Everything Humans Do Is Art

The Little Ice Age, 1400-1900, put Europe in a deep freeze.

And clothes got Big.

Come see 500 years - and the aftermath - of unprecedented cold and what it did to fashion!

#ArtHistory #FashionHistory #EducationalVideo

When it's cold, clothing goes Big. And the Little Ice Age, between roughly 1400 and 1900 CE, was the coldest Europe and North America had been since the start of the Holocene, nearly 12,000 years go.

It was so cold London held entire frost fairs on the ice of the Thames, multiple times. (View from the north. The old medieval London Bridge is to the left.)

Like this 1841 plate from the French magazine "Le Follet."

The original plate, from the collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, is on the left. Their collection is superb, and the plates are in excellent condition. Even so, as you can see, the paper the plate is printed on has discolored over nearly two centuries and distorted the original colors.

My attempt at digital restoration is on the right. It's not exactly an attempt at a "like new" look. I have made the paper background a purer white than it would ever have been originally, mostly for the value of seeing the colors clearly.

And when I did that a bright lavender-purple blotch in the middle of the skirt on the right figure suddenly became visible.

I don't know for certain, but I hypothesize the original dress may have been painted with a fugitive lavender pigment that has changed over time. In the mid-nineteenth century there were exciting new pigments that were sometimes adopted by painters before their fugitive nature was fully understood.

So perhaps the dress on the right was originally bright lavender and over time it slowly changed to a sort of drab pinkish-brown, except for that one blodge.

As a side note, I mostly focused on this plate because I loved the rainbow-dyed ostrich feather on the right figure's bonnet, and I had some idea of posting this for Pride Month.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

The basic problem with this question is that the high end of what player characters can do in high-powered tabletop RPGs very rapidly becomes too big to powerscale. If you push things far enough, shit goes all conceptual in a way that defies direct comparison.

From left to right: 1795 Michał Jerzy Mniszech with his daughter Elżbieta - Marcello Bacciarelli; Christopher Anstey and his daughter Mary Ann by William Hoare 1776; A Musician and His Daughter by Thomas de Keyser 1629; The Geography Lesson (Portrait of Monsieur G. and His Daughter), 1812; Jean-baptiste Isabey And His Daughter; Portrait of a Young Girl and Older Man by William Harrison Scarborough

in fact often if it was kind of safe dads had the babies in their workshops for just that reason as we can see in these paintings:

First Lesson by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865 - 1931)

Un Coup De Main (The Helping Hand) by Émile Renouf (1845 – 1894)

I started reading SFF and comics in the 1960s. I started studying logic including modal logic in the 1970s. I started playing RPGs in 1976. The summer thereafter, inspired by a great High School English teacher, I read every epic poem I could get my hands on.

I started writing SFF in the 1980s. I started homebrewing RPGs around the same time.

For all of these the one thing that most held my interest was in building worlds that were internally consistent and which explored ideas that interested me in ways that I had not otherwise seen them explored.

I should probably say that for me, something is interesting if its implications and its interactions with other things are surprising and which keep growing and evolving as one explores them.

The stories and worlds that interested me were ones where the way things worked always mattered. And where those ways could in some form or another be picked up and played with.

I also enjoy it when supposedly incompatible models of things and world views could come together and be revealed to be aspects of a broader understanding which in turn lead to knew capabilities for playing.

Some people try to make art that they would enjoy. I’ve always tried to make art out of what I can infer from what I am interested in and enjoy. So that rather than trying to bring other people to my ways of thinking, I use is my thinking as a starting point for an open ended process that others can pick up and play.

It's thanks to her I learned there is in fact a word for someone who's just not interested in dating, or smooching, or smooshing booties, and it's called aro/ace and it's totally valid and normal.