Life is a bitch

So if my keys are misplaced that means I put them in the wrong spot, but if they are displaced it means someone else moved them from where they were supposed to be.

There's a lot of dis- words for bodyparts! Dislocate, dismember, disarticulate - if a corpse is disarticulated that means it's all jumbled up and torn apart. If it's misarticulated you put it together wrong in the first place (and your name is Victor Frankenstein).

I almost posted this without the professor-fucking part but I decided that it is in fact crucial to combating OCD. sometimes you have to fight fire with fire i.e. spiraling thoughts with strong negative emotions get countered with strongly emotive surprise, cringe, and humor

sometimes the OCD brain can't just be stopped from fantasizing completely, but you can redirect that anxious mental energy toward crafting a fictional setup and story that doesn't involve you or your fears at all

another thing I do is interrupt intrusive thoughts with a very conscious and deliberate "and then an elephant walks in." and I'd make myself commit to the bit. it would force me to reframe everything and specifically understand it in an absurdist context, make me confront how ridiculous the initial thoughts even were, and there is honestly no way to keep being serious and distraught about your what-if scenarios when you've introduced a fucking elephant into the mix. film studies professor is also that elephant.

The headlines are as golden as the medals he’s previously won. But this one just had me in hysterics.

This time, for video games.

Some key information:

They are striking so all performers will have protection against AI

The struck companies are those signed to the Interactive Media Agreement

The listed companies by SAG-AFTRA include Activision Productions Inc, Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc, Electronic Arts Productions Inc, Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc, Llama Productions LLC, Take 2 Productions Inc, VoiceWorks Productions Inc and WB Games Inc. Though this may not be everyone.

Important things from the FAQ:

Some games from struck companies are non-struck (due to the Collective Bargaining Agreement still being in effect)

Localisations will be affected if covered under the Interactive Localization Agreement

Actors who are part of SAG-AFTRA cannot work for non-union or independent/low-budged productions during the strike unless they are signed to an Interim Interactive Media Agreement, Interim Interactive Localization Agreement or a Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement

Similarly to the previous strike, struck work cannot be promoted. This includes accepting awards for performances in struck games. This does NOT include hosting/performing a skit at an awards show and San Diego Comic Con (the latter due to the close proximity to the calling of the strike)

As implied by the point above, SAG-AFTRA performers cannot partake in panels related to struck games or companies, including finished games produced by struck companies

The best way to check if a game is struck is to use the search tool provided by SAG-AFTRA

Most importantly: You are NOT being asked to stop playing video games, as highlighted in the FAQ for creators and streamers. This does NOT cross the picket line. Though please do talk about the strike and show your solidarity

I expect to see the same amount of support from y'all that we saw in the last strike. Just because it's video games doesn't mean performers deserve any less support and protection.

Also please reblog with any additions (with sources - we are NOT here to spread misinformation)! And please correct me if anything listed here is incorrect.

SOURCES:

Video Game Strike FAQs | SAG-AFTRA (sagaftra.org)

As has been evidenced by other Catalan people in the notes, this is very easily recognisable for us as the base of a castell.

Castellers (which in the Catalan language means “castle builders”) are people who climb on each other to make this “human castles”. It’s one of the most beloved Catalan traditions. It symbolizes the spirit of teamwork and inclusion, because all people come together to reach for the sky, which they could not be able to do alone.

Nothing symbolizes teamwork and belonging better than dozens of people holding your ass to give you strength!

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

We create and post educational materials about developments in fandom-related law on transformativeworks.org and on archiveofourown.org.

We assist individual fans when their fanworks are challenged, we answer fans’ questions about law relevant to fanworks, and we help fans find legal representation.

We partner with other advocacy organizations and coalitions in the U.S. and around the world.

We advocate for laws and policies that promote balance and protect fanworks and fandom.

And much more!

Back then, this could include anything from the ship they didn’t like (look up the ship wars from Potter fandom. The feuds were horrendous and hateful) to something as simple as a g-rated slash fic because “this of the children”. Hell, when strikethrough happened on livejournal, it was everything/anything which - sadly - also included a lot of fantastic support communities for queer kids and SA survivors and the like. All because the site decided to crack down on ‘lewd’/‘deviant’ content and didn’t pause to think what else might be tagged under queer and SA content.

A lot of the writers in a lot of the fandoms I was in included content warnings for slash because if people felt spiteful or hostile when they stumbled on it, they could report it to fic hosting sites and have it taken down for any number of excuses. I lost fics on fanfiction.net because some big weirdo deemed them as inappropriate and had their friends all report it at the same time.

in one, they pack your cavities or cracked tooth or whatever with stem cells and then trigger those stem cells to become tooth cells and your tooth basically heals itself :D

in this one, they basically tell your genes, "hey, remember that bit of genetic code that caused your body to grow a whole new set of teeth when you were like 8 years old? Yeah, run that code again right here" or, more accurately, what they really do is tell your body to temporarily stop running the extra bit of code that prevents you continuously growing new teeth like a shark.

https://globalnews.ca/news/9984605/tooth-regrowth-drug/amp/

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/may/30/groundbreaking-human-trial-tooth-regeneration-drug/

For another thing, if there is such a connection, it's that the impact of long selection for lots of "fuck-fast-die-young"-style mutations that encourages shorter lifespans in exchange for earlier fertility shapes the average lifespan within the species. All other things being equal, it's generally more advantageous to reproduce early and often at the expense of lifespan, especially in species that exist under a lot of predation pressure. So mutations along the "live fast" side of the balance outcompete mutations from the "live slow die old" varieties, and you change the mean lifespan of the pool.

I had that doodle sitting around in my folder for a while, so I decided to doodle some more on it. :D Bullet-riddled coats are my new favorite thing to draw. 

1. The author’s kinks

2. The author’s power fantasy

3. The author’s political agenda

So like look at this mid-1400's fit:

to get the effect of that orange gown, you've got

chemise next to the skin like a slip (not visible here) (sometimes you let a bit of this show at the neckline) (the point is not to sweat into your nice clothes and ruin them)

kirtle, or undergown. (your basic dress, acceptable to be seen by other people) this is the puffing bits visible at the elbow, cleavage, and slashed sleeve. It's a whole ass dress in there. Square neckline usually. In the left picture it's probably the mustard yellow layer on the standing figure.

coat, or gown. This is the orange diamond pattern part. It's also the bit of darker color visible in the V of the neckline.

surcoat, or sleeveless overgown. THIS is the yellow tapestry print. In the left picture it's the long printed blue dress on the standing figure

if you want to get really fancy you can add basically a kerchief or netting over the bare neck/shoulders. It can be tucked into the neckline or it can sit on top. That's called a partlet.

the best I can tell you is that they were technically in a mini-ice-age during this era. Still looks hot as balls though.

Coats and surcoats are really more for rich people though, normal folks will be wearing this look:

this is kind of the fashion equivalent of when an AI has been trained to approximate what art looks like without understanding what it's drawing or how physics work. A costume designer has general recollections of about how the dresses looked from art, and a lot of the art they're learning from is also romanticized revival recreations of earlier art, so things are getting pretty confused structurally.

(I have to blame Disney for a lot of the specific trends but to be clear this was already happening before Disney was born.)

You can probably recognize how the gestalt of the bodice evokes what would actually be two layers--a gown laced over an under-gown, maybe with a stomacher in the same color as the gown.

The skirt is the very distant legacy of a trend that starts around here, in the early 1500's:

deliberately slitting the skirt of your gown so that it shows a triangle of the under-gown peaking through.

You know what a farthingale is? it's this thing.

Reeds sewn into the skirt to give it that round bell shape without needing 100000 layers underneath. Unsurprisingly invented in Spain, where it's hot as fuck. This is also the era where the farthingale starts its evolution into the eventual hoop skirt. You see that wide "ballroom" shape in a lot of princess designs. Princess Peach is a classic example.

Farthingale becomes hoop skirt, and using basically the same technology (reeds sewn into the fabric for support) the under-gown/kirtle becomes stiffened and shaped.

Eventually you get to this very pronounced version of the "slashed skirt" shown in the left figure, below. You can see that the red skirt is probably part of a whole dress, because the red sleeves in the same fabric are visible under the outer gown. (you can also see the chemise at the edge of the neckline). They did have detachable sleeves back then, as a standard part of a gown, so the red sleeves could be pinned to the chemise instead of attached to the body of the gown.

>Right figure, you can see this shit is getting elaborate now. I think that's a white under-gown with a yellow gown and a burgundy overgown. The collar around her neck is actually a partlet, not connected to anything else, just tucked in and maybe pinned underneath the neckline. But they're starting to have separate skirts now, so it's also possible she's only wearing a yellow skirt with the overgown on top it.

At this point whalebone is coming into the picture in a BIG way, and that's when you start to get Tudor style boned gown/kirtles tight around the bust really taking off. Also boned sleeves, if you can believe that. The smooth flat conical bodice is the product of a boned kirtle, which will eventually become stays, which will eventually become a corset.

anyway by now we're fully out of the medieval period and into the early modern/renaissance.

One common outfit you see (thanks to Amazon) is this modern take on the kirtle

On the left: Amazon. On the right: a recreation of what people actually wore. You can see how we have the same basic concept with a very different execution. This is what you would call a kirtle.

Another common ren fair look is the outer-wear stays. Always with the un-collared billowy undershirt.

I want to draw attention to the lacing. Stands to reason that costumers now would use contemporary lacing rather than that of previous eras. But check out even the romantic depictions of clothing from the 1870’s below this. No grommets. That’s just pure fabric baby.

Very few renaissance era women ever wore anything exactly like the ren fair corsets. For one thing, cross lacing wasn’t common, and metal grommets were not accessible to normal clothing makers. For another, structured stays (or “bodies”) were underwear, not outerwear. (Apparently something more popular with English peasants than French peasants, who didn’t use them.)

Left: stays (underwear). Right: jumps (outerwear)

Stays are boned. Jumps are not. Stays/bodies were pretty expensive due to the craftsmanship, and a poor person would have budget for a single pair. You can imagine this investment was not as popular with women who did hard physical labor. Jumps got really popular in the mid-1700’s and largely replaced stays in working class fashion.

A brief history lesson: clothes are ephemeral; we lose them as they are worn out, cut down, repurposed, and thrown away. Before modern anthropology and modern record keeping, it was difficult for anyone to know what anyone else looked like in the past or even a country away. Words used to refer to one kind of garment kept being used even as that garment changed in structure and purpose over time. Even after paper became common enough for printing art, it wore out fast and art was lost. References were hard to get.

What we think of as “peasant garb” is actually the product of a game of telephone that travels back from Romantic Revival art, and many of those (urban) artists got their idea of what rural peasants wore from opera costumes. The costumers working at the opera were not going out to the country side to take notes on what farmers actually wore, nor did they want to. Opera is show biz, you want it to be evocative, but not ordinary. Their costumes would have been based on what urban folks were wearing, with extra little touches like a shepherds crook to make it look “rural”.

Below: some mid-to-late 1800’s artistic depictions of peasants wearing improbably nice fabrics/clothes (probably a reflection of opera costumes). The painting of the peasant girl on the right is wearing more-or-less jumps.

You can see how the romantic art depictions of unstructured vests eventually inspired the “medieval revival” styles of the 1960’s/1970’s which lives on in the ren fair. Not only the neckline of the vest, but the style of undershirt with an open neck and billowy sleeves.

Compare (unstructured, laced, outerwear):

Nobody wore that in the 1400’s or 1500’s, but they wore things that looked similar at a glance. When 1960’s artists went back looking for early modern/medieval styles to replicate, they mostly had a hodge podge of this art to reference and extrapolate from.

The fact that a historical laced kirtle with an over skirt looks a lot like stays worn on the outside, probably made this confusing for artists. Undershirts of the 1500’s were collared and high necked, however, with tighter sleeves.(Below, 1500’s kirtle)

One last example of 1800’s romanticism, this time depicting a contemporary girl. Looks familiar, right? We’re back at the ren fair, if you take the bonnet off.

It does look similar to what was being worn in the 1800’s. Here’s a cartoon showing a working class woman in the 1870’s.

TLDR; what we think of as “Renaissance” or even “medieval” peasant garb is actually a remix of the working class clothes from the 1800’s, with some confused memories of the kirtle from older art thrown in.

Structured stays? 1500’s. The blousy no-collar undershirt? 1700’s. The cross lacing? 1800’s.

Anyway. This image of peasants has always been costume & fantasy. That’s why I think it’s kind of fun that it reaches a terminus in the anachronism and fantasy of a Renaissance Festival.

like a swiss waist:

(1860s- these could appear with or without straps but the straps were almost always off-shoulder like that. Probably named for their association with Swiss folk outfits- which feature elements likely based on laced kirtles or the 18th-century "stays are an acceptable outer layer" moments)

(1890s-ish. Princess Mathilde of Bavaria, apparently. this style had many different names and can be seen throughout the decades post-1860s now and then)

or Medici belts: