Silver Polar Bears

She lived in Germany and could be considered as the first person to sew stuffed animals merly for children to play with and to counter the common “hard” toys out of wood or metal wich were popular back then.

There is even so much more to the story, because she was as you can see paraliezed from polio, she couldnt walk or use her right arm, she had to fight all her life just to be accpeted as a human being, she wasnt even allowed to sit in the front row of church in her home village and had a pretty abusive mother. One time she and her brother almost drowned but the townpeople only attempted to save her brother because he was healty. Her father saved her from drowning in last minute.

 Only her father and brother stood behind her, still she learned to accept her faith and make the best out of it. After a failed operation she said she had gone around living this way anyways. She started to sew, more importantly she started to sew with a sewing machine wich was realy new at this time. People would not buy from her at first but then she made a realy beautyfull dress for her best friend and suddenly everyone was crazy for her work.

Then she started to sew little elephants as pincushions, but when she attempted to sell them around christmas she quickly realized that for one children were crazy for them and wanted them as toys and also. this was what she wanted to do, bringing happiness to kids.

She expanded futher and gave work to over 20 women as sewers in her factory, her brother helped her to do so, and she started producing stuffed animals of all kinds (almost) their trademark was a button sewed into every anmals ear. It still is to this day.

Whit the economy crisis her factory, and she almost lost it, she already couldnt pay her workers, he factory was about to be forceclosed and the last hope was a toy fair they would attend,

and then she had an idea, she sewed a bear, the very first stuffed toy bear there was, with moveable head and limbs and realy soft fur and glass eyes, it was beautyfull, but at the toyfair most people thoght it was to expensive

most people because one american buyer fell in love with the bears, he bought them all and he ordered 3000 more, it saved the factory

you may ask why would anyone need 3000 stuffed toy bears easy, to support and advertise the candidacy of  Theodore Roosevelt as the U.S. president, trough that the toy bear invented by Magarete Steiff became well known as the

The fact that she faced so much ableism and discrimination in her life was indeed sad (and infuriating!) – and that may be the reaction of many abled people when they hear her story (the poor disabled little girl).

But the fact that she survived, and innovated, and brought modern machines to her hometown, and advocated for herself, and brought joy to so many people, in spite of that discrimination (and I do mean “spite”) is not sad at all.

Huffpost article about the fight for Oak Flat

More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Design Award 

The AuthaGraph map is the most accurate map you’ll ever see. You probably won’t like it.

You probably don’t realize it, but virtually every world map you’ve ever seen is wrong. And while the new AuthaGraph World Map may look strange, it is in fact the most accurate map you’ve ever seen. 

The world maps we’re all used to operate off of the Mercator projection, a cartographic technique developed by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. This imperfect technique gave us a map that was “right side up,” orderly, and useful for ship navigation (because it kept longitudes consistent and the angle from any point to the North Pole constant) — but also one that distorted both the size of many landmasses and the distances between them.

To correct these distortions, Tokyo-based architect and artist Hajime Narukawa created the AuthaGraph map over the course of several years using a complex process that essentially amounts to taking the globe (more accurate than any Mercator map) and flattening it out…

I’m cis because I’m afab and still identify as a woman. If I was afab and identified any other way, I’d be trans. I’m intersex because my body itself has a mixed bag of secondary sex characteristics and hormones.

The label “intersex” itself isn’t a gender identity as much as it’s a way for people with mixed or ambiguous sex characteristics to define that experience. There are cis men and women who are intersex, trans people of every kind as well. I’m sure there are intersex people who just identify as intersex entirely but most intersex people I’ve met still identify as male, female, or nonbinary. Because your body doesn’t determine your gender identity.

Dungeon masters, Minecraft players, fanfic writers:

For his model, Praxiteles used the beautiful Athenian courtesan Phryne. Phryne was a legend in her own right. She earned so much money from her liaisons that she offered to sponsor the rebuilding of the walls of Thebes, so long as they included the inscription “Destroyed By Alexander The Great, Rebuilt By Phyrne The Courtesan” (Thebes declined). Later she moved to Athens, committed some unspecified offense, and got charged with impiety, a capital crime. Athenaeus writes that when the trial seemed to be going against her, she disrobed in the middle of the courtroom. The judges were so awed by her beauty that they became concerned she might be a god, and that something terrible would happen if they harmed her. They voted to acquit. She was lovers with basically all the famous and important Athenian men of her day, and one of them was Praxiteles, the greatest sculptor in the world. Thus the Aphrodite of Knidos.

It was the most famous statue of its time. Pilgrims would come from all over the Greek world to look at it. Sometimes more than look. There was apparently a problem with lovestruck young men breaking into the temple to copulate with it. It was a really good statue.

According to a legend recorded by Antipater of Sidon, the statue’s fame reached Aphrodite herself, and she descended to Knidos to judge it. She got confused and upset, wondering when Praxiteles had seen her naked. It was a really good statue.

Around 260 BC, King Nicomedes of Bithynia offered to buy it. One source says that in exchange for the statue, he “offered to liquidate the entire national debt of Knidos, which was immense”. The Knidians refused. It was a really good statue.

It stayed in place until the Christian era, when it was destroyed as part of the general persecution of pagans. Some sources say instead that it was rescued and brought to Constantinople by a wealthy collector, but his museum caught fire and it was lost in the blaze.

I find myself fascinated by these kinds of stories. Stories of legendary objects, things so far outside the normal range that they seem almost supernatural. There are a lot of them in fantasy - Tolkien is very good at this. A gem brighter and more beautiful than any that have survived to the present day, an elven city fairer than any built by mortal men. Part of what makes the past so alluring is that it has this kind of thing, something beyond all your experience, something where all you can do is speculate fruitlessly about what it would have been like to live in a time when you can see such wonders…

…except that the Romans were as practical as the Greeks were fanciful, so they sent a bunch of sculptors to Knidos to create various replicas of the statue, and many of these have survived. There’s a picture of one on Wikipedia. It’s a very pretty statue, but if I saw it in a museum I’m not sure I’d take special notice of it. These things are always more impressive in your imagination.

Two thousand years ago, if you were well-traveled, your standard for hotness might be “the hottest person [that you’ve personally seen] in Greece, or an image of them executed as a painting or statue.”

Today, your standard for hotness is “the hottest of millions of people all over the world, beamed directly into your house at your convenience, selected by industries specifically designed to locate and recruit the hottest people they can find.”

Modulo, of course, the fact that beauty standards are cultural and change over time; everybody has their own particular taste for what is hot and what is not; and “that statue is so hot the local youths keep trying to fuck it” is exactly the kind of hilarious urban legend that gets embellished and spread whether or not it has any basis in fact, especially among people who have never seen the statue or a particularly good copy.

For a modern person treating a celebrity as if they are your personal friend is considered a mental failure. But imagine if you had never seen a photo, or even a painting done with the level of realism we expect today? (no ancient greek or even medieval painting could be mistaken for a real person). You would never have needed to develop a separate mental category to account for these unreal people you might encounter daily. So if you are suddenly presented with a representation, in this case a sculpture, that looks close enough to reality to trigger your normal human emotions, then even knowing that its a representation at a conscious level, you probably don’t have the psychological tools for dealing with it. 

I figured it within a minute or two because I suddenly realised I couldn’t think of any statue of equivalent importance that would be left to the mercy of the elements and modern air pollution any more. And a day or two later found my way into the Galleria dell’Accademia where the original is now.

And oh. Oh shit. 

The replica is nice. The original … look, you’ll have heard this kind of gushing before but it is all true: he really. REALLY. Looks as if he’s about to move. He looks as if he’s breathing. I swear you can see the oil in his skin. No picture I had seen, and certainly not the replica, prepared me in the slightest.

It’s not a set of values or something you automatically earn after college or like some mysterious inherent quality your parents pass down to you. 

(Like, maybe your parents have enough money/assets where they can sustain you through economic insecurity, but let’s be honest…that’s not most people’s situation.)

If you are struggling with bills, if you don’t have savings, if you constantly question even small purchases, if spending a few thousand dollars on a vacation seems like a distant dream…you are not middle class.

And most importantly, saying you are not middle class is not an attack on your character. 

Found out you weren’t autistic but actually schizophrenic? Thought you were ace and aro but you were just a late bloomer? Tried out new pronouns and a new name, but eventually learns that you are cool with your assigned gender? Thought you were gay, but then one day you also fell in love with someone of another gender? 

….And so on and so forth.

We NEED to normalize this shit. No one should feel like they need to uproot their whole identity and move to a new blog because their label changed. No one should be shamed for getting that one step closer to figuring themselves out - even if that step is a step towards the “norm”, we need to celebrate the bravery and strength it takes to come out again and again and again.