ChemE, Crafts, and Caffeine

because one of the most common criticisms leveled at almost any mainstream western style for women pre-1920s is "it was impractical!!!!"

and like. okay. impractical for what though?

sure you can't like. I don't know. wrangle an escaped farm animal back into its pen in full Natural Form. but most women weren't doing that, any more than most of us are now, and the ones who were....wore Work Clothing during livestock-wrangling hours

had someone tell me the other day that you couldn't work a 9-5 job in Second Bustle dresses

you could go to the office in this. you could send memos to Janice in accounting in this. you could work many types of non-food retail in this. you could do several different types of museum jobs in this. you could be a dressmaker, miliner, seamstress, or lady journalist in this, at the time. you could be a doctor in this, although nowadays we know you shouldn't.

what do you MEAN you can't work a 9-5 in this? there are so so so many jobs, modern and otherwise, that could be done in exactly this outfit

I make most of my own clothing from patterns that usually date to like 1869 or 1879-82. long skirts and corsets and the whole shebang (well, okay, I do corset sometimes and bra sometimes, but I digress). my average day is walking to the train, taking the train to work, either sitting at a desk or walking around a museum for several hours, running errands, taking the train back, and walking home

dressing like a Victorian vampire countess is no impediment to my daily life whatsoever. and I average 2 miles of walking per day, so I'm MORE active than most of my fellow USAmericans on a daily basis

on the flipside. can you do aforementioned livestock-wrangling in modern fashion jeans? in trendy oversized tops? is the Clean Girl Aesthetic 100% practical and possible to maintain in all situations that could possibly arise?

what's that? it doesn't matter because you don't have to do those things in your clothing and you'd wear different clothing if you did?

OH WOW. WHO WOULD HAVE EVER CONSIDERED. SUCH AN IDEA.

surely not our Dumb-Dumb Stupid Brainless Ancestors, But Only the Women, Who Were Complete Idiots With No Concept Of Situational Clothing Adaptations

If you watch older movies / TV, you see a lot of men wearing suits who unbutton their suit coat when they sit down and rebutton it when they stand up. Most of them do it without appearing to notice. As someone who never wears a suit coat, I don't know if I would think to do this. Does that make suits impractical?

As someone who wears long-sleeved shirts in winter, I automatically shove my sleeves up to do wet or messy tasks with my hands and pull them back down afterward. Would someone who never wears long-sleeved shirts think to do that? Would the resulting wet / grubby hems show that long-sleeved shirts are impractical?

Someone who is used to wearing a long skirt will treat it differently when going up stairs, either by lifting the front hem or by moving their legs around differently on each step. I know that this is a learned skill because I remember learning it as a child. Does an inexperienced wearer tripping on their hem mean that skirts are impractical?

It is awkward to put on or remove a winter coat while wearing mittens. Most people who wear these things regularly handle them in the right order without thinking. Does someone getting stuck in their sleeves mean winter clothing is impractical?

This is not fabric

Hey.

The fascists don’t like NASA.

They don’t want stuff like this to happen.

They want to give NASA’s budget to the already bloated military.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine to celebrate a massive peaceful scientific achievement that’s a collaboration between the US and Canada space programs during a time when there’s so much bad news elsewhere.

but DO techbros like nasa? a lot of techbros i see are super into the idea of privatized space travel industry and colonizing mars, the first of which nasa is directly opposed to, and the second which nasa isn't really focused on.

The Artemis Accords are one of the first large-scale civil policies about space and related activities to come about since the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. NASA wants to hold people (at least a little) accountable for the junk they're leaving in our orbit, and not enough people talked about this shit back when it got signed, so I wanna talk about it now

Things getting generally noisier, more screens/devices, more polyester in clothing. I'm not personally affected very much by lights, but maybe lights are different???

but like, kids generally spending more time in institutional settings (daycares/schools/extracurriculars) would also do it.

I was homeschooled K-12 (for disability reasons) and I really wonder sometimes how being in a "traditional" school environment would have affected me, like, developmentally. The number one thing that I absolutely Need to function and to Want To Be Alive is the ability to separate myself from other people and take downtime when I need it.

Situations where I have back-to-back activities all day are... I don't think I've ever been truly suicidal, but I've had times when the state of being alive felt so incredibly painful that I would cry for hours multiple days a week from the sheer crushing despair of having to live and be conscious through my life.

Sensory overload isn't the exact same thing as pain, but the "hurt" or suffering of pain is itself something that is not inherent to pain and only happens with pain above a certain threshold of tolerance and processing ability. So I think it's accurate to say: in the same way that an intolerable amount of pain hurts, sensory overload HURTS.

But every kid is expected to spend more than 40 hours a week in the same room as dozens or hundreds of other kids, and basically everyone thinks of this as the bare minimum for normal social development and literally cannot imagine anything else.

That is kind of an existentially dark thought to me

And then I remember that the majority of people do things like go to concerts and go to the mall

But that doesn't fully make the horror go away

The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.

He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.

Dude, if i was on that thing? i'd be checking the whole time, like, "hey, so, are we still exactly where the math said we should be? going the speed everyone predicted? okay, coolcoolcool. uh. How bout now?"

hold on, hold on. Our earth, okay, is following our sun, right, so we're doing this through space

and they are doing THAT slingshot and return maneuver while everything is doing what the gif shows, only the distances are unimaginably vast. And they are just. In a fancy tin can that we exploded up off the earth into space on the strength of our certainty we understand some very complex physics equations.

1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it

2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir

3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it

He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.

Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.

At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.

It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.

There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)

Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"

So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"

He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.

At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."

Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"

Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.

Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.

Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.

In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.

So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.

here it is today

Are you going to come out of it with a Klein-level work? No. Dude was bonkers skilled. But I am here to tell you that if you've ever gone to Home Depot and shuffled through paint chips and been like "God, this is such a gorgeous color, I fucking love this color" and then immediately been like "...but I can't imagine painting a wall with it." and bought a can of soul-killing eggshell off-white or what the fuck ever, you absolutely can go pick up a $10 canvas from a craftstore and a $5 sample of that color and just hang 6 square feet of it on a wall and enjoy the fuck out of it.

This is a literal "Hammerhead" shark created by artist Matt Sanders.

The sculpture is made from 685 reclaimed steel hammer heads and weighs 500 lbs (about 227 kg). It took approximately 2,500 hours of work to weld together. Sanders even used sledgehammers for the eye sockets and ball-peen hammers for the eyes to give it a realistic look.

Watching any green or blue-green mineral being ground to make pigment in these, praying it's just rough glass or some shit and not any of the almost always notably poisonous green minerals: