Howdy, it's me

the very first site I open: "unlike flax linen which has a PROUD EUROPEAN HERITAGE, ramie linen is made from a CHINESE NETTLE PLANT. ramie linen is currently less widespread than flax linen but that's due to the more involved processing required of ramie fibers - china is working on new enzymatic processing methods, that if successful, may ENDANGER OUR PRECIOUS HEIRLOOM FIBERS by flooding the market with CHEAP IMITATIONS--"

I think I've resigned myself to the idea that all clothes are going to need repair eventually, and therefore my standards for anything I'm going to take the time to make into a garment are "can be washed in a machine on at least warm" and "not made of plastic." but like. it would still be nice to know some things so I can decide whether it's a good idea to make a given fabric into something that's going to have a bunch of stress points.

ANYWAY I can't tell how much of this is legit and how much of this is just "trust me bro," but ramie linen (in sharp contrast to the language decrying it as a Cheaper Worse flax linen) is its own beast with quite a few nice qualities. yes, it is made from a nettle plant - no, that particular nettle does not sting. sources are all over the place about how strong it is (especially because "strength" when it comes to fibers refers to a bunch of different factors) but it's tough enough, including when wet, that it's used to make ropes and fishing nets. it's been used for a Very Long Time in asia, with many examples of ramie linen clothing surviving today. it spins into a more consistent yarn than linen (which often spins into yarns with varying thicknesses, aka slubs) so it can be made into some very fine and smooth fabrics - this can be a plus or a minus since slubbiness can be great for more rustic-ish looks. it also has a slight sheen - again, plus or minus depending on what you're going for. claims are that it initially feels rougher than flax linen but softens up nicely after a few washes. claims are also that it's "naturally anti-microbial" (how? by what measure? in what way?), highly breathable, and that it both wicks moisture and dries quickly which makes it great in hot and humid climates - which okay, I'd buy that considering its long history of use in hot and humid countries, but I really would like something more specific than "better than cotton/flax linen/etc." like so many clothes are made of plastic these days. the bar for these things is in hell.

its an interesting conversation in a sense, in that both sides are pretty revisionist. soviet space program apologia would have you believe that the Soviets were doing awesome at everything and just walked away for some reason. The Soviets in reality were seriously struggling to develop heavy and superheavy lift capabilities and the space program was riven by rivalry and backbiting. N1 and Energia, as programs, both failed bigly and in N1s case spectacularly. The Soviets really failed in having a vision on What To Do In Space beyond earth orbit. That's not to say they didn't have remarkable achievements - their Venus probes were a mark of tenacity and determination - but they often ended up going "So... now what?"

Which is an interesting reversal of circumstance! the Soviets got ahead at the beginning precisely because they, unlike the Americans, saw the usefulness of a space program and had a strong vision for what needed to be done. And they marched forwards implacably. Many are also unaware that the Soviets made real long term success and had scientific achievements which NASA never matched. The Soyuz was simply unbeatable as a cheap, safe and reliable medium lift vehicle, and a man rated one at that. It wasn't surpassed until Falcon 9 just a decade ago, and the US relied on it to get to the ISS because shuttle kept eating people and cost a fortune. Soviet metallurgy and materials science in rocket engines was also more advanced than NASAs (who thought the Soviets were lying until NASA got to pick the carcass after the collapse).

Still, it failed dramatically in the later years. they had no idea what to do and were competing over lift vehicles, not in the manner of sports teams but in the manner of mob families. these failures went beyond late soviet decay and grew out of the structure of the Soviet space program, which was built out of competing and independent facilities/projects, scientist gulags where you could be imprisoned while winning the hero of the soviet union awat for being a head scientist of rocket programs, and big egos who learned that they could send state goons after rival scientists who came down on the other side of the hydrolox vs metholox debate (yes, really, that example was real)

The NASA apologists meanwhile act as if the moon landing was the only thing that mattered and are simply completely ignorant of soviet accomplishments. the "first woman in space" is the most obvious case here, but most are also completely ignorant of the Soviet Mars and Venus programs - the venutian program in particular revolutionised our understanding of the planet. The yanks, as always, are focused on thumping their chests and jerking themselves off, they even miss the real victories of the American space program, which occured long after da moon. First, Mars: the Soviets failed, despite reaching mars first, to actually succeed in doing anything on Mars, while NASA's Mars missions, which began contemporaneously with the soviet program, needs no introduction. Secondly, space stations. Mir, for all it's accomplishments, ended up being neglected and finally abandoned with astronauts inside - actually stranded and in danger, who had to be rescued by the US and their space program. in fact the entire Russian space program would be rescued by forcibly joining it at the hip to the American space program by the frankenstation we call the ISS. This was done intentionally by the US to 1 - make decoupling physically impossible and thus politically infeasible 2 throw the Russian space program a lifeline so their many rocket engineers and facilities wouldn't start building for whomever bid highest (nuclear nonproliferation was the 90s watchword) 3 create a necessary point of cooperation to ensure a diplomatic and peaceful door was always open between Russia and the US. This worked specularly, to be clear. most are unaware of how well too.

An example which I said I wouldn't bring up is also the moon program. not the landing, which was a lovely show pony and acomplishment, but the program entire. NASA didn't go to the moon, they built a long program to go to the moon over and over and over again. The Soviets could have gone to the moon - but I doubt they could have built this kind of enduring program. It was always their weakness in deep space missions.

NASA and the USSRs space program were different because their method of organisation and leadership were different. The US opted for a centralised program with decentralised facilities to force political cooperation and gaurentee funding. The Soviets opted for a bottom up program of competing facilities and teams who had to petition the central organs for funding and approval explicitly against the others. While this lead to initial gains and diversity, in the end it lead to money being spent all over on programs which were dropped and on fierce and underhanded competition for scraps, where necessary failures resulted in abortions (N1).

As a fellow animorphs enthusiast, do you have any thoughts? Do you think it would have changed much?

Not really. I don't think Tobias cares much about the sex of his hawk body, and I don't think the other kids would talk about him as a girl if he was in a girl hawk, if that's what you mean -- they morph across sexes all the time and never have much to say about it except for that one time really early on that Marco complained about being a "girl wolf". Being a hawk is a radically different experience than being a human already, and I don't think that female hawkitude is any closer physiologically or socially to female humanity than male hawkitude is. I think the main difference, if Tobias had a female hawk body, would be slightly different teasing from Marco.

Harrow is the broke homeschooled kid from an isolationist cult that was let out on mission and/or bargained her way into attending a university so she could bring knowledge and funding back to the community. All her clothes are second-, third- or fourth-hand and have been patched and mended to hell and back and are not visually distinctive enough to identifiably belong to any subculture. The only exception to this lack of visual distinctiveness are her Church Robes, which are Church Robes. The only new clothing she owns is, like, underwear, maybe.

She is covered from neck to wrist and ankle because if anyone saw she had a human body under there she would gouge their eyes out. Most of her clothes are home-dyed black because she did it in the bathtub, and they must be black to show she is in permanent mourning. Also because then it's less likely people will notice she wears the same shirt and skirt for three days straight.

She does still have piercings (she is the only one on the Ninth mentioned to have piercings, I do not believe those are sacramental and are fully a Harrow Thing) because she can argue it's holy mortification of the flesh. Otherwise, thinking about what she is wearing is a distraction from more important things, which are a) being Righteous and b) proving she is the smartest person in the room.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea:

on one hand, you've got two actors who up until now have played Harrow (and a bit of Gideon) and G1deon (with a liiittle bit of Pyrrha) now playing Pyrrha and Nona. It's wildly different characters, wildly different mannerisms and speaking styles, with a completely opposite dynamic. That in itself would be amazing to watch two good actors pull off.

But then

You've got Camilla's body now housing Camilla and Palamedes.

Can you imagine the tape recorder scene?

Nona presses play and starts listening, then the visual cuts to a shot of Camilla, sat down recorder in hand, halfway through her line before pressing pause and rewind, then she closes her eyes for a half second and when she opens them it's Palamedes, with Palamedes's body language, pressing play and hearing the line again, reacting with a whole different set of expressions.

The whole conversation, delivered through a single shot that slowly zooms in, then out, on that one actor. Camilla almost giving a small, dry half-smile as she deadpans “You thought it was your agenda? Huh”, Palamedes hearing it play back and taking a moment because his eyes are getting teary, then “I cannot bear the thought of losing you”, Camilla then bringing a hand to her own cheek because it's wet? Then “Love and freedom can't coexist, Warden” and Camilla giving herself a hug so Palamedes can wake into it.

After the conversation is done, looking strained, Camilla immediately takes a tissue to her nostril—when she takes it away, here's some blood on it.

Do you see my vision. I think a scene like that, well-executed, would take out most of us.

Per wikipedia:

The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume) but even when iron/steel rusts people did not expect to find like. decomposition. bacteria are EATING the titanic.

and there's wood furniture from the titanic that isn't decaying. hell, there are wood ships at the bottom of the ocean that archaeologists study. so the expectation people have for the titanic is not that the steel would decompose at the bottom of the ocean. Even in 100 years, since there are much more ancient preserved wooden ships iirc.

The sister ship HMHS Britannic is still perfectly preserved because of the way it sank, and partly in due to the coral that has grown around it keeping the structure in tact I believe was the reason.

There is NO ONE in trans media like White Chain and it’s a god damn CRIME I don’t see her celebrated as a cornerstone of the beauty we can embody when stories are written about us with true love and care and reverence.

Like, animal and environmental rights activism is so misunderstood by the people within the movement who are doing it for all the wrong reasons, and it’s mostly because they do not understand that animal rights and human rights are so intrinsically connected that you cannot seperate the two at all without watering down your activism into a complete nothingburger.

On one hand, I died a little at the kaleidoscope of neutrals that my mother thrust into my hands this morning with a desperate, "I trust you to pick a wall color for me."

On the other, I can distinguish nuance in color very well, and quickly discarded 99% of the samples with the reasonings why (wrong color temperature, too close to the couch's beige, poor base tone given other items in the room, etc.)

Sadly, I was not able to convince her to go with a red sampled from the couch swatch on the table (she's done red in the past from my advice and loved it). But I did find a good warm & bright ivory that will pull that couch away from looking muddy and play well with the art for the walls.

Anyway, it's very funny to me, because *my* house looks like this -- as someone whose favorite colors are brown and taupe:

Decorating advice my mother *did* take from me today, though:

What you draw on paper won't match how the layout feels like when walking around in the actual room, so be prepared to move or even ditch furniture

You need area rugs to create little islands in an open plan space

Fixtures go a long way between a bathroom looking cheap / like a hotel room, and being cozy

You do not have to recreate your old room layouts when you move

You do not have to follow the "rules", such as a formal dining area

You can repurpose furniture to serve different needs - if you like the china hutch, but not the china anymore, put something else inside

A room should reflect how you plan to use it 90% of the time

Figure out what "entertaining" means to you - your parties do not have to look like someone else's, which influences how you change your space when company is over

Comments like these seem extremely disingenuous to me, sorry. Like yeah, there are ways to translate the general concept of "elf druid" into VtM. And yes, it's generally a good thing to try to meet your players where they're at, especially if they're new to the game, but also I don't think you have a responsibility or moral obligation to go out of your way to do that to acomodate a player who clearly has no interest in doing the tiniest attempt on his part to meet the game (that HE signed up to play) where it's at.

Like if I as a player signed up to someone's D&D game after years of playing, say, Troika, and then showed up to the table wanting to play my favorite Troika background in their D&D campaign regardless of how well it fits (or doesn't fit) with their setting fluff, I think it's a totally reasonable expectation that I as a player should at the very least have done the work myself of converting that background into something that can work in D&D. If I just show up to the game like "I'm going to play a Zoanthrop" expecting the GM to figure out how to accomodate it, that is nothing short of a complete refusal to even attempt to engage with the game, the campaign, the setting, the GM, and the other players on their own terms, and it would be completely reasonable and not indicative of any personal flaw for the GM to refuse to coddle that by not going out of their way to figure out how to make my background from a completely unrelated game work in D&D.

...and those tags are painting the GM as the bad guy for "explaining a bunch of setting fluff the player wasn't interested in"?