Everything Humans Do Is Art

“Every now and again I just have to post this early #1830s dress. There is something about the sleeve that is so satisfying, the perfect pink gills of the underside of a pale field mushroom. Only silky and pearl embellished @LACMA #fashionhistory”

The company I bought the unit from--and which I supposedly have an extended warranty with that they're refusing to cover, but that's another matter--quoted me 4-6 weeks to come look at the machine for a diagnostic, then warned me there was another 6-8 week wait for parts.

They also quoted me several hundred dollars for the estimated parts, which they were going to order pre-inspection (????), and told me it'd be $400 for some rubber tubing, which was the likely culprit. And then another $900 for labor, not including the diagnostic testing.

Well, thanks to the very kind people who donated, I was able to call another company that came out the next day, told me the problem wasn't with any tubing at all, but the water sensor at the base of the machine was busted, and then quoted me $700 to replace it. Bracing for the worst, I asked about the timeline for parts and how much everything would cost in total, including labor.

Yeah, turns out that $700 included parts, labor, and diagnostic testing.

Oh, and ordering the official licensed parts took a week.

I told him the other place told me it'd be almost two months to order parts, and he asked who the company was, rolled his eyes, and said, "Yeah, they've been doing that. They're trying to get you to just buy a whole new machine."

I didn’t realize there was a condor release point out by Klamath but congrats to everyone involved! You all have no idea how much I love condors. (Or maybe you do)

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> opens my email

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> launches a software

Once a day, shadows briefly bring back to life the beautiful ‘Ghost of Ungru Manor’ Estonia...

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow 

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash 

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

(worth noting that slavery was in something of a legal gray area in the UK during the 18th and early-mid 19th century when it was legal in other parts of the Anglosphere; it was never technically legal in the UK itself, but of course it was legal and commonly practiced in their colonies, and many enslaved people who were brought to the UK Were treated as though they were still de facto enslaved until they were taken back home again. And of course you don't have to rely on chattel slavery to make a business off of unfair labor practices, which was extremely common even after slavery was outlawed and/or fell by the wayside)

Gordon Parks captured the Jim Crow South with a quiet, devastating clarity—using his camera as both witness and weapon. Through intimate portraits and everyday scenes, he exposed the cruelty of segregation not with sensationalism but with humanity, dignity, and truth. Parks showed Black life in the South as it was lived: tender, resilient, disciplined, and determined, even under oppressive laws. His photographs didn’t just document injustice—they challenged America to see what it preferred to ignore.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow 

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash 

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.