As protests start ramping up and violence escalates please remember:

DO NOT PUT MILK IN YOUR EYES FOR PEPPER SPRAY OR TEAR GAS.

It can and will cause infection due to bacteria. Flush with water, distilled if possible, and never EVER wear contact lenses to protests where there may be police retaliation.

Please reblog. It may save someone's sight.

I'm going to either find or make my own post about this but I'm a street medic, I was trained by the Black Rose organization medical branch during Occupy and have since done my own research with papers written for and by the cops and military about treating chemical agent exposure. this is correct, please do not use milk. I'm not sure about distilled water because I haven't seen it used in any papers or ok the ground, but my suspicion is that while it is probably not harmful, the osmotic qualities of distilled water may hurt or cause contact damage to the mucus membranes of the eyes. in addition, riot control chemicals are mostly designed to be water-activated and plain water will make the exposure sites hurt worse with minimal benefit besides flushing out any particles that aren't glued on with the oil medium they use for these agents.

in at least one study, the research on tear gas and pepper spray exposure showed that plain water was so painful that most cops who volunteered to be test subjects for treatment trials refused to use it, opting instead to just wait until they could shower or for the chemicals to degrade on their own. this is a pretty important indicator of both cops being mega pussies, and that plain water isn't very effective at treating riot control chemical injuries.

the substance that tested best in multiple trials was sterile buffered saline solution. in other words, the same stuff that comes in the squirt bottles for cleaning your contact lenses. this is a useful tool to carry into a protest because the squirt bottle makes it easy to direct the flow of water over the surface of the eyeball. trials also showed that putting this solution into your eyes prior to exposure cut down on discomfort quite a bit. in practice, this looks like putting in some clean eye drops from the drug store before you are exposed to riot weapons.

remember, if you are injured in a protest, call "medic!" out loud and street medics will find you. this has been standard protest practice for decades.

onions and milk and vinegar should not go in your eyes. I've seen all three recommended for tear gas treatment and I do not think they are a good idea or that they will work. stick to sterile saline or LAW (liquid antacid + water).

consider carrying an osha-approved eyewash bottle for easier application

also, please wear a helmet and buy a gas mask

PSA to all historical fiction/fantasy writers:

A SEAMSTRESS, in a historical sense, is someone whose job is sewing. Just sewing. The main skill involved here is going to be putting the needle into an out of the fabric. They’re usually considered unskilled workers, because everyone can sew, right? (Note: yes, just about everyone could sew historically. And I mean everyone.) They’re usually going to be making either clothes that aren’t fitted (like shirts or shifts or petticoats) or things more along the lines of linens (bedsheets, handkerchiefs, napkins, ect.). Now, a decent number of people would make these things at home, especially in more rural areas, since they don’t take a ton of practice, but they’re also often available ready-made so it’s not an uncommon job. Nowadays it just means someone whose job is to sew things in general, but this was not the case historically. Calling a dressmaker a seamstress would be like asking a portrait painter to paint your house

A DRESSMAKER (or mantua maker before the early 1800s) makes clothing though the skill of draping (which is when you don’t use as many patterns and more drape the fabric over the person’s body to fit it and pin from there (although they did start using more patterns in the early 19th century). They’re usually going to work exclusively for women, since menswear is rarely made through this method (could be different in a fantasy world though). Sometimes you also see them called “gown makers”, especially if they were men (like tailors advertising that that could do both. Mantua-maker was a very feminized term, like seamstress. You wouldn’t really call a man that historically). This is a pretty new trade; it only really sprung up in the later 1600s, when the mantua dress came into fashion (hence the name).

TAILORS make clothing by using the method of patterning: they take measurements and use those measurements to draw out a 2D pattern that is then sewed up into the 3D item of clothing (unlike the dressmakers, who drape the item as a 3D piece of clothing originally). They usually did menswear, but also plenty of pieces of womenswear, especially things made similarly to menswear: riding habits, overcoats, the like. Before the dressmaking trade split off (for very interesting reason I suggest looking into. Basically new fashion required new methods that tailors thought were beneath them), tailors made everyone’s clothes. And also it was not uncommon for them to alter clothes (dressmakers did this too). Staymakers are a sort of subsect of tailors that made corsets or stays (which are made with tailoring methods but most of the time in urban areas a staymaker could find enough work so just do stays, although most tailors could and would make them).

Tailors and dressmakers are both skilled workers. Those aren’t skills that most people could do at home. Fitted things like dresses and jackets and things would probably be made professionally and for the wearer even by the working class (with some exceptions of course). Making all clothes at home didn’t really become a thing until the mid Victorian era.

And then of course there are other trades that involve the skill of sewing, such as millinery (not just hats, historically they did all kinds of women’s accessories), trimming for hatmaking (putting on the hat and and binding and things), glovemaking (self explanatory) and such.

TLDR: seamstress, dressmaker, and tailor are three very different jobs with different skills and levels of prestige. Don’t use them interchangeably and for the love of all that is holy please don’t call someone a seamstress when they’re a dressmaker

Mermay Day 4: Caldina

katara is one of those impossibly cool people who “has a guy” for everything. like run into any sort of problem and she’s just like “hang on i gotchu. just contact this number and they’ll know what to do.” but half the time that guy is just sokka

incredibly in-character

i hate that post that’s like “wizard hat cowboy brim” because the full outfit that someone added onto it isn’t even remotely cowboyish. if ur gonna try to combine these aesthetics make a fucking effort. if zamigo did it you can too

now THIS? THIS is wizard cowboy.

This thread omg

Family doesn’t have to be blood related.

Sometimes family is a righteously angry little girl, her supportive brother, a random stranger with a thirst for chaos and justice, two foreign grandmas, and The Rest Of The Plane.

yasss this makes me happy like nothing else lol

As a note for many of the commentors, we were not ON THE PLANE at any point during this encounter. We were at the departure gate in the Melbourne Airport.

We were not remotely the most chaotic thing happening. International departure gates are a circle of hell.

Oh my goodness, the woodpecker 😆 (other two are Oriole and female Grosbeak)

Curious why the woodpecker kept doing this.

Reblog if you think fanfiction is a legitimate form of creative writing.

Affirming boys' right to be silly and women's right to blow shit up

Feeling normal about Javert and Eponine today

Holy crap “Lost Stars” just acknowledged the existence of transgender people in the Star Wars universe. And not only that, but that transition technology and procedures exist and are relatively common knowledge.

I know some people could interpret this as an anti-trans women joke, but it honestly doesn’t read that way to me. This author, Claudia Gray, could have had Dak say something very different, either overly derisive of trans people (we all know how those jokes tend to go) or responding with agreement about how cold it is and not mentioning transition at all. Instead Gray has Dak say “There are easier ways to switch genders you know.” Aka if for some reason Thane wasn’t talking about the cold, it opened up that line of conversation (Perhaps Dak’s reason for saying it within the diegesis of the story). Aka letting any trans readers know that people like them exist in the Star Wars universe in canon, even if no named trans characters have appeared yet (I don’t think they have?).

Idk, this line blew me away and made me really happy. Gray has made people like me a canon part of the Star Wars universe with this line, and not in a way that marginalizes us or treats us as freaks (at least the way I read this line) and that makes me ludicrously pleased.

Update! I saw Claudia Gray at C2E2. I pointed out the line to her and said “Thank you so much for making people like me a part of Star Wars.” And then basically gave her a short version of my post on the line.

She gave me a big hug and told me that she was so glad I caught the line and read it that way, because that’s exactly how she meant it, and of course trans people are a part of the Star Wars universe. And then she signed my book like this:

I’m so overwhelmingly happy you guys. You have no idea.

PEOPLE OF EARTH.  LOOK AT THIS THING.  IT IS GREAT.

(ETA: Hopefully now you can all see the picture?)

Fanart

FF14 - Urianger

I just had to, it was a desperate need

ah.

Keep in mind these things were advertised heavily as being able to drive through reasonably deep water as a standard feature.

It does this even in the wading mode if you attempt to do so.

So much water gets pooled into the frame you can hear it sloshing around.

Tesla “vehicles” are about as reliable as the machinations of a cartoon coyote.

I genuinely don't understand how you fuck up the automobile so fucking bad. We've had close to a century of knowing that all of this "innovation" is stuff that doesn't work.

Because they deliberately and specifically avoided all that stuff we learned the hard way because it was "old fashioned thinking." Like steering wheel design. There were a lot of steering wheel designs before we settled on the ubiquitous one we all use, and quite a few of the designers of those earlier ones have biographies that end with "died during field testing."

Musk ignored ALL of that accumulated knowledge, thinking he was very clever, and built a car-shaped object.

I started reading this post feeling like "do not wash in direct sunlight" sounds like it should get filed alongside "do not feed after midnight" and other warnings about the husbandry of mythological monsters, and then it turns out that putting water on it (in direct sunlight) will kill it, not precisely like but still having very much in common with the Wicked Witch of the West.

What a time to be alive.

Do we know yet if a few weeks of rain does the same thing?