no shit.

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

what is it about me sitting in my little corner of the Internet and saying “I actually don’t hate myself as an adult now and I want to be nice to people and that’s my entire thing” that makes these anons start foaming at the mouth

I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve spent the better part of a decade wishing I weren’t fucking alive and beating depression off with a caveman’s wooden club. If I get to a point in my adult life after all that shit where I can finally say “I don’t want to see myself dead anymore, I like who I am” and you have the gall to tell me I have too much self confidence now, I’m gonna take the club I killed my depression with and I’m gonna start beating you with it

Basically,

(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) by Yao Xiao

words to remember

oh it totally does, but you can’t hear it because space is a vacuum and sound can’t travel through a vacuum! 

and that’s a good thing, 

because the roar of the sun would clock in at around 120db heard from earth, about the equivalent to having a train’s horn go off three feet from your face. 

constantly. all the time, even at NIGHT. there would be no escape.

this is simply terrifying. how do you erase knowledge please ?

NASA actually recorded the sun, if you want to hear it:

And they recorded the planets too:

so, the sun and the earth sound about how i would’ve expected, and a lot of other planets just make strong wind sounds which is perfectly reasonable but venus sounds like pure dread?!?! WHY IS SATURN SCREAMING?!? pluto isn’t bad and is actually kinda nice but it’s very strange to me too like Why Does It Do That. jupiter is super chill 10/10. pluto and jupiter need to collab i would buy that album

oh, fuck, guys, you know what this means? it means the ancient world was right about the music of the spheres. 

Sun

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus 

Neptune

Pluto

h oLy sh IT??? I was Not prepared for Pluto

Damn son…

Astronaut readjusts to life back on Earth

HE GRABS THE CUP BUT THEN HE DROPS THE PEN 0.0003 SECONDS LATER

AND HE LOOKS UP AT THE CEILING INSTEAD OF AT THE GROUND WHEN HE CAN’T FIND THEM

I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING HE JUST DROPS IT

IT’S NOT FUNNY IT’S VERY LOGICAL THAT HE WOULD HAVE ADJUSTED TO LIVING LIFE WHILE HE WAS IN SPACE BECAUSE IT’S DIFFERENT FROM EARTH BUT I CAN’T FUCKING BREATHE

*THUNK*

i love it so much every time i see it

“ugh stupid gravity” 

IM FUXKING CSHAKING

I haven’t seen this post on my dash in *years* bless this

Bless, this is absolutely amazing

I’m gonna build my garden today.

Before:

Boring, sad. Full of splinters and negligent HOA policies.

Currently (WIP):

Sexy, full of re-used materials (srsly check out your local habitat for humanity, I got all this for like. $50). 18 cinder blocks, 24 red bricks, 6 large tubs, an old RV mat and an unopened package of weed mat. I’ll call it an upper body workout and get the dirt and plant seeds tomorrow.

So I ganked up my arm a bit carrying cinder blocks Yesterday, so I only drilled holes in the bins for drainage, cut weed mat to keep the dirt from coming out when watering happens, and bought dirt.

the actual putting of dirt into bins and planting seeds will happen tomorrow.

Assembling the bins:

1. Hydrate yourself

2. Drill drainage holes in bottom. If you don’t have a drill and are a feral gnome, you can stab some holes in with a utility knife but this is not recommended.

3. Hydrate again.

4. Wave at your neighbors. Forget you are holding your knife while doing so.

5. Cut a swath of weed mat. Doesn’t have to be pretty or fitted, just large enough to cover the drainage holes. Weigh down with bricks so they don’t fly off with the slightest breeze and you end up accidentally chasing your neighbor. With you knife. Again.

6. D I R T

Open various bags of dirt and pour in, breaking up any particularly large clods with your hands so it areates. It’s also good for your soul to shove your hands into dirt.

7. Realize you’re really bad at math and that you will need to go get more dirt for the last 2 tubs.

8. Wrangle hose from around the other side of the house and give everything a light squirt.  Hydrate again, directly from the hose if safe.

So it took a while for our (probably) last frost to pass, but if I didn’t get stuff in the dirt soon I’d miss most of our growing season.  And it’s been warm enough to leave the Lemon Shrub outside so It’s probably warm enough for seedlings.

So unless I REALLY fail the hell out of a Will Save I’m not planting 5 tomato plants, but the cages are real handy for keeping the soaker hose in place and indicating to Erin the HOA Snitch that what I have going on here is a GARDEN, THAT THING THAT IS TOTALLY LEGAL FOR ME TO HAVE, HAHAHAHAHA FUCK YOU.

We may have run into a small snag in that while the plumber was here fixing my sink he got my seeds wet and some of them have germinated/slightly moldered but I’m leaving for FoCo tomorrow and they’re on a timer for water so what lives, lives and if it really comes to it I’ll put starts in.

I have no idea what’s going on but honestly spill the tea on Erin OP

OK SO- I own a house that’s in the jurisdiction of an HOA, which is supposed to be an organization that does the stuff a super does for an apartment complex, but for a neighborhood, except that ours sucks and doesn’t do dick fuck but annoy me.

As of right now, I don’t have running water between 8AM and 5PM because the HOA never allowed the city to do sewer maintainence because then they’d have to spend money fixing the parking lot, and now something catastrophic has happened to the pipes, and there is a colossal hole in the ground where the parking lot used to be. Also a hideous amount of noise and terrible smells. 

In addition to generally sucking, we have Erin. She was probably born in the Triassic, smokes like a factory victorian children would lose fingers in, and She’s my most recent Mortal Nemesis.

I found out about her when I came down for breakfast about a week after we moved in and found her, on a stepstool, both hands on the glass, peering into my kitchen window at 5 AM.  I slapped the window and swore at her, assuming she was the neighborhood loon*, and a week later got a letter threatening me with a $300 fine if I didn’t remove the nonapproved storage bins off the porch. She then took 9 months to approve me putting the gate the HOA had owed the property since 2012 up, and threatened me with another fine when I put up the damn thing anyway. Other neighbors have been harassed for things like having repairs she’d already approved done, having loud children, and having “too revealing” swimwear.**

She doesn’t get paid to do this, by the way.  She volunteered.

So I’ve taken two lines of precaution.  

Firstly, my reading-disordered ass went down to the library where the actual copy of the rules are kept, INSTEAD OF ONLINE, LIKE EVERY OTHER ORGANIZATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, and read the whole thing until I found a neat loophole to an issue-  The porch is very nice in the summer, but it’s also exposed and people look in the windows and my idiot dog will bound right over that wall after any rabbit he sees, so I want a tall visual barrier put up.  But the rules say no artifical fences or blinds. They do specify that having plants that just so happen to grow up over the edge of the wall are A-OK.  So I’ve planted corn and sunflowers all around the outside.  Should give me a nice 9-foot and perfectly legal fence when they’re done.

Secondly, I’ve made friends with her Priest, a Father McAffery, who runs a legit food bank.  So as far as he knows I’m running the Saint Fiacre’s Food Bank Supplemental Garden and Spiritual Refuge***.  He thinks I’m delightful and Catholic. I am probably one of those things and good at faking the other, but the illusion is enough that I can probably sic him on Erin if she sees fit to complain about the garden.

*I mean, I’m not wrong. 

**Colorado recently legalized allowing people with breasts to have them out in public regardless of gender. Karen in number 6 is also a Mortal Nemesis**** but I’m looking forward to the partially topless fight she and Erin are going to have any day now.

***By which I mean I like growing crops but only want to eat some of them and like feeding other people, and when my mind is troubled and my soul restless, I shall retreat betwixt the corn with an iced coffe and a trashy fanfic until I feel better.

****I have many nemesises. It runs in the family. Karen in Number 6 is her own post though.

Well, it’s been about a month, and everything came up really nice!  The corn is about knee-height from where it’s planted the sunflowers are going to be HUGE, and the Lemon Tree made a tiny, tiny little lemon that the birds ate.

I also found my snap pea and pumpkin seeds and stuck them in the dirt because better late than never and last year my MIL was picking tomatoes off her plant well into the middle of November

Also:  the first of the flowers has bloomed!

I don’t know what it is but it’s cute and the butterflies love it.

Unfortunately, I cannot explain about the Drama of Karen in Number 6 becuase the situation escalated like crazy a few weeks back and now I’m a potential witness in a court case involving her.

Plug It On The Window

The Window Socket offers a neat way to harness solar energy and use it as a plug socket. So far we have seen solutions that act as a solar battery backup, but none as a direct plug-in. Simple in design, the plug just attaches to any window and does its job intuitively.

Designers: Kyuho Song & Boa Oh

I’m on mobile so the last thing won’t load but I’m gonna bet everything that it’s the squid ward “future” thing

Reblogging ause this is super useful to literally everyone especially homeless people and college students

‘LOVING VINCENT,’ an Animated Film Featuring 12 Oil Paintings per Second by Over 100 Painters

‘Loving Vincent’ will be the world’s first feature length painted animation, with every shot painted with oil paints on canvas, just as Van Gogh himself painted. Written & Directed by Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman, produced by Poland’s BreakThru Films & UK’s Trademark Films.  The film is scheduled for a 2017 release.

[Retweet]

Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease

Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero.   She:

She was brought down by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and has been largely forgotten.  But she was a sorcerer, and a hero.  

@theladyragnell

Let’s un-forget her.

Parenting.

hallbeck.com

THANK YOU

I love this one personally.

It gotta better

THIS👏IS👏SO👏IMPORTANT👏 These comics RADIATE good dad energy and I am LIVING for it!

One of the ballsiest things Tolkien ever did was write 473k words about some hobbits called frodo, sam, merry, and pippin and then write in the appendices that their names are actually maura, ban, kali, and razal. 

This just in: Eowyn and Eomer’s names actually start with the letter “L.” [source for other nerds] 

#wait so they have hobbitish names and common names?

No, they have Westron names and English names.

What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us. 

There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign? 

“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”

Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down: 

In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder). 

“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing. 

“Banazîr” is Westron for “half-wise, or simple.” In Proto Germanic, the prefix “Sam” means half, and wise is obviously a word we still use. 

“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because  “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”

“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match. 

Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine. 

I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently). 

The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn”  is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss). 

“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L. 

The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron. 

The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.

Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud. 

Further Reading: 

Rohirric , Westron 

Ok but the fact Frodo means wise and Samwise is half-wise is actually some extremely cute name matching OTP nonsense and I love it

Oh my GOD how did I write this long-ass post and not notice that?

“Ah, Perry the platypus!”

“What an unexpected -“

“WAIT, WAIT, WAIT!”

“You’re trapped!”

“By societal convention!”

“Look! We’re in a fine dining environment. Everyone knows not to throw a scene in a fancy restaurant!”

“That’s right. You’re trapped. Sit down.”

This show is fucking brilliant.

did everyone else read that in his voice

Funny way to find out which plant you might like to buy.

Source: apartmenttherapy.com

FOR MY FOLLOWERS THAT HAVE DIFFICULTY CARING FOR PLANTS AND ASK WHAT THEY SHOULD BUY, THIS IS REALLY GREAT!!