Snally's Stupendous Miscellany

the gender ratio for azurill is 75% female whilst for marill it’s only 50%.

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

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 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.

Firstly, let me say there’s nothing wrong with keeping jumping spiders as pets. I have one myself. She’s a captive bred regal jumping spider. She’s currently a bit over two years old. I’ve had other jumping spiders as well, but they passed of old age and in one instance, a failed molt, which is fairly common.

Before and after getting pet jumpers, I joined some jumper groups, read a lot of care guides, and watched a slew of videos about keeping them.

It became obvious pretty quickly that apparently due to their cute fuzzy appearance, large round eyes, and intelligent behavior, people (owners, admirers, and popular content creators) assign human and mammal emotions and behaviors to them, often to their detriment.

I personally believe bugs are complex creatures that can be intelligent and have emotions, but that those emotions and behaviors are NOT analogous to human or mammal behavior and ignoring their natural needs and behaviors means you’re likely not providing proper care for them.

This is mainly about handling. Bugs don’t want to be handled. They get nothing positive out of it emotionally. They don’t want to be pet or cuddle with you. They don’t want to hang out with you. You’re a big scary predator, and it likely wants to get away from you. Forcing handling can stress, injure, or kill them. That’s why I tagged the post (linked above) “your spider is not a cat.” It doesn’t seek affection from you.

I can’t tell you how many posts or videos I saw where people were super upset because they let their jumper out of its enclosure to handle it and it either escaped and got lost or they somehow crushed it and killed or injured it badly. I’ve also seen people chasing their jumper around its enclosure trying to grab it or get it to jump onto their hand when it’s clearly just trying to hide.

As an example, a very common thing I’ve seen in videos about jumpers is people saying when they lift their front legs at you and jump or climb onto you/your hands it’s because they “want uppies” and want to be pet and be close to you. This is a wild misreading of behavior. Sometimes raising the front legs is a defensive display, trying to make itself look larger to scare away a threat. Other times, they’re waving their legs around to sense and feel their environment, or preparing to jump onto something. They are arboreal, and their natural behavior is to find a high vantage point, so climbing onto the big thing (you) nearby is normal. It’s not because it seeks your affection.

Certainly if you DO handle them frequently they can get used to it, and it becomes less stressful for them. But in my opinion the dangers outweigh any positives, and I don’t handle mine. These are wild animals that have not been domesticated, even when captive bred. If you want to give them enrichment, and you should, offer them prey to chase or interesting things to explore in a larger enclosure. For those that do still handle them, I’d encourage you to watch their behavior closely and read the spidery cues they’re giving you rather than assuming they’re feeling what a cute little mammal might be feeling in the same scenario.