Parvus et Stultus

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

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!

I’m at the executive management level for my very small company and I have 4 people who report directly to me. I am a nice boss. I’m friendly with my employees, I treat them like professional adults, I actively try to create a positive work environment, and I mentor them and make sure they’re advancing in their careers. I do my best to shield them from the rest of management doing stupid shit. My employees like working for me.

The other day one of my employees came to ask if she could change her hours on Mondays. I said yes immediately because it’s helpful for me to know when she’s here and when she’s not, but as long as she gets her work done I don’t care when and where she does it. She then proceeded to tell me that it was so she could attend therapy and like … I will never use this information but … as a general rule don’t fucking do that.

Do not tell your employer shit about your mental or physical health except for the bare minimum needed to request a reasonable accommodation. Even your nice boss can fire you, even your nice boss can unfairly change your working conditions, and even your nice boss at some point is probably going to face pressure from their superiors.

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE

There was a time when typing a message into a terminal actually meant something.

You hit enter, and it went somewhere real. Not into a queue. Not into a model. Not into a monetisation funnel dressed up as a timeline. It went to people. Actual people. In a room. Watching the same stream of text, in real time, with no gatekeeper standing between your signal and their eyes.

That wasn’t magic. That was just how the internet worked.

Or how it was supposed to work.

Back When the Network Was the Interface

Once upon a time, the stack was clean.

user → client → protocol → network → other users

No middlemen. No “boost this post.” No “unlock reach.” No opaque ranking system deciding whether your words were worth anyone’s time.

You joined a channel. You spoke. Everyone saw it.

If you were boring, you got ignored. If you were interesting, people replied. That was the algorithm. Brutal, human, immediate.

IRC didn’t care who you were. It didn’t care how much money you had. It didn’t care about your engagement metrics, your posting schedule, your brand voice, or your follower count.

It just delivered the message.

Thirty years ago, a kid with a dodgy connection and a half-broken client had the same broadcasting power as anyone else in the room.

That wasn’t a limitation.

That was the point.

The Great Trade: Convenience for Control

Then came the carrot.

Convenience.

No more remembering servers. No more weird clients. No more figuring out where your people were hanging out. Just sign up, log in, and we’ll handle the rest. We’ll show your content to people. We’ll connect you. We’ll grow your audience.

It worked.

People moved.

The old infrastructure didn’t break — it just got abandoned. Like a perfectly good city left to rot because someone built a shinier one down the road with better lighting and easier parking.

And once everyone moved in?

The terms changed.

What was once:

type → delivered → seen

became:

type → platform → algorithm → maybe seen

That “maybe” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The Illusion of Reach

Modern social media sells reach the way casinos sell luck.

The promise is scale. Massive, global, instant visibility. You’re not limited to a channel of a few hundred people anymore. You’ve got the whole world.

In theory.

In practice, most users are shouting into a void that looks busy from the outside and silent from within.

The timeline is full, but your post isn’t in it.

Not unless the system decides it should be.

Not unless you play the game.

Not unless you pay.

So now you’ve got the worst of both worlds:

No guaranteed delivery like IRC

No guaranteed reach like the marketing copy suggests

Just a probabilistic system where visibility is rationed, nudged, and increasingly sold back to you.

Managing Ten Platforms Instead of One Network

We were told this was simpler.

That we wouldn’t have to coordinate presence anymore. That we wouldn’t need to maintain identities across fragmented systems.

Absolute nonsense.

What we actually got was:

IRC: 1 protocol → many networks → 1 client Now: many platforms → many identities → no shared layer

Instead of managing a nick and a handful of channels, you’re now:

maintaining multiple accounts

adapting to multiple formats

chasing multiple algorithms

posting into multiple systems

All of which refuse to talk to each other.

Congratulations. You’re now manually federating closed systems like some kind of human middleware.

The Backbone Is Open. The World Isn’t There.

Here’s the part that stings.

The internet itself didn’t close.

The protocols are still there. HTTP still works. RSS still works. Email still works. You can still stand on the open backbone and broadcast your signal into the void.

The problem is:

No one’s there.

The settlements moved.

What used to be shared space is now empty infrastructure — perfectly functional, completely uninhabited. Meanwhile, the crowds live inside bright, sealed environments orbiting overhead, each one charging rent in money, data, or attention.

You can still build a website.

You can still publish a feed.

You can still speak.

But unless you plug yourself into one of the gated systems, your signal doesn’t land anywhere meaningful.

Not because the network is broken.

Because the people left.

Pay to Speak, Pay to Be Heard

Let’s not dance around it.

Distribution is no longer neutral.

Money doesn’t guarantee success, but it absolutely increases your odds of being seen. The system is tilted, and it’s tilted on purpose.

What used to be a flat plane is now a gradient.

At the top: those who can pay, optimise, and game the system.

At the bottom: everyone else, posting into a probabilistic void and hoping for a flicker of visibility.

The lie wasn’t that the system would be free forever.

The lie was that convenience wouldn’t come with a long-term cost.

What We Actually Lost

This isn’t just about APIs or interoperability.

What we lost is simpler, and more fundamental:

a shared space where messages were reliably seen

Not scaled. Not boosted. Not optimised.

Seen.

That certainty is gone.

In its place, we got:

massive scale with no guarantees

frictionless posting with conditional visibility

global networks with localised silence

Conclusion: The Signal Still Exists

Here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud.

You can still broadcast.

You just can’t assume anyone will hear you.

That’s the real shift.

The network didn’t die. It got hollowed out, then wrapped in layers designed to extract value from the act of speaking and being heard.

What used to be a basic function is now a product.

What used to be a right of participation is now a managed experience.

And yeah, it’s bitter.

Because once you’ve seen the old model — once you’ve lived in a system where typing a message meant guaranteed delivery to real people — everything that came after feels like a downgrade wrapped in better UX.

The stack didn’t evolve.

It got enclosed.

Checked the email he'd sent them.

"It was nice to meet you toady."