Y'all ever open a book on a new subject, read a little bit, and have to put it back so you can process the way in which your mind was just expanded?

The textile book: okay here is some of the ways that textiles are important to human life

me: Okay!

The textile book: Clothes separate the vulnerable human body from the conditions of the outside world, and in doing so absorb the sweat and debris of human existence, accumulating wear and tear according to the lives we live. In this way, various lifestyles and professions are represented by clothing, and the clothing of a loved one retains the imprint of their physical body and their life being lived, as though the clothes absorb part of the wearer's soul

Me: ...oh

The textile book: The process of weaving a garment and the process of a child being formed in its mother's womb are often referred to using the same language. Likewise, when a baby is born, a blanket or other textile material is the first material object it encounters and protects it. Textiles can create the idea of two things being inextricable, as with being "woven together," or can create the sense of separateness, as with a curtain or veil that separates two rooms or spaces, even separating the living from the dead, or separating two realities, such as a performance ending when the curtain falls

Me: ...oh God

The textile book: Odysseus's wife Penelope undid her weaving in secret every night to delay the advances of her suitors. In this way she was able to turn back the passage of time to allow her husband to come home. Likewise the Lakota tell a story of an old woman embroidering time by embroidering a robe with porcupine quills. If she finishes the embroidery, the world will come to an end, but her faithful dog pulls out the quills whenever her back is turned, turning back the clock and allowing existence to continue.

me: ...is...is...is that why we refer to the fabric of space and time?

The textile book: The technological revolution of textile making is sadly underappreciated. The textile arts are possibly the most fundamental human technology, as once people created string and rope, they could create nets for catching fish and small animals, and bags and baskets for carrying food. In the earliest prehistoric times, the first string or cord perhaps came from sinew, found in the body of an animal. Because of this perhaps the body of a living being could be understood as made of a textile material. Indeed textiles have the function of preserving life, as with a surgeon stitching back together the human body or bandages being placed on a wound. Textile technologies are being used to create life-changing implants to restore function to injured parts of the body, as though a muscle or tendon can be woven and made in this way. Cloth can be used to create a parachute that will save a human's life as they plummet out of the sky. Ultimately, the textile technologies are used to enter new parts of the universe. [Photo of an astronaut and details explaining the astronaut's suit]

Me: STOP!! MY MIND IS NOT STRONG ENOUGH FOR THIS

The book is "Textiles: The Whole Story" by Beverly Gordon

Reblog if you didn’t write My Immortal

We’re going to find the author by process of elimination.

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

Apparently, I have 9 invitations available, and I think I've used one of them ever, so if anyone out there wants to make an AO3 account, just DM me and I'll send you an invite. ✌️

Oh, I also have invitations, let me know. I never even knew I had them

occasional posts from users

reblog if you make occasional posts

JUST FUCKING LISTEN. 

THIS IS HALLOWEEN BUT NOT LIKE YOU KNOW IT

reblog so others can hear it!

Where the hell are the Victorian Goths they should be all over this.

*SMASHES REBLOG BUTTON*

this is some insta-reblog shit, my friends, i’m like 20 seconds in

HELL YES I LOVE THIS

Happy ten years to this post!

why do grooms get one boring black jacket and brides get the most jawdropping gowns ever like when i get married i want pearls and lace and a train is that too much to ask??

Hnn could you imagine.. a suit embroidered with baroque pearls… a LACE CAPE gently floating behind the groom… a fuckin sword..

oh my god…. your m i n d…. the wedding industry is quaking 

Meanwhile in Scotland…

YO, there are SO MANY great groom outfits around the world where he is dressed all in silk, lace, gold, pearls and glitter, with capes and scarves, hats and stitchery and I find it so sad that most of these countries switch over to “suit”. Like, look at these handsome boys!

India

Sudan

China (traditional)

Nigeria

Indonesia

Mongolia

Ghana

Ethiopia

Poland

Romania

Russia (1)

Russia (2)

*shakes fist at sky*

damn you western marriage culture

may I add

Norway

japan 

japan the hard core traditional wedding costume

Turkey

Hungary

Navajo

maori (new zealand)

Fiji

Tonga

Here are some gay wedding additions:

India

India-Pakistan

South Africa

Thailand

Japan

Georgia

This last addition to this ^^^ is my genuinely my most favorite part!

I rb’d a different version of this and added other cultures (including that Georgian one – which, ftr, notes that these guys are Georgians in America, because if they’d worn those clothes [chokha] in Georgia as openly gay men having a gay wedding, there’s a not-insignificant chance they would’ve gotten killed, since gay men aren’t considered “real men” and only “real men” are deemed worthy of wearing chokha. Which I think is contextual information worth sharing here – that this isn’t just beautiful cultural garb but also a very deliberate act of defiance and pride using that clothing in the face of the intensely hypermasculine, homophobic culture it comes from).

Rb’ing this alternative version just because I love the inclusion of some of the other same-gender weddings.

Which is relevant for another reason, namely that the Western boring suit wedding attire (and the blandness of a lot of Western men’s clothing in general over the past hundred years or so) is a result of Western homophobia selling the idea that it’s gay/effeminate for men to care too much about their appearance or to present themselves as an object of desire.

What I like about a lot of these pictures is that the straight couples match! They’re wearing the same fabrics and look like they belong together! What an obvious idea, how strange we never do it

Yooooo just adding on that the ‘Navajo’ picture shows the groom and bride regalia from different bands- Idk anything about Navajo culture but the groom is DEFINITELY from the PNW, the dots on his button blanket are abalone buttons

I wanted to get into embroidery last year and of course the first project that popped into my head was a massive one. So here's the masterpost for the Discworld jacket I'm currently working on. The plan is to have at least one motif for every book and cover the whole thing. Wish me luck.

This is a work in progress, so I'll update this post when I finish new stuff.

Feel free to suggest things that should be on there. I've still got a list I'm working through, but any ideas are appreciated. 😊❤

I've been working on Great A'Tuin on and off since July 2022. My rough estimate is that it took me 150 hours total. That's the low end btw. I think it was totally worth it, though! ❤

Next up: the luggage and Errol.

At least this one only took me two months. Progress! Meet my version of the Death of Rats.

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

Yeah, I’d watch Muppets Lord of the Rings

@thebibliosphere

Having anotheg 'gork we have got to get out of bed faster then this' morning

dasfsffadfjdag I meant girl but gork works better

I didn't even question it I was nodding along like I'm literally right there with you gork

#classic gork morning behaviour [lliyrapohl]

ready to adopt 'having a gork morning' into my vernacular

Any conspiracy theory about people going missing in National Parks is automatically silly to me. Like "Why are National Parks such a hotbed of disappearances???" because they're full of idiots. You've got thousands of people who've never pissed outdoors in their life wandering around the woods/desert/mountain with zero experience and zero gear and zero understanding that this place can kill them. You don't see as many disappearances in wild areas because people don't go to them unless they have some background knowledge. Whereas you get tour buses full of old folks and suburban families shuttling people into National Parks 365 days a year. If you took the same amount of buffoons and dropped them in the actual wilderness the disappearances would be significantly higher than at the parks. Use your brain.

Some fun stuff from the notes:

what a good morning!! im gonna draw a dog!!

apRIL FOOLS I DREW TWO DOGS THEY’RE BEST FRIENDS

Where will the lies end?

Poisson d'Avril

"In 1508, French poet Eloy d'Amerval referred to a poisson d'avril (April fool, literally "April's fish"), possibly the first reference to the celebration in France." Wikipedia