in HEMA (aka historical european fencing), much of the sport is done with fencing masks on, so identifying your clubmates during sparring or tourneys is just based on gear. you know, what color their jacket and pants are, what patches they have on it, how is their mask painted. If someone borrows someone else’s jacket it’s legitimately jarring, like having someone with an entirely different body type and way of moving stealing your friend’s face.
Once i read about historical fishermen in the north sea and how they each had a specific hat pattern that their buddies would use to identity them while they were bundled up. It was so much part of their identity that they were often buried wearing those hats. The gear is like your name, a visual identifier of YOU when you do not have a face.
anyway, back when I was buying gear i got my pants in ELECTRIC blue. I figured i was gonna get a black or grey jacket. but HEMA gear is kind of expensive because it’s all custom- or handmade, so instead of spending $400 on a new jacket I picked up one secondhand for like 20. Except the only jacket that fit me was bright, SCARLET red. And I already had my expensive, new, custom, BLUE pants. I look like a damn rocket pop or like, a mixed Icee. I was like, shit! I should switch my jacket before i become the rocket pop guy!!!
Long story short, not only am I now the rocket pop guy, the color scheme has bled into my entire wardrobe. Every-fucking-thing I own is red and blue. I look like a french revolutionary. I look like a founding father in a school play. I have become a northern fisherman in my stripey hat. Now, even if I DO get a new jacket, I feel like I GOTTA buy it in red, yk? Otherwise they won’t recognize me. Maybe I won’t recognize me. I’m the rocket pop guy!!!
OP I DO HEMA TOO AND SEEING THIS ON MY DASH FILLED ME WITH SO MUCH EXCITEMENT OMG AND I HAVE SOMETHING RELATED TO SHARE (also if you wanna compare where we get stuff from hit me up)
when I was buying my gambeson, I decided to check out the deal of the day section and found one that was my perfect size for much cheaper
except
it’s description said it was blue and yellow and came with an “added patch”
I initially thought it was going to be more muted colors and I could just sorta subtly be supporting my local basketball team’s colors. When it shipped I realized it was very bright blue and yellow. so now I’m very boldly supporting my local basketball team. Go golden state warriors!!
the added patch turned out to not to be the Warriors’s logo, a dragon, another hema place, or anything else I expected to be. it turned out to be a name tag. a name tag that says JEREMY on it. my name is not Jeremy. the people at my club know this. so for me, someone not named Jeremy, who has never in their life supported a basketball team before, to show up in a bright blue and yellow gambeson emboldened with the name JEREMY on it, was a sight. Jeremy has now become his own identity that I simply use on occasion. I would say he has since become a bit of an icon in our group.
if I’m getting hema pants, they must continue the trend. I am Jeremy
I do SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) fight, not HEMA, but we’re all wearing helmets and we can’t see faces unless we’re right on top of each other, so the whole ‘I know that is My Good Buddy Joe because he’s wearing My Good Buddy Joe’s armor’ is legit. And then you have my household, where we all wear the exact same armor because it’s household-issue and Free, so the only way to tell us apart is that we write our names on the back of our helmets. If you’re not behind us, good luck.
SCA here, (i did do HEMA for a bit! I can’t fight now) and yes, the Armor and people’s Arms, that is their colors and device on their shield and clothes? Same deal. Even as onlookers we check for where our buddies are by trying to spot their heraldry. My own involves red and blue because that’s like half my real life wardrobe- it’s very much Me.
So you get, “Dude I know that’s our pal Gilbert De Fancy because look at him he’s got a white bend across vivid blue I can see him from two miles away. And that over there is the Monarch because they are wearing the Monarch’s Kingdom-heraldry, and only a King, Queen or Ruler is allowed to wear that and also look how shiny their crown detail on their helm is.”
It’s like in college when you know everyone by their Winter Coat. You each have just one, and you see people’s bundled silhouette before anything else… so “Long black faux-wool buttoned coat with turned cuffs and heavy hood’ becomes who you Are for five months.
i. the monster’s body is a cultural body - The monster is a work of fiction to be analyzed through tools of literary and sociological theory.
ii. the monster always escapes - As long as the cultural fear from which the monster stems persists, the monster will reappear in retellings, reimaginings, and sequels.
iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis - Monsters defy binaries and challenge easy comprehension or categorization.
iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference - The monster represents the Other.
v. the monster polices the borders of the possible - Tales of the monster exist to discourage unacceptable or taboo behaviors.
vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire - Subjects can vicariously participate in the disruption of the social order through the monster.
vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming - Within the monster we find information about the self.
Every time I see another ibuprofen post on this site I’m like STOP
STOP
Stop.
Take that after a meal. Take it with a big glass of water. Don’t take it on an empty stomach EVER. Don’t take it with alcohol. You will destroy your stomach. You will end up with an ulcer. You will vomit blood. I’m not exaggerating.
Love, an adult person over 35 who can’t take NSAIDs anymore
That goes for Alleve (Naproxen Sodium) too! Aleve is worse on your stomach than Ibuprofen is.
Acetaminophen, not a NSAID, even more so that NSAIDS, should not be taken when drinking. No seriously, it causes liver and stomach damage (and it’s particularly hard on the liver to start with).
Painkillers are great! But the common ones are still nasty on your stomach and liver and eventually they won’t be an option for you. If you take them with care, you can extend how long you can keep using them.
this is such a non-issue but truly no greater tragedy than seeing a piece of media furryfied and they’ve made your special guy the wrong animal. like that animal does NOT align with the themes in my little guy’s story, do it again.
not everyone can be a wolf, not everyone should be a wolf. hold this in your heart and come to terms with it.
no lie i genuinely believe brands are so behind the pleather movement bc they can just buy cheap plastic sell it as expensive ‘vegan leather’ and be ready for you to return in a couple years to buy another 'vegan peeta approved™ leather jacket’ bc they last like 5 minutes compared to the way leather lasts decades all the while you can pat yourself and coorporate’s back for being sutainable all the while pvc (what some fake leather products are made of) has been labeled the single most environmentally damaging type of plastic and while there are non pvc fake leathers such as pu leather… its not like thats much better producing plastic pollutes and the second your pleather clothes start to breakdown (which happens much faster than you think) theyll wound up on landfills for at least a 100 years…
also they love love LOVE to try and sell you “plant-based leather” that you then look at the details and it’s “45% cactus” or whatever and there’s no mention of what the rest of it is
it’s plastic.
it’s always plastic.
ALT
Let me tell you a story.
50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it’s body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.
But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.
The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn’t melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.
Anyway, I pulled grandad’s jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.
The cow is still dead. There will be another cow that dies tomorrow for the same reason. But there’s no market for leather these days. Its skin won’t be a garment that lasts 50 years. Its gonna rot in a pile with all the others. Someone will sell a “vintage” cowboycore Americana aesthetic dark academia plastic peice of shit that will be garbage in a year. And then they’ll sell another one.
That cow, that became a leather coat?
It’s probably also a saddle that another cowboy is still riding.
And several belts. Probably some wallets, several gloves, some riding tack.
Nobody who doesn’t work with leather understands how much material you get from one cow. I have sides (like ¼ of a cow) that I’ve been making things out of for years and there’s still lots left in my materials stash.
Once that coat is too worn out to wear, there will still be lots of the leather that’s still good. Someone who can’t afford to buy hides will probably make smaller things from those pieces (that’s how I started working with leather).
Even when every piece of that hide is completely unusable, it will decompose like it was originally going to, and shed no microplastic particles. A synthetic alternative lasts a fraction as long and sheds microplastics for its entire life.
You also can’t use that synthetic leather for many of the things you’d use real leather for. It’s not fire resistant, so welders can’t use it to protect them from sparks. it doesn’t have the tensile strength of real leather, so you can make equestrian tack out of it. It doesn’t provide any abrasion resistance, so you can’t make motorcycle leathers from it. It can’t be used for protective equipment in sports like archery, because it would disintegrate under normal use.
Synthetic leather can only be used in place of real leather in fashion and upholstery applications, and it’s not very good at either. It requires hundreds of times more material for the same applications due to its short lifespan, and it produces plastic pollution constantly.
There’s literally no good argument for replacing real leather with synthetic alternatives. Even if you want to go the animal rights route, how many marine and aquatic ecosystems are you willing to sacrifice for the life of a few cows? Are you even saving cows, when we use them for so many other industries? Does a domesticated animal have more right to life than the wild species impacted by synthetic leather production?
Death Certificates – What you need, why you need them, and
how to get them
Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone
What the Everloving Fuck is Probate
Some Simple Dos and Don’ts
Shitty Mad Libs – Templates for writing Obituaries and
Memorials
How to plan a non-religious death party
So you suddenly have to become some sort of hacker or some
shit
This is an eighteen page book that you can print out, download, share, and give away; it is meant to be used to collect information about funeral planning and account management after a death OR you can use it BEFORE you die and give people information so they’re not stuck playing Nancy Fucking Drew while trying to keep seventeen cousins who crawled out of the woodwork from gutting each other in front of the fucking casket as they argue about who’s inheriting grandma’s favorite dentures.
It’s not exactly cheerful and it’s full of things that are probably going to feel really fucking raw if you’re processing a fresh death.
I’m sorry! I love you! Death is shitty! I’m trying to laugh about it a little and I hope you can laugh a little too because otherwise we’re all just going to cry together.
Good luck!
(in memory of my weirdo mother and her weirdo siblings who all died too fucking young and left me holding this flaming bag of dogshit)
[image ID: a tweet from Shayma (@/dpechesmode) posted on December 13 2023 that reads: “our house was bombed. my sister martyred and left two orphans behind. now i’m trying to evacuate my family of 16 out of gaza, but we need a lot of money to make it happen. your donation and sharing is very much appreciated. paypal.me/doaa94r” /End ID]
shayma is the sister of doaa abuajwa, who worked as an arabic instructor at al azhar university in gaza. doaa was martyred, along with one of her daughters, in early november by an israeli air strike. prior to her murder, a tweet of doaa’s where she talked about being happy to be able to scrape together a small “birthday party” for her daughter maria’s fifth birthday gained significant traction. (maria survived the attack and is now in the care of shayma)
the problem is im so used to urasawa/satoshi kon/katsuhiro otomo men that whenever someone asks to show me “an old anime man” with no wrinkles no gray hair no big nose no different face shape at all i feel like ive been cheated
mappa doesnt want you to know that old men should be drawn like this again
So for over a month and a half I’ve been told in my Creative writing MA class that my writing is too poetic and abstract to work in the form of a novel and that I need to simplify my meanings and sentences. I did as I was told and lost all interest in writing if I have to write in the same style that every other novelist does. Today I received this note from a classmate and didn’t realise how much I needed to hear it. Don’t change your art just because other people don’t get it. Don’t change your style to fit in with everyone else. It’s your story not theirs.
This post is 4 years old, but for anyone who needs to hear it I want to tack on the advice my Creative Writing professor told the class I was in: “Not everyone is going to get what you’re trying to do. So a lot of the advice your classmates write on your papers might feel Wrong to you. If it feels Wrong and you don’t think they understand your story, don’t take their advice because they are not your audience.”
Sounds like the initial advice for OP to tone down her natural voice was incorrect, but thankfully one of her classmates that was part of the audience wants to hear that voice.
People with low spoons, someone just recommended this cookbook to me, so I thought I’d pass it on.
I always look at cookbooks for people who have no energy/time to do elaborate meal preparations, and roll my eyes. Like, you want me to stay on my feet for long enough to prepare 15 different ingredients from scratch, and use 5 different pots and pans, when I have chronic fatigue and no dishwasher?
These people seem to get it, though. It’s very simple in places. It’s basically the cookbook for people who think, ‘I’m really bored of those same five low-spoons meals I eat, but I can’t think of anything else to cook that won’t exhaust me’. And it’s free!
SPREAD THE WORD THIS IS FUCKING GOD TIER OH MY GOD, SOMETIMES I HAVE SPOONS SOMETIMES I DON’T BUT NO COOKBOOK OFFERS LEVELS IN THEIR RECIPES THIS ONE DOES!
The problem with studying Catholic heresies is that they litreally made a hobby out of inventing fully realised heretical theologies in order to accuse each other of subscribing to them. Basically every single one comes with a big asterisk noting that it’s unclear whether anyone ever actually believed this, or whether some random theologian just made up a guy to get mad at – and the worst part is that you absolutely cannot tell just from looking at them, because the heresies we do have evidence of actual practice for are, if anything, even weirder. Like, the guys who thought Jesus was a hologram were 100% real, so you can’t rule anything out!
My favorite example of this are the Ranters who (allegedly) believed that because god was in all living things there was no such thing as sin or hierarchical order. Therefore, they should show the totality of God’s forgiveness by sinning as hard and as often as possible (at the orgy in the pub every night). Anarchy, sexual liberation and equality for women, abolish the church and state, peace and love on planet earth.
Real sect of Dissenters or strawmen for theological anxieties? Who knows. I sure hope they were real because they seem to be having a great time.
so was no one was gonna tell me that the painting saturn devouring his son was found painted directly onto the walls of the artist’s home after he died and that it may not even be depicting the greek legend, that’s just the most common interpretation??????
hello????
Not only was it painted on the wall of his house, it was painted on the wall of his dinning room.
Like imagine you go over to your boy’s house for dinner and that’s across from you while you eat. Like would you say something or just
Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings are fucking nuts. Like if you look at Goya’s other work, there’s plenty of darkness, after all, one of his his other most famous paintings, The Third Of May 1808, depicts a firing squad executing innocent civilians during the Peninsular Wars.
He also did an entire series called The Disasters Of War, which were stark presentations of the brutality of war. Goya understood violence. Understood that deep dark part of us that comes out when we are engaged in battle with a foreign power, or even with our own country. His artwork prior to the Black Paintings contains plenty of dark, powerful imagery… But that wasn’t all Goya was great at. He also painted the Maja.
While I’m using La maja vestida because Tumblr will probably have me drawn and quartered if I post La maja desnuda, that one’s the important one. It was one of the first Western paintings to depict nudity outside of a religious or mythological context and without negativity. It was an unabashed depiction of the female form without any of the usual artistic justifications of the time. It was also one of the first to depict female pubic hair without negative connotations behind that, since usually pubic hair was only presented in artwork of women seen as “unclean” or “immoral”, such as prostitutes. Yes, even back in the day, there was that weird anti-pube thing. Goya just… Painted a nude woman. No justification. Just a nude without any of the usual justification.
He nearly got tried by the Spanish Inquisition over it, albeit in the years their power was waning, but that’s a story for another day.
Goya was capable of incredible things. His painting of Manuel Godoy is a brilliant piece of subtle, intricate artistic satire, his painting of Charles IV and his family is flattering without being absurd, still presenting them as people, his fresco Adoration In The Name Of God might just be my favorite religious fresco ever.
Look at this. Holy shit.
And of course there’s The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters.
Anyway my point is that Goya’s artwork was intensely varied, even to the end of his career. One of the man’s latest self-portraits (well, self-caricatures) depicts him as an elderly man, thick beard and head of hair, two canes, long robe, and has a single phrase written above him.
“Aun aprendo”. I am still learning.
But the Black Paintings are what people know most about Goya, and yeah. I’m with you, the Black Paintings are nuts. They depict the mental state of a man whose mental state was growing darker and darker over the prior three decades.
You see, Goya went deaf because of an unspecified illness. His artwork’s increasing darkness following this is often seen as a reflection of his increasing insular, isolated state, the worsening of symptoms such as tinnitus, loss of balance, all led to him becoming more withdrawn. It might’ve been Ménière’s disease. It might’ve been lead poisoning. We don’t know.
What we do know is that Goya proceeded to paint the Black Paintings directly on the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo (The House Of The Deaf Man, named that prior to Goya even owning it) due to a conscious decision to withdraw from the public eye following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the rejection of the Spanish constitution of 1812, and started to suppress his own works. The Black Paintings weren’t meant to be seen. They were the artwork of a man who saw his country start to turn towards the old, bad ways once again, drifting closer to medievalism than it had previously, at the same time he was becoming more and more isolated due to his deafness, his fear of old age and madness creeping up on him, and so he decided to get his despair out through art. Saturn Devouring His Son might be what we all know, but the Black Paintings are 14 paintings, not just one.
And here are a few of my favorites.
The Dog.
Women Laughing.
Fight With Cudgels.
Witches’ Sabbath.
The Fates.
I can’t post any more images but I hope you enjoyed this dip into Goya’s career and I hope you look into it more deeply yourselves, because there is an incredible amount of power in his work. The Disasters Of War is deeply upsetting even to this day. The man had power behind his art and he knew how to wield it.
I left my YouTube on autoplay while I’ve been working and somehow ended up listening to a true crime thing and I would be absolutely fucked in a police interrogation.
“Repetition and forgetfulness during storytelling are signs of guilt,” the detective says with certainty.
Worstie, you can ask me the same question multiple times in a row, and I will think of new details to tell you each time while simultaneously forgetting everything else I previously told you. That doesn’t mean I murdered Karen, it just means I’ve got mental illness and ADHD.
i think its really funny when people say they don’t like political media and just want something ‘cozy’ and 'discourse free’ then the media theyre talking about is like. miyazaki movies. or the moomins
tove jansson and hayao miyazaki were probably the farthest from being apolitical you can be in children’s animated media it’s just that you saw cute artwork and a pleasant setting/aesthetic and decided to put no further thought into the story you were engaging with
youre right but i think people are going to kill us for you sayng it
anti-egg vegans are always a hoot. like, she’s not using it. it’s not fertilized. it’s going to rot and attract predators. you want me to just throw it in the trash??
its still animal exploitation, is it not?
do you think a chicken with zero emotional attachment to the egg she popped out feels exploited when that egg leaves the coop?
if that unfertilized egg cracked in the pen there’s not a chicken who would wait 0.002 seconds to slurp that shit down raw and unseasoned but I’m supposed to exploit foreign children farming for slave wages and ship all of their staple crops across the world to me instead. and this feels like the moral high ground to them. alright
So, uh, now that someone fired a gun outside of a Jewish synagogue and preschool (that was in session) here in the U.S., is now the time we can talk about rising antisemitism on the left in the U.S.?
Because here’s the thing: American Jews have been trying to raise the issue. Over and over and over. And repeatedly we’ve been told we are paranoid, that “real” leftists/progressives aren’t antisemitic, that our pointing out truly troubling language being used by those that identify as anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian isnt a real issue but is us being secret Zionists and whining to distract from Israel’s wrongdoings…
Jews have been written off, ignored, silenced, and even threatened for bringing up the rising tide of leftist antisemitism and antisemitism in some pro-Palestinian activism. We’ve been told that it isn’t the time, that diasporic Jews’ concerns and fears can’t be addressed right now because of what is happening elsewhere, if, of course, it is even based on reality at all.
Now that shots have been fired outside an in-session Jewish preschool, rooms full of toddlers - not by a neo-Nazi, not by a white supremacist, not by a MAGA idiot, but by someone who shouted “free Palestine” - now can we talk about it?
I can speak only for myself, but I am not asking you not to care about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, I am not asking you to support the Israeli government. What I am asking you to do is include us in your activism, to listen to us when we tell you that some of the rhetoric being used on the left is dangerous to us, to believe us when we say that there is actual antisemitism on the left.
Because if now is not the time, I suspect that the only time will be when it is too late.
[image id: a tweet saying: yeah sorry we fandomized your concept of a “found family” :/ yeah we cut the thing about creating a network of unconditional love and support transcending the hegemony of a traditional family structure. yeah it’s a found mommy and daddy and siblings now. another tweet saying: y– yeah it’s, uh. it’s problematic to ship the characters we decided were the siblings, even though they’re adults and not related to each other and tehy don’t see each other that way in the text. sorry. end image id]
ALT
