aequoreatoria - Tumblr blog

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WAKE UP BABE NEW DASHCON JUST DROPPED

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Happy International Museums Day to the following people:

The guy who called me the Whore of Babylon for teaching kids about Ancient Egypt as I stood there and nodded.

The woman who was deeply incensed that staff wouldn't open the cases so she could touch the organic objects.

The one guy who made me translate hieroglyphs on a stele for him, then was mad because it didn't say what he wanted it to say, and reported me for 'lying' to the public.

The parents who objected to the taxidermied animals having taxidermied genitalia because it was unseemly.

Those kids on a school trip who got on the floor in front of a mummy and started chanting 'we worship Ra' as their teacher desperately tried to get them to leave.

That one guy who...uh...really liked geodes. No, they were not a special interest. He really, really liked geodes.

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Can you believe I'm having to make this meme even after successfully finishing up taxes and applying to job

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How the heck do you bake with cold butter? Doesn’t it just sit there and not mix with anything? I can never get it to do what I think the recipe wants it to do.

Cold butter DOESN't incorporate fully into the batter, and that's the point.

Unmelted, hard butter creates little layers and pockets throughout the dough, and those pockets of butter create steam when it melts in the oven to make fluffy moist pockets of air. It's used often in scones, flaky pie crust, biscuits, and especially croissants.

Those recipes often also recommend you put the dough into the fridge, to really cool it off and KEEP the butter cold before baking it. This firms up the dough's texture, and it's less likely to spread out as much, compared to a dough that's baked starting at room temp.

Pie doughs particularly, may even ask for freezer-cold dough. This is essential for very fine flakes that are defined enough to HOLD UP to a filling being put on top of it.

Croissants are very well-known for their super flaky interiors.

This is achieved by rolling dough flat, making a sheet of cold butter and then folding the dough and sheet several times, rolling it out so it forms many thin layers of cold butter, between the dough. It can become a multi-day process because you have to regularly chill the dough to keep the butter from warming up too much.

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Most recipes will say you need to dice the cold butter, slice it into sheets, or warm it to just barely cooler than room temp so you can smush into a shape (like the croissant's butter-sheet), then chill again to be cold.

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So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17 years in a hot attic!)  

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america’s favourite orange, furry sweetheart | ABBOTT ELEMENTARY

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(via shepherdmakestiktoks)

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FYI: In the US, if you've been kicked from registration even though you're eligible to vote, you can report it to the DOJ:

In fact, if anyone tries to bar or intimidate you from voting, you can report it, because that shit's a federal offence. 🗳️

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Graphics glitch makes for entertaining weather report…🔊 🔊

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“i asked chatgpt-” ohhh ok so nothing you are about to say matters at all

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Share to save someone with nut allergies a hospital trip hoooly shit

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Tom Holland photographed by Michael Muller for Man About Town Magazine

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#dedicated to the gram

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do you guys wanna see my favorite video on the internet yes you do