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613 Personal health and safety

Life-changing OCD hack is learning that you can literally call poison control to check if you fucked up and took medications wrong in a way that could kill you instead of having a panic attack while reading reddit and quora threads for an hour. They won't even be mad at you. Like obviously don't do it every day or something but genuinely you can do this if you need to

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746.92 Fashion design of clothing

So this is a totally useless rant, but as a skinny girl, I’m getting extra, extra tired of fat-shaming.

I work for a corsetier at a Renaissance Faire. We sell corsets. Not flimsy bullshit costume corsets; like real, durable, waist-training corsets. Today a woman came in with her boyfriend, so I helped her pick out a corset and try it on. While her boyfriend—who was decidedly enthused about the whole corset thing—sat watching me lace her in, he told me, grinning, “Of all the good jobs at the Renaissance Faire, I think you have the best.”

I shrugged in agreement. “I touch butts and reach down cleavage all day; I mean…” Because we like to be a bit rakish at the Faire, and, y’know, it’s true. Tying people into corsets pretty much invariably requires getting handsy.

The couple laughed at that, and the boyfriend said, “That’s the job I would want!” But then he chuckled again and said, offhand, “Or maybe not; while we were looking at the racks, there were some pretty big sizes on there!”

Our sizes are all done in inches, and the biggest we make is a 46. And you’d better believe our large sizes sell. For a second I wasn’t sure what to say to the guy’s comment, but I answered him casually. “We get a lot of beautiful big ladies in here.” Because we do. “We make corsets for real women, not Barbie dolls,” I added. Wasn’t trying to be smart, just kind of tossed it out there because that’s the line we like to use when people ask about larger sizes, and because, again, we do.

The boyfriend went quiet at that; I didn’t think anything of it, I just kept on lacing. A moment later, he said, a little awkwardly (but sincerely enough), “Didn’t mean to be offensive.”

I quickly smiled and brushed it off, said he wasn’t, said I was just saying. (Don’t want to make the customers uncomfortable, you know?) And that was the end of it. His comment had rubbed me the wrong way, but it wasn’t a big deal. Now, I wear a 20-inch corset. I’m a few cup sizes short of being one of the Barbie dolls. Like his girlfriend, I’m one of the “hot chicks”; he doesn’t have to worry about offending me by implying that I wouldn’t be fun to poke and pull at.

Honestly though, of all the people I fit sexy technically-undergarments to in a day, fat girls are maybe my favorite people to lace up. Because they are just so damn happy that we have stuff that fits them. They are so damn happy that the corsets we make in their sizes are all the same pretty, shiny colors and cool flower/dragon/skull/etc. prints that the smaller corsets are, not ugly beige and boring “granny” colors. They are so goddamn happy that at least one (of several on the grounds) corset shop carries things that they can wear, that they actually want to wear, and that they look fucking awesome in. This is only my second season working, and we’ve fit 60+ inch waists and double-K busts. The only people we’ve ever had to tell sorry, we don’t have anything that fits them, are twelve-year-old kids.

It’s half-wonderful, half-heartbreaking how excited those women get. Women who say with sad smiles, when we ask if they want to get fitted, “Oh, no, you don’t have anything that fits me,” and then are stunned when we’re 300% confident that yes we do, and we have options. Women who can’t stop smiling and looking at themselves in the mirror after we’ve got them laced in.

I had a lady last week whose waist I measured (cinching the tape tight, as per procedure) at 41 inches—honestly not all that big. So she picked out a 41-inch corset to try on. I could tell halfway through getting her laced that it was going to be a bit big for her, so I mentioned it and said she might do better to try a smaller size. She started crying on the spot. She was so overwhelmed; she couldn’t believe someone had just told her that a 41 was too big. She told me about how hard clothes shopping was for her, how her mother would tell her she needed an XXXL instead of an XXL, how she had recently lost weight but still couldn’t wear certain colors because they didn’t fit or she wasn’t confident enough.

She did end up getting her corset, and after I checked her out she asked if she could give me a hug, so we ended up standing there hugging each other for a minute. While we did, I told her, “Do not ever let anyone tell you any bullshit. You are gorgeous.” She said, “I have a new boyfriend and he keeps telling me that.” I told her he was right, and to just keep telling herself she’s gorgeous; it was okay if she didn’t always believe it, but to keep telling herself anyway. (That’s how I talked myself through shit when I had bad anxiety.)

We all know fat-shaming is bad. The stupidity, fatphobia, and misogyny of it has pissed me off since I first became aware of it. But working with clothing, especially as figure-hugging and precise as corsets, has given me a new perspective on it—how much it affects people and just how shitty it is. Like, what does it say that I had a grown, only average-big woman crying into my shoulder because she was so overjoyed not to be the uppermost extremity of what a manufacturer can clothe?

My job rocks and it’s really rewarding, but sometimes it highlights some of the ugliest shit about society. I’m so glad I work at a shop that’s not bullshit about body types and operates with more people in mind than just scrawny white chicks like me. The fat women I work with are a ton of fun to lace up, and they’re so much more than their size—they’re cool, they’re smart, they’re funny, they’re sweet, they’re great to talk to, and yes, they’re hot. I’m so damn done with them getting short-changed and shamed by petty fucks who refuse to make them nice clothes, who refuse to even try to work for them, who refuse to consider them pretty. This whole rant was useless and won’t get read, but I had to vent because it’s been driving me nuts.

So actually, screw you, random dude. Fat girls are the highlight of my job.

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391 Costume and personal appearance

tweet

Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.

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302 Social interaction

Worst Case vs. Best Case Scenarios by Karina Farek.

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624 Civil engineering

where the hell are my pneumatic tubes this is not the future jules verne promised

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002 The book (writing, libraries, and book-related topics)

This is important. Fuck Amazon books, Apple books. Shop local.

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128 Humankind

Major human pastimes:

frying dough

classifying things and then arguing about the classifications

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973 United States

Hey. International people.

Keep calling it the Gulf of Mexico or whatever your term is for it. Do not allow the Republican regime to label that body of water the Gulf of America to the world. The name came from a the term Mexica, what the Aztecs called themselves. It’s been called the Gulf of Mexico since the 1600s.

Keep calling it Denali. The original name before it was Mount McKinley. Don’t let the Indigenous Peoples/First Nations be erased.

It may sound stupid and petty. But it is an attempt to rewrite history and make us forget the origins. It is a literal white washing of history. This type of censorship is a beginning to greater evils.

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736 Carving and carvings

Starting a new post because I'm not derailing my original one twice, but if anyone is interested in seeing more of the hauntingly beautiful or delightfully derpy mortuary art of early New England, I highly recommend visiting the Farber Gravestone Collection.

This is a photography series, mostly by Daniel and Jessie Farber, documenting over 9,000 pre-1800 gravestones in high-quality black and white photos. It is not a comprehensive list of stones by any means, but it is searchable by state, town, carver, and style, and gives a wonderful overview of the different types of stones that you can see in our old burying grounds.

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005 Computer programming, programs, and data

Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:

Replacing a HDD with an SSD

Adding RAM

Graphics cards if you're nasty

Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)

Customizing what runs on startup for your computer

Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:

Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin

adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading

Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too

Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:

Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.

Correcting disk utilization errors

Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:

Clearing cache and cookies on your browser

Restarting the computer

Changing your screen resolution

Uninstalling unused browser extensions

Things that do not actually make your computer faster:

Deleting files

Registry cleaners

Defragging your drive

Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.

This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.

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752 Color

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346 Private law

Happy Public Domain Day 2025!

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002 The book (writing, libraries, and book-related topics)

Banned Books Preliminary 2024 Statistics - Banned Books Week (September 22-28, 2024)

Graphics from https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data

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002 The book (writing, libraries, and book-related topics)

Censorship By The Numbers

Banned Books Week (September 22-28, 2024)

For more information, see https://www.ala.org/bbooks/censorship-numbers

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002 The book (writing, libraries, and book-related topics)

Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2023 - Banned Books Week (September 22-28, 2024)

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe - 106 challenges. Challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson - 82 challenges. Challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson - 71 challenges. Challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, sex education, claimed to be sexually explicit

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky - 68 challenges. Challenged for claimed to be sexually explicit, LGBTQIA+ content, rape, drugs, profanity

Flamer by Mike Curato - 67 challenges. Challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, claimed to be sexually explicit

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison - 62 challenges. Challenged for rape, incest, claimed to be sexually explicit, EDI content

(tie) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews - 56 challenges. Challenged for claimed to be sexually explicit, profanity

(tie) Tricks by Ellen Hopkins - 56 challenges. Challenged for claimed to be sexually explicit, drugs, rape, LGBTQIA+ content

Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan - 55 challenges. Challenged for claimed to be sexually explicit, sex education, LGBTQIA+ content

Sold by Patricia McCormick - 53 challenges. Challenged for claimed to be sexually explicit, rape

Source: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10

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002 The book (writing, libraries, and book-related topics)

Banned Books Statistics - Banned Books Week (September 22-28, 2024)

Graphics from https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data

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821 English Poetry

I cannot stand the parodies of modern major general, they're overdone and simply not as good as the original. They've done them about everything, whatever topic, big or small.

And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.

The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.

The scanning of the lyrics in the meter is unbearable, they emphazise the syllables in ways that are untenable, in short in matters musical, prosodic and ephemeral, i cannot stand the parodies of modern major general!