Wandering between myths and constellations

there are a bunch of free monitor tests, but here’s an easy one you can use. the passmark and eizo tests are also pretty good, though passmark doesn’t work in your browser. be warned that some tests may cause eye strain.

so, professor A is my mentor. i like him a lot, and he was the main person that taught me the most abotu Eris and ArcGIS. professor B is a professor i had one for class, and shes nice and knows a lot of little tricks about Eris programming but mostly relies on arcMAP because shes the raster data professor.

faux fur is plastic

pleather literally has plastic in the name

synthetic wool is plastic

The best furs to buy for warmth are coyote and raccoon, anyway, not mink and such. Sheepskin is also good. Stuff like mink, ermine, and sable aren’t actually very useful in terms of keeping you warm. Vintage bear and beaver are also pretty warm. Rabbit is useless, it sheds and goes bare quickly and isn’t very warm at all. Soft though.

Wool is the only fibre in the world that keeps you warm even when the wool is wet, and silk is among the best baselayers for warmth. Linen is the coolest fibre in the world, better than cotton, has been used for centuries and is a lot less costly in effort and water to produce–cotton is only cheaper artificially.

Down is the warmest and most breathable stuffing for blankets and pillows and it lasts a really long time. Cotton or wool stuffing is available also, but it doesn’t get the loft that down does, nor is it as warm (cotton isn’t warm at all). Remember that stuffing is also made of plastic!

Leather is great stuff, if you take care of it properly. It needs regular care and maintaining, but it will last a really long time if you do, and just get softer and softer over the years. And yes, you can clean it! You use something called saddle soap to clean it with. Patent leather has a plastic coating and may not even be leather these days, unfortunately. Deerskin is very nice, very soft but not very warm.

There’s a movement I first heard about in the historical costuming community, from Pinsent Tailoring: Slow Fashion. It’s a response to fast fashion, and the goals are to have a wardrobe that is more about longevity and quality of the clothing, and also about the clothing being made so that in a hundred years, all that would be left are the metal/horn/bone/shell/wood buttons. It’s very hard to do that with modern shoe soles, but if the heel or insole of your shoe is the only plastic you leave, you’re still doing better than an outfit from Target or something. Making your own clothes is actually not extremely difficult, you can start with extremely simple things, including the Bisexual Shirt (poet shirt), a pair of comfy pajama-style pants, and so on.

Make friends with your local vultures, costume historians, and leatherworkers (which are all, sometimes, also cosplayers)! They’re going to have oodles of resources for where to find natural materials.

take men at arms, where he’s grouchy as hell about having to include these affirmative action hires and loaded with casual bigotry that he feels like he’s okay to have because ‘he’s allowed’ - and how this conviction is challenged and shown for the excuse that it is throughout the novel.

 this is something he has to learn in order to be better at what he does and therefore a better person. that’s half the point of his character: expose the flaws in the system. he’s a watchman who exposes the weakness of the watch, who at the time of ‘men at arms’ still has an attitude of overlooking wrong so long as it’s done to the wrong sort of people. there’s this scene where he’s having dinner for the first time with his fiance’s rich cronies and they’re having one of those ‘political conversations’ we’re all familiar with (last time you saw the family at Thanksgiving and you kinda just buried your head in your wineglass while they got lofty about The Illegals and The Decline Of Family Values until you got sick of it and got chewed out for chewing them out, that kind of dinner). he starts parroting their own racist rhetoric back at them, dialed up to eleven, until everybody’s embarrassed, and his fiance gets upset because ‘you made them look like idiots, and it’s not like you’re a paragon of political correctness’ and then - and then he makes a comment along the lines of this: he’s allowed to make rude comments, it’s different because he’s not as bad, blah blah blah blah blah. and there’s his hypocrisy, use the thing to show its flaws.

and then he realizes. 

this has gotten rambly but the point is: his development hinges, and always has, on working hard to overcome personal biases and shortcomings. taking his privilege as well, and confronting it. that’s the only way he can get to become the kind of character who knows which laws are in fact unjust. 

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a friend shared these with me — people are still piecing the info together, but seems like this is a true phenomenon

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