢 Red Chamber Dream

🎨東君之桃

[kata4a]

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do.

chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde c. 1380

[youzicha]

glossary: eek also and even tho at the time prys great value wonder a cause for astonishment nyce stupid spedde succeeded

You know the form of language, too, can change. Within a thousand years, even the words that were most precious then, seem strange and foolish to us; yet they spoke them so and did no worse in love than we now do.

[pengosolvent]

Edit: the title for this comic is “Puzzle Rat” this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

(it’s completely unrelated to any of my songs that have to do with “puzzleboy”) Patreon: www.patreon.com/PengoSolvent

[insert-witty-user-name-here]

[starknstarwars]

Me opening up the half-finished draft of my ‘narratively creative’ Conclave fanfic:

[throo]

Wh-what do you mean it’s from a birthday cake

[throo]

We could have been eating him

[fraactals]

this site is actually insane and so amazing for anyone who reads historical cnovels and wants to understand historical context

you can find things like: * this map of chang'an when it was the capital of the tang dynasty

or * this reference on the various measurements and units, their conversions to more widely known western units, and their regional/dynastic variations or * this list of sayings related to marriage

etc etc etc