Nael's art ref dump

So I can’t brush my teeth. Like, it’s the worst kind of hell. I went to the dentist for a cleaning today and I told the hygienist this, and she was wonderfully helpful.

There are some incredibly soft toothbrushes available- namely, post-surgical brushes. Running them under hot water makes them even softer.

She told me that you don’t really need to use toothpaste- it’s mostly marketing. The foam gets to me, so that is really reassuring.

She gave me two particularly soft brushes and some xylitol gum. Trident is a market brand of xylitol gum, which helps with your teeth and can make your breath smell better.

The whole purpose of brushing is to disrupt plaque buildup. You don’t need to brush twice a day, every day with toothpaste if you brush correctly- little circles, focusing on near the gums (where most plaque builds up). So if you’re having a bad sensory day and can’t brush at all, it’s not the end of the world.

Hell, you don’t even need a toothbrush if even the post-surgical ones are too harsh. Going over your teeth with the same motions using a washcloth is enough.

She wants to find a fluoride rinse that has a taste I can stand (peppermint is the only mint I can stand) but she’s not particularly worried about it.

I go to Dr. Barr in Chicago. If you can get to the State St. Macy’s, his office is nearby. He’s very kind and patient and really understanding of my needs as an autistic person. The hygienist, I don’t know her name, announced everything she was going to do before she did it, and stopped frequently to see how I was doing.

This is really the only positive dentist I’ve ever had- past dentists have been too rough and not bothered to help find ways I can actually brush.

Gonna make one hundred soups this year. Starting off with kapustnyak, carrot soup, chickpea soup, and parsnip soup.

Can't stop won't stop. 15 soups so far.

Four new BEAN BASED SOUPS, the first one trailblazing because it was a taco soup recipe courtesy of @alex-of-1000-dumbasseries. 61 IN THE BAG, 39 TO GO.

despite the many astonishingly useful features my real favorite part is the color picker which is 100% identical to the MS Paint of my childhood

Finished! Hooray! The Glitching Out Brush Pack is over yonder.

You can change the size & spread by adjusting the gap & brush size values in settings. Compatible with Clip Studio only!

Try some of these resources:

Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades Naming Conventions Manual

Yabla: Online Pinyin Dictionary (search the keyword “surname” and you will get surname recommendations)

Choose a Name by how many Strokes are in it

Mandarin Chinese Character Generator

Evolution of Han Chinese Names

Writing & Illuminating & Lettering by Edward Johnston

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 an artist and medical student, and I use art to help me pay some bills.

I built a free, helpful tool because to help prevent other talented creatives from undercharging, as I really see this a lot online.

It's a calculator with a built in reality check

Input your survival costs and expenses

True billable hours

Get the rate you actually need to charge to hit a 20% (or whatever you choose) profit margin.

It generates the rate, a template negotiation email + final invoice.

Plan to keep this tool free, ad-free, and open to everyone.

🔗 Check your math: fairpaycalc.artres.xyz

If the "Thriving Rate" calculation empowers you to double your quote on your next job, please consider hitting the "Buy me a coffee"button. It keeps the server running and the code flowing <3

I WILL !!! I WILL DO THAT

some of my favourite indigenous artists, in no particular order:

Inuit artists:

the jerry cans (esp their album Inuusiq)

beatrice deer

twin flames

Māori artists:

jordyn with a why

Indigenous australian artists:

tilly tjala thomas (i particularly love ngai yurlku nhiina)

kardajala kirridarra (srlsly check out ngajabu (Grandmother's Song))

And one of her own:

Oh and of course there's also the HU and Bloodywood for people who like more rock and metal mixed in:

Main recommendations: Season the dough AND season the filling. Also, make smaller loafs, about the size of a spatula head, for easy flipping!

Here’s how they look! Recipe below (doubled bc I have a big family).

Loaded Potato Loafs

Poke holes in and boil 6 large potatoes until soft

Peel potatoes (do this after boiling to retain nutrients and get the texture needed for the dough)

Mash into a smooth puree

Add 4 tablespoons of melted butter

Add 10 tablespoons of flour

Add a bit of pepper and a good amount of garlic salt

Mix until it forms a soft dough

Lay out plastic wrap and grease with a little oil

Place 1/8 of the dough into the plastic wrap and flatten it into a round shape

Add shredded cheese, shredded chicken, bacon bits, more garlic salt, chives, and Italian seasoning.

Grab the plastic wrap and use it to fold each edge of the dough over, starting with parallel ends. Make sure the dough is sealed all over and doesn’t break. It should be about the size of a spatula head for easy flipping.

Airfry two at a time. Fry one side at 450 degrees for 7 minutes

Flip with spatula and airfry other side for another 7 minutes

Couple of notes:

Season the shit outta this thang

Like it’s actually fucking crazy that neither cook in the video mentions seasoning 🤨

Don’t overstuff with fillings if you’re frying in oil bc it might lose structural integrity and fall apart on the flip

I filled mine with just cheese and hot dog bits (it’s what was immediately available and I’m lazy) and topped it with some ketchup + mustard to go with the hot dog theme

It was bomb as fuck chef kiss 😚👌💋

XKCD: Degree Off

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

But scroll up and look at that first graph. Really look at it. For 2000 years, for every society for which we have data, roughly 1 in every 2 kids died. I have two kids – statistically, one of them would have died (to be fair, my daughter was medically complicated in utero and the medication that saved her was developed in the 1960s, so in my personal case, there’s no “statistically” about it). Do you have a sibling? One of you probably would have died. Are you from a big family with lots of siblings? Your parents would have probably buried more than one of you, assuming that both of your parents had managed to make it to adulthood in the first place.

And to be entirely fair, there are reasons beyond modern medicine why childhood death rates have dropped in the last 200 years. Obviously, medical care is not the only place where we’ve made significant advancements in ways to reduce mortality rates in children. Like, 100 years ago children were still sent to go work in mines and factories in an era where OSHA did not exist. The fact that we don’t do that anymore also helps.

But medicine is a HUGE contributing factor to the childhood mortality rate plummeting. And some of it is big, exciting stuff, where a child is obviously dying, and a doctor gets to be a hero with a life-saving medication or procedure. That’s what happened with my daughter. And in cases like those, it’s super easy to draw a line of cause and effect. Child’s life was in danger -> medication given -> child’s life no longer in danger. Medicine saved the child.

But it’s actually much more common for a child’s life to be saved by the quiet, everyday work that primary care pediatricians do. Some of that is education – SIDS rates were cut nearly in half in the first ten years of the “Back to Sleep” campaign, which was just doctors telling parents that it’s safer to put your infant to sleep on their back rather than their stomach. But a lot of it is vaccination. Like, A LOT a lot.

I went looking for exact numbers, and I found this study from 2024. And I just want to quote the findings section of their abstract:

Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year. For every death averted, 66 years of full health were gained on average, translating to 10·2 billion years of full health gained. We estimate that vaccination has accounted for 40% of the observed decline in global infant mortality, 52% in the African region. In 2024, a child younger than 10 years is 40% more likely to survive to their next birthday relative to a hypothetical scenario of no historical vaccination. Increased survival probability is observed even well into late adulthood.

Those numbers are huge. 154 million lives saved. 10.2 BILLION extra years of healthy lives. And the study didn’t even account for smallpox. Because as mentioned above – smallpox was. But the cause and effect line is much harder to draw. It’s easy to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles makes the baby cry, and potentially get a little sick for the next few days and these things all seem negative. It’s much harder to see how stabbing a healthy baby with needles will keep them safe from a disease that they may or may not get in the future. And it much harder to see how stabbing my healthy baby with needles helps protect that other baby who is too sick to get stabbed.

A lot of my friends have celiac, and since my usual holiday gifts are cookies I'm trying to find gluten free baking projects.

These look fucking delicious.

For Jackass: stop hiking your shoulders up to your ears. This is pretty much a stress thing, it’s human instinct to protect our neck when we’re under stress so that predators can’t get at it. Easiest way to do that is be elevating the shoulders, so. Periodically take not of where your shoulders are at.

Absolute Fuckwaffle: stretch out your chest. The rhomboids on the back work to keep our shoulder blades back, so when we’re hunched forward they are constantly straining to do their job. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as telling you to stand up straight, since our pectorals get chronically tight and prevent us from doing so. Step one: pectoral stretches. Hold for at least 20 seconds.

CTRL+SHIFT+i does not initially work, you need to turn on developer tools:

^the article does use the wrong quotes, use this: "DANGEROUS_ENABLE_DEVTOOLS_ONLY_ENABLE_IF_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOURE_DOING": true

Paste this above "ChromiumSwitches":

Then go to console, type "allow pasting", press enter, and paste the below text (@pokemonheartgold used one _ too litle on either side):

Object.values(webpackChunkdiscord_app.push([[Symbol()],{},r=>r.c])).find(x=>x?.exports?.default?.__proto__?.getCurrentUser).exports.default.getCurrentUser().ageVerificationStatus = 3;

Click away from the channel, back into it, press continue, voila:

^as you can see it took a few tries to get the code right

Close devtools, possibly remove the line of code from settings.json again, done!

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made awhile back :P