l'esprit d'escalier

i am scouring the internet like the victorians scoured and destroyed all trace of joy and color from stolen relics for the LOST NAME OF THE ANCIENT PROCESS of textile-creation akin to knitting/crocheting/nålebinding that at least one academic/crafter used to recreate the leggings on this Glorious Motherfucker:

Archer statue from the Temple of Aphaia (ca. 480 BC) next to a reconstruction of its original paint job:

The leggings and sleeves would have created using a method called SPRANG which predates knitting and is over 3,000 years old. What's even sexier is modern artisans managed to recreate the entire outfit using the original method!

Mmm-HMM, love me a shapely thigh in harlequin hosiery. Put👏men👏in👏clingy-ass👏clothing👏again👏👏👏

Unfortunately english sources are hard to find, partly because Google's a shithole, but also because this textile project comes from a German museum, in Germany, where people tend to speak (and publish) in German. That said, the original link is to a short-but-sweet article I would have had no problem finding in 30 seconds a mere few years ago. fortunately i have clever beautiful insane people following me, but alas not everyone has such luxury. thanks to everyone in the notes who shoved themselves down this rabbithole with me!

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors, and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors, all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

Corporation stole your life's work? Well if there were UBI you wouldn't mind!

Robot stole your job? With UBI you wouldn't need your job!

Not enough help for disabled people? If we all had UBI that would replace disability payments!

Corporations conglomerating into a few huge unregulatable cartels which hike up the prices of everything forever? Just tax them and do UBI!

Like, yes UBI would certainly help those problems. I'm not at all saying it wouldn't.

But if we do not actually fix society in a few key ways, we're going to end up right back where we are now.

For instance, if we had UBI nationally (instead of just in test areas), these big colluding megacorporations would simply raise the prices of everything to recapture the money. The only limit in the money they extract from us right now is how much we have. If we had more, they'd take more, and monopoly gives them the ability to do that efficiently.

UBI isn't going to hire a special ed teacher in my kid's school or make your apartment ADA compliant.

UBI shouldn't be a consolation prize for destroying a job someone loved. Humans like to work, and we like to benefit from our own work. I do not want to have my industry demolished to be done worse by a word salad machine, and be compensated by a check.

And of course, with corporations so huge they can buy politicians, they will soon vote the taxes down and UBI back out.

We need, for starters:

robust anti trust

money out of politics

regulations that protect ordinary people without a lawyer

I’m Australian. Sure, we do have those doors, but the vast majority of places in Sydney are automatic sliding doors or old-fashioned manual push/pulls because we don’t need to block out the cold and wind the same way here.

So every day I experienced a culture clash with something as basic as what doors were normal for me.

The rare two-punchline EWC comic (because both made me laugh)

Youtube always does a [_____] when a word like 'fuck' or 'shit' is said.

I've lost count of how many times I was watching a film on tv as a kid, or even a film on prime where they will write 'shoot' instead of 'shit' or 'screw' instead of 'fuck.'

This still happens, by the way. Very regularly. The last film I watched on Prime, the subs said 'darn,' instead of 'damn' and 'oh no' instead of 'shit.'

Oh, the worst one I saw- instead of 'get fucked,' it was 'get stuffed.'

please stop treating me like a child.

in other words, an ASL interpreter is there to present the scene exactly as it happens to a deaf audience. therefore if the hearing audience can hear the fart, the deaf audience should too.

(she also brought up the inherent ableism in farting in front of a deaf person assuming you'd be able to get away with it.)

so yeah i wholeheartedly agree. subtitles should not be censored. Image IDs for screen readers should not be censored. There's probably a whole host of scenarios I can't think of where censorship is an option, and one should choose censorship in none of them.

They are giving no indication in the caption whatsoever that words they don’t like are being said. It skips over them. There’s no space, there’s no indication that they’ve been censoring a word. It just carries on from the previous “acceptable” word to the next “acceptable” word. No space to tell you that they have just censored something.

If you are for example profoundly deaf, and you happen to blink at that moment, or the camera is off the person who’s just said the offending word, you don’t know the word was said. There’s no indication that they have censored something. I’m quite certain this is extremely intentional.

I think this is dodgy as hell.

But as I posted yesterday, the UK is trying to force YouTube to prioritise content that is approved by the UK government because people have stopped watching BBC. Personally, I find this incredibly Orwellian and dangerous. It’s bad enough that they censor disabled people. It’s bad enough that they treat us like we are children who cannot handle these big scary words like fuck.

*if comfortable doing so, you may include your age range/generation in the tags for helpful demographic data

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