fantasy and fandom prone

Beaded Gown with Flower Inserts

1930s

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).

Indeed, if there is a fetish angle to Heated Rivalry, I actually don’t think it’s a sexual one. For the most part, the fervor around the show’s sex scenes feels similar to the fervor around the straight sex in Fifty Shades of Grey or Outlander or Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” or, hell, even Hot Priest saying “Kneel” on Fleabag—less exclusive to gayness than to a broader appreciation of onscreen horniness. (The Skins approach, if you will.) No, if anything, Heated Rivalry is part of a fetishization not of gay sex but of the inner emotional lives of men in general. Because “girl culture” has never just been Mean Girls and Little Women and When Harry Met Sally, it’s also male-centric stuff like Newsies and The Outsiders and Dead Poets Society too.

That’s because we live in a patriarchal society where men are treated as the default. So women naturally want to understand the male experience they’re surrounded by and yet separate from too—especially straight women, to whom men are simultaneously oppressors, pursuers, and objects of desire. It’s a confusing reality, and exploring fictional stories of male desire (whether of other men or of women) provides a safe space to work out those contradictions. Plus all that cultural baggage means it can be especially thrilling to watch stories of men who defy patriarchal norms by charting a different, more empathetic path—not just with women but with each other as well.

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

This, as I said in the post, is a noticeable and significant problem in the last two years. It is affecting students who were fine three years ago, and now aren't. It is a very specific issue that is affecting very specific skills, including previously very intelligent people

This is already attested in the literature. Meanwhile, the for-profit education system has not changed in the last two years

Additionally, prior to the last 2-3 years, I had failed one student ever, and flagged one student ever for plagiarism. This year we've had to deal with five separate plagiarism cases on the Masters course alone, all of whom admitted to LLM use. Not one of them can analyse information worth a damn; all of them had excellent prior undergrad scores.

William Eggleston

From the article:

On his return home, Schreiber wanted to spread the word. The next year he held his first wind turbine-building workshop, founding PureSelfMade, a nonprofit to teach people how to make their own wind turbines from scratch. Ever since, Schreiber, who returns to Scoraig every year to see Piggott and other friends, has been offering courses, usually for groups of between eight and 20 people, on how to make wind turbines from scratch, including rotor blades and custom-made generators, and setting up the basic electrics. Although outputs vary depending on locations, most turbines could power several appliances, but not an entire home. Often they are connected to batteries to store energy for when it’s needed. In the context of volatile energy prices, the pressing need to shift to renewable power, the limits of centralized electricity systems and the risks of relying on foreign supply chains, there’s growing demand for communities to become energy self-sufficient. Until now, so-called “small wind” has been a relatively overlooked local provider. But for Schreiber, the “DIY approach” brings with it a level of reassurance and freedom. “Instead of big industry, I prefer the more grassroots way,” he says. “I like the idea of decentralization. With a lot of chaos in the world, it’s better to be self-sufficient, to have a reliable energy system at home.”

a woman can work outside the home, have hobbies, marry for love, be happy bucking the status quo or happy having it work out for her...and still be subject to crushing social norms and structural inequality

a Regency-era housewife who adored her husband and wanted a big family and took pride in running the home and furthering her husband's career was still oppressed

a Regency-era lady portrait-painter like Sarah Biffin (who was also disabled!) could exist and have a career even though that oppression existed

really every oppressed minority faced a complicated dance of finding the loopholes and the ways society would bend or break to let them do what they wanted, because those ways did exist most of the time- OR they found joy and happiness even in the face of oppression, in what lives they WERE allowed by the world they lived in. and all of that nuance is worth learning about and honoring fully

I showed this post to my boyfriend and he tried to take his shirt off like a girl and 

uh

and it made me realize that girls and boys pull their shirt off differently. /amazed

Its not science unless you write it down so 

Well done, i guess…

Second:

I fucked up

It’s all in the way that girl/boys shirts are made.

Girls shirts have less armpit room then boy’s do and are generally shorter so pulling it off over your head is more practical because by lifting your arms all the way up you make enough room for the sleeves to just slip off.

Boys shirts have more room and are generally longer so it is easy to slip them off over your head.

but if you take a girls shirt off like a boys shirt you will get your arms caught because there isn’t much armpit space.

and if you take a boys shirt off like a girls shit you will still have your head in it when you’ve lifted your arms all the way up because of the shirt’s length.