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So the post reads:

So like ... did french hoods have a chin strap or nah? Because some portraits show the wearer as having one. And some don’t. One wonders if the portraits with the missing straps is evidence of the artist taking creative liberties to create a more streamlined look or if perhaps there was another was to secure the hood to the head? Pins maybe?

There's no hard evidence either way, but it seems to me more probable that there were french hoods without the chin strap.

The modern understanding of french hoods is that it's made up from two separate parts. There's the cap and the hood. The cap is the part that has stiffening (especially in 1540s) while the hood is folded on top of it. The earlier French hoods show the construction clearer as they were not yet as stiff and smoothly folded. This portrait from 1520s shows pretty nicely the cap and the hood.

Under everything is the white linen cap of which only the edge is showing. On top of it is the red cap made from a fashion fabric and secured clearly with a chin strap. It has very little stiff structure if at all. The black hood is then pinned into the cap and it's edge is turned to reveal the white lining, which creates the iconic (though still understated at this point in time) crescent shape of french hood. Here in this statue from around the same time the folding of the hood is seen even clearer.

The fold shows a small crescent of the brownish lining. The half-folded strip of fabric along the edge of the hood with the gold trimming is probably what people at the time called billiments. Billiments were either just the gold or jewel trimming along the hood edge or strip of fabric with the trimmings attached to it, that would then be attached probably with pins or baseting stitches to the hood. The fabric billiments made it possible to change the adornments of the hood to change it's look. In this depiction I think it's safe to say that the white cap into which the hood is attached to was very much not secured with chin strap, but with a tape that probably goes around the head under the hood. The cap seems already to have a bit of structuring on it's visible edge.

Here's a portrait with just the cap from around 1520s or 1530s. It's edge clearly is stiffened and probably secured with the stiffening and white tape that goes around the hair and would be hidden by the hood. Because the edge of the cap is stiffened it doesn't need the chin strap to keep it's shape. Possibly, if the weight of the hood would be added here and pinned to the cap, it might need a chin strap to keep it well secured.

Later in 1540s the crescent of the hood becomes larger, it becomes more structured and the points of the cap in the jawline start curving more dramatically. Here's example of that version of the French hood, first one from 1535-40, second from 1544.

Here the structuring is so sleek, it's very hard see that the crescent is the lining of the hood turned very carefully. Some theories suggest that the lining at this point has become a separate piece from the hood, but if you look really closely, you can see that in the first picture there is a thin line that suggests that the white cap is under the white crescent that's likely still the folded lining. In the second example the cap itself is white, and the lining is red. In these portraits the billiments have also become very stiffened and almost like thin hair band that probably also keeps the folded lining smooth and in shape.

I go into detail about the construction, because the curving stiff shape of the cap might be the key here. If the earlier cap that had it's points on the jawline straight, could hold the cap alone secured, the newer curved and even stiffer (likely added wire too along the edge) might have been able to keep the hood too secured on it's own (and with the help of the tape that's under the hood). In fact dress historian Samantha Bullat says in her video, where she recreates French hood, that her 1540s French hood probably wouldn't even need the chin strap she added to it. Her video is super great if you want to understand some probable ways of how the hood was constructed (I've learned most of the information here from it).

Cavendish National Park

"Thaler's lawyers complain that if the Copyright Office's reign of terror continues unchecked, it 'will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative industry during critically important years.'"

This new policy means that any trans males who have ever had hormone therapy will have to quit hockey in the US, and all trans males w/o hormones would have to play in the womens team. In all levels of play in the USA, It effectively bars a whole minority from playing hockey and it's degrading. I'm a trans man, I've wanted to play hockey now for ages, but to see that I literally will not be allowed on any boys highschool teams is so discouraging. Plus to know that if I ever go on hormones, that I would never be able to play PERIOD? That's awful.

In such a time where we're being attacked so openly, we need the PWHL and NHL to back their transgender policies up. For the Pdub, a gender inclusive policy is needed, you can't pick and chose which women get to play. The NHL has no reason to go back on it's current policy of allowing trans athletes, and I do hope it stays.

GOOD NEWS FOR KAKAPO

A bumper berry harvest has New Zealand’s weird flightless parrot in a rare mood for romance

The world’s only flightless parrot species was once thought to be doomed by design. The kakapo is too heavy, too slow and, frankly, too delicious to survive around predators, and takes a shamelessly relaxed approach to reproduction.

But the nocturnal and reclusive New Zealand native bird ’s fate is teetering toward survival after an unlikely conservation effort that has coaxed the population from 50 to more than 200 over three decades. This year, with a bumper crop of the strange parrot’s favorite berries prompting a rare enthusiasm for mating, those working to save the birds hope for a record number of chicks in February, which would move the kakapo closer to defying what was not long ago believed to be certain extinction. Kakapo live on three tiny, remote islands off New Zealand’s southern coast and chances to see them in the wild are scarce. This breeding season has launched one of the birds to internet fame through a livestreamed video of her underground nest, where her chick hatched on Tuesday...

Motherhood in the Cretaceous Period