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I want to talk about policing the use of AI in creative writing fan spaces any why attempting to investigate and punish people this is a terrible idea.
Now let me be clear - Gen AI is awful and most people agree that it has no place in creative spaces, but that's besides the point. I'm not here to debate AI in creative spaces, I'm here to talk about the moderators who feel the need to investigate and punish writers who they believe use AI.
I'm going to start by reminding people of two important things:
There is no way for anyone to know for certain if someone is using AI to write - unless they tell you they are. The common "tells" that are cited online are found in the work of people who have excellent control of functional grammar, good vocabularies, and an excellent control of sentence structure. AI is trained on the work of talented writers.
There is no way for an author to defend themselves against a claim that they are using AI, especially in an online environment. Nor should an author have to. The rule should not be "prove you are innocent or we will find you guilty!"
I feel very passionately about this and have for quite some time. I've seen fandom witch hunts before, and I know how easy it is for some people to climb to moral high ground and punish those they believe are doing the wrong thing.
My friend recently chose to leave a discord server after the mod team contacted them to announce that there had been reports made by people who wished to be anonymous who suspected their work was AI generated. The mods explained that they had investigated these claims by looking over their writing, and although they admitted they could not be 100% certain the work contained AI, they were issuing a strike/warning to them in accordance with their discord rules because they believed they might have.
The investigation involved them reading some of their work.
That was it.
They read their work and decided that, in their own words, they thought it might be AI so they were issuing a strike. They then proceeded to delete the writing they had shared on the server without any opportunity for this person to retrieve it.
There was no communication prior to them issuing a strike. My friend was not told about these accusations ahead of time, the moderators did not talk to them about the accusations or raise concerns, and did not stop to ask themselves why the people making these claims wished to do so anonymously.
Perhaps if they had, they would have learned that members of their discord had been harassing this person via Tumblr anons about this issue. Instead they chose to give the bullies anonymity, to deny a writer a chance to have open communication, and issued a punishment for a rule infraction that they themselves admitted they could not be certain had been broken.
When my friend gave the names of beta readers and editors who had worked with her in real time, these moderators chose not to engage with them or seek clarification, and instead doubled down and tried to justify their decision.
My friend asked for the evidence they had that their work contained AI content, and it was not provided to them. Instead they supplied a generic statement about how they had made their decision based on their use of syntax, grammar, tone, and word choice was rolled out. But again, they did not give examples or explain this.
As someone who admins and mods several creative spaces, this kind of behaviour worries me. Actually, it terrifies me. Because anyone can be next: you, me, the brand new writer eager to share their work, or the fandom oldie.
It sets a dangerous precedent for fan spaces and the policing of creative works, because it leaves writers in these spaces open to harassment, bullying, intimidation, and censorship under the guise of keeping fan spaces "AI Free". Anyone can accuse someone of using AI to write, and this can be used to bully people out of fan spaces.
Moderators are supposed to keep fan spaces safe for members, not take it upon themselves to play detective and police creative works in case someone is using AI. In fact, mods taking it upon themselves to police writers in fan spaces by handing out warnings and bans are making fan spaces unsafe and encouraging social exclusion. This kind of behaviour will actively scare and intimidate writers into simply walking away - because who wants to hear an accusation that their work is AI?
Facilitating AI witch hunts is killing fan spaces.
Attempting to police the writing of others is alienating writers.
And if you think someone is using AI to write, don't try to be a detective, just click away and stop reading their work.
bestie boo, let me fill you in on something: if you're going to take any part of 'good grammar' and randomly assign it to She's A Witch! AI, you might as well give up. It's over. You're cooked. Anyone who has spent the last decade or more learning to type properly, anyone who has spent any time writing articles/papers/essays that require you to use 'good grammar' is going to fall into that 'oh no it might be AI' trap.
Stop hunting like it's 1692. You're not going to find Goody Proctor at the ChatGPT sacrament. What you're going to do is exactly what happened back then: harming people who've done nothing wrong.
THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.
So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
...One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.
People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.
They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.
In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.
And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.
And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--
Like these silly, silly shoes:
(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)
--or going in a different direction entirely.
So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.
Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?
There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)
How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?
So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.
You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.
So the steps to making leather are as follows:
(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)
1) Kill and skin animal. This means removing the whole skin, in as intact a piece as possible, which while harder than it seems would be something your fictional leather-working society would be way better at than me.
Actually, scratch that. Step 1 is know what kind of animal gets you the type of leather that you want. Cowhide and horsehide are thick and tough but provide a lot of usable skin. Young goats are supposedly great for thinner, softer leathers, but my professional experience doesn't give me a lot to go on there. The phrase "kid gloves" means that they are leather gloves made from young goats, aka kids, which tells you that the leather is thin and flexible.
The main cost of this step is having enough of the animals you need to slaughter. If you’re hunting, then it’s all meat to you, but if you are a farmer pre-industrially, meat might be a byproduct of animal husbandry and not the point of it. One of the main reasons to keep a herd mammal – horses, cows, sheep, goats, llamas – is milk. Milk is liquid protein and once you figure out how to make cheese it can store for longer than meat can, at least without a fuckton of salt, which is often worth its weight in gold historically. (You could also smoke it but fuel is expensive and smoking things is technically a little trickier than salting them.) If you kill too many of your female animals, you don’t get milk, and you don’t get baby animals. If you keep too many male baby animals until adulthood, they start fighting and may injure you, your valuable female animals, or the structures you have built to keep your valuable herd animals in your possession instead of your neighbors. As a herder, your reliable access to meat and hides is mostly culling immature males from your herd, which tends to lead to smaller amounts of usable hide.
2) Scrape that shit. Harder. If you do not remove literally all the connective tissue beneath the skin, your hide will rot. Your hide may still rot if you don’t tan it properly or wait too long to tan it. Or if you tan it wrong by dumping shit in water and waiting for the magic of fermentation to work right without even knowing the difference between an acid and a base.
The scraping is also a great way to tear the hide or put holes in it. If you, for example, want to make leather out of a cow that has been lying around in the summer for a day because you wisely prioritized the meat… it can get kinda fragile, depending on what the bacteria do. I have to sharpen our 21st century steel knives literally every time we do a cow or a horse, just to get through the hide at all, and I have still seen cowskin tear like thin cloth if it’s deteriorated enough.
3) Assuming you have completed steps 1 and 2, you need the chemicals to tan the animal. Historically brains have been used a lot. DO NOT DO THIS if you are a modern person who wants to hunt for meat or leather. Prion diseases like CWD live in the brain, as do a lot of viruses that will kill or disable you painfully and slowly. It’s a relatively low risk (compared to things like accidents with your hunting gun) but it’s a risk you do not have to take. Yes, this is why some states want you to turn in the heads of any deer you shoot, regardless of how many points they have. This is part of how we tell you if the deer you shot is actually safe to eat, and not full of said viruses that will kill or disable you painfully.
The other thing that you need is a steady location and a fuckton of water, because these bitches need to soak for a long time. Way longer than soak times for retting flax or other plant stem fibers. And in multiple different solutions of the foulest smelling shit that you can imagine: in addition to brains, the steps included soaking in urine, possibly dung if you didn’t have enough brains, salt curing, soaking until the hair is loosened and then scraping all that off, and then the actual tanning, which is soaking it in a high tannic acid tree bark solution until it’s ready.
You can skip some of these steps, especially if you are, say, a paleolithic hunter gatherer. But your leathers will degrade faster. They will be less comfortable and less good for your range of motion.
So the production of leather is not necessarily less time consuming than cloth. It is also resource expensive at many steps – from start to finish you need animal wealth, mineral and plant resources, time, and a lot of water that you don’t need urgently for something else, like irrigation or watering your livestock. You’ll also want to do your tanning away from where you eat and sleep, because, the odor of fermenting cowhide is not fun. Finally, it is way more difficult at every step to construct a garment out of leather: cutting it, using an awl to punch holes in it so you can actually sew, or boiling it into shape. It’s also a specialized process when it comes to the chemical aspect, more so than cleaning wool or beating flax, both of which you can produce way more of (eventually) as a small household in the middle of nowhere. Spinning and weaving are both activities you can pick at slowly – you can also get a very small child to spin yarn acceptably with practice, freeing up your adult hands to do things like the weaving, while you really can’t bring your tots into your leather working and expect them to do anything but get underfoot. And shitty cloth smells way better than shitty rotting leather.
And none of this even scratches the surface of the material property reasons why a society may prefer leather for some applications (saddles, shoes...) and cloth for others.
Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)
The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.
In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.
‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.
It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.
The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)
Don't forget dyeing, which had to be re-done and was itself a whole fucking profession.
Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.
Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.
Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.
Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.
Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the sheep, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.
Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.
Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.
Shear
Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.
Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.
Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.
This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!
5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabrics in existence:
6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.
7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.
Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.
8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.
Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pins of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!
Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.
Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:
This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:
This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!
Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.
Of course, places outside Europe (which is my speciality and has been my whole life) have their own fabric and decoration techniques, from the wax resist of batik to the special tie-dye from Japan called Shibori, to ikat, to the quilling of many North American Indigenous people (not to mention wampum beads, hand-carved of shells!). Everyone likes to decorate themselves and their clothing!
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I want a romance-focused rp. My favorite elements are pining, temporary angst, *reasonable* miscommunication, and continuing the story after getting together!
I will not do (permanent) major character death or cheating.
Age of muns: 21+ preferred, 18+ STRICTLY required. I'm in my late 20's if that has an impact on your decision.
Plot ideas under the cut. I'm open to discussing more, and will probably be pretty excited to discuss if you have something else in mind!
If you're interested, feel free to send me a DM, or drop a “like” on this post if you want me to reach out!
Plot idea 1: Canon divergence
The classic Return To Season One, except!!! they're returning from mid s4 instead of the Panopticon <3
After finding out how to Quit, Jon has a choice to make. He takes the third option. Using a Leitner that was strictly off limits, Jon returns to the past with the intent to do everything right this time.
Little does he know, Martin found out his plans, and decided he was not doing it alone.
The two of them wake up in their old, un-scarred bodies, about two years prior.
Is it just a fantasy? Are they still connected with their patrons when they go back, or do they have to face the conflicting relief and emptiness of their minds being entirely their own? WE get to decide.
Plot idea 2: Fantasy au
I'm a big fan of the “one of them is a dragon” concept, especially in hemidemi's art where the dragon can take multiple forms, some more human than others.
For more specifics, I've been kicking around the idea of something Captive Prince-esque. The dragon is gifted to a prince. Neither of them are happy about it, but the political circumstances are too complicated to just let him free. How hostile dragon and prince are toward each other can be discussed.
Plot idea 3: Canon compliant
Literally just the Scottish honeymoon thing. Miscommunications and misunderstandings get in the way, and you know what they say about assuming things.
I should add, you're free to use these in your own rp's if you want, I don't need to be asked!
Fics too, with the caveats that 1) you show me I wanna read pretty please, and 2) you check with Hemi for that second one; I don't remember Hemi's stance on inspired fics
# my favourite part about this post # is that nowhere does it say to reblog this # but we’re all reblogging it # because if we have to suffer # so do other writers
I want a romance-focused rp. My favorite elements are pining, temporary angst, *reasonable* miscommunication, and continuing the story after getting together!
I will not do (permanent) major character death or cheating.
Age of muns: 21+ preferred, 18+ STRICTLY required. I'm in my late 20's if that has an impact on your decision.
Plot ideas under the cut. I'm open to discussing more, and will probably be pretty excited to discuss if you have something else in mind!
If you're interested, feel free to send me a DM, or drop a “like” on this post if you want me to reach out!
Plot idea 1: Canon divergence
The classic Return To Season One, except!!! they're returning from mid s4 instead of the Panopticon <3
After finding out how to Quit, Jon has a choice to make. He takes the third option. Using a Leitner that was strictly off limits, Jon returns to the past with the intent to do everything right this time.
Little does he know, Martin found out his plans, and decided he was not doing it alone.
The two of them wake up in their old, un-scarred bodies, about two years prior.
Is it just a fantasy? Are they still connected with their patrons when they go back, or do they have to face the conflicting relief and emptiness of their minds being entirely their own? WE get to decide.
Plot idea 2: Fantasy au
I'm a big fan of the “one of them is a dragon” concept, especially in hemidemi's art where the dragon can take multiple forms, some more human than others.
For more specifics, I've been kicking around the idea of something Captive Prince-esque. The dragon is gifted to a prince. Neither of them are happy about it, but the political circumstances are too complicated to just let him free. How hostile dragon and prince are toward each other can be discussed.
Plot idea 3: Canon compliant
Literally just the Scottish honeymoon thing. Miscommunications and misunderstandings get in the way, and you know what they say about assuming things.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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What are your favorite Appalachianisms? Mine are "built like a brick shithouse," and "enough x for' patch hell a mile," (which I'm only like 80% sure is Appalachian but I've never heard anyone but my dad say it, so 🤷♀️)
I like that we call bags "pokes" and we pronounce "creek" like "crick." For some reason the most offensive thing we can say, by other people's standards, is "warsh" instead of "wash." Nothing gets me heckled worse than that. That's not Appalachia-specific though. I've heard "warsh" in Eastern Washington-state.
My favorite word we say here is "afeared" (afraid), and I like "plum" (completely). Of course I like calling little mountain towns "hollers." I like saying "et" for "ate."
I don't know that this is Appalachia-exclusive, but I've lived all over and not heard it elsewhere, which is people calling vacuums "sweepers." I think that's cute. Also not sure if this is regionally specific, but I always call baseboards (the board at the bottom of the wall that borders the floor) "mopboards." Cuz you mop up against them, I guess.
I think "lap child" for a toddler is cute (called so because they're still small enough to sit in your lap). I don't say that one too much but sometimes it just pops up.
I like sayings like, if someone asks how you are, you can say "finer than the hair on a frog."
Appalachia is such a huge regional and the dialect & accent varies so much from South to North, and I like hearing voices from all over!
i have general questions about comments on fics. Is it customary for authors to answer comments? Some never do, is that because they want their comment count to remain true? I find it confusing how there can be such a big difference. Is it different in different fandoms maybe?
Hi! Thanks for asking!
Some do and some don’t, it really varies from person-to-person!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
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my writing fundamentally changed forever ten years ago when i realized you could use sentence structure to control people’s heart rates. is this still forbidden knowledge or does everyone know it now
Okay, so a few people have asked for me to cite the dark magics at them, and i’m super happy to share because it’s my favorite thing ever.
so, let’s see if i can explain this the same way that i learned. read a sentence out loud. you come to a full stop when you hit the period, and you take a normal, breath. but, when you hit a comma, you take a slightly longer pause. and when you hit a dash - you take an even longer pause.
this is a natural rhythm that we pick up when we’re first taught to read; we do it without even thinking. but when you start to think about it, you realize that it can become a tool.
think of your heartbeat. a period is badump. a comma is badump-dump. and a dash is thump badump. one breath. a longer breath. two breaths.
that means what you read automatically affects the rhythm of your breathing and your heartrate. which means that you can control the amount of physical tension your reader feels… by altering your punction and your sentence structure.
for fast paced scenes, you use short sentences. a lot of hard stops. mostly periods, with just a few comma’s thrown in for the full breath. your reader’s heartrate accelerates. their breathing is slightly and unintentionally, on their end, quicker. you hit the dramatic ending of the scene - and your reader’s body phsyically feels the gasp, the breath of fresh air, of these longer sentences.
now, read that paragraph again ant take note of your natural pauses, and how it subtly affects your breathing.
the same thing can be said of comma’s and dashes. while they can be used as a breath of fresh air, they can also cause a new line of tension as they lead your reader to hold their breath. during this section, you should use longer sentences; breaking up the harshness of the pauses by using variations of punction. read this paragraph out loud from the start and take note of how long you go between pauses and full breaths.
and then, comes the biggest trick.
the hard stop.
the paragraph.
because while the periods, commas, and dashes are variations on a short stop, the paragraph is a hard stop. you take a full breath. you pause for a moment, then move to the start of the next paragraph.
which means you can create an entirely new sort of dramatic tension. read the sentences that are in bold. see how you take a naturally longer pause at the end of each paragraph?
see how it makes you feel?
how it makes you breath different?
how doing it once, twice, or three times creates a different line of tension?
this little magic trick can be used to cause a reader’s heartrate to speed up during a fight or chase scene. it can be used to cause their breathing to slow down during moments of dramatic tension, sorrow, or softness. and it can be used to create hard breaks that add a new level of physically felt emphasis to your written work.
i hope these examples make sense! it’s my favorite writing trick!