AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Keeping it classy for my 1000th post 1 day ago:
Toum is so good. It forever ruined garlic mayo for me.
For anyone who doesn’t know toum is a Lebanese sauce that uses garlic as the emulsifier, rather than eggs. This means that it’s also vegan. Garlic is also a weaker emulsifier than eggs, so it’s insanely garlicky. Any vampire hunters should consider getting Lebanese food before their next hunting trip for this reason
- Comment on Crying is a free action 2 days ago:
I am a freak who really enjoys linear algebra. It’s actually quite heartening to discover that even amongst my friend group of weirdos, there are still freaks
- Comment on Sway 1 week ago:
I really appreciate the OP of this (nontanne) for making me see the poetry in something I was familiar with, but had never considered in this way before. I think it actually works really well as a poem, and I feel like I’m going to remember this each time it’s extremely windy
- Comment on Nutritional Hexes 1 week ago:
I read a thing recently that argued that “purity” is one of the most distinctive thematic motifs in fascistic thinking, and examined how that is a means by which people can slide into right wing ideologies from an initially left wing position.
It was striking because it made it clock for me why there seems to be a “crunchy eco-leftist turns right wing” pipeline. To attempt to summarise some of the article and my own thoughts following it: A purity oriented framework of health situates “toxins” and the like as the Big Bad Other. Many of us are aware of how dangerous the notion of a Big Bad Other is if we’re thinking about people, but it can creep up with us in contexts like this because it doesn’t seem harmful initially. However, by thinking about health in this way, we train ourselves to think in terms of the Big Bad Other, and condition ourselves towards thinking about things in a black and white manner.
- Comment on Gottem 1 week ago:
Not necessarily. There was a dude who was studying some plant and was measuring their leaves, and discovered that touching them to measure them stunted their growth. It confused him a lot at first.
I think the plant was mimosa pudica, but I will double check the story when I have had some sleep. I just wanted to add this briefly because it’s a very funny story. The dude was super confused when it happened, because I think that science didn’t realise the extent to which plants could detect and respond to touch at that time
- Comment on College core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself 2 weeks ago:
That’s pretty in line with what I’ve read of cognitive science research around learning from lectures.
Though it’s not actually necessary to teach yourself first, at least not fully. The important part is to sandwich things together. You can get a lot of the benefits with just half an hour before and after a lecture.
The short version of it is:
- Before the lecture, write down what you already know about the topic of the lecture, and what you don’t understand. I can’t remember as much about this part, though, to be honest.
- In the lecture, don’t take notes, except perhaps extremely brief notes such as a reference that you want to look up later (i.e. if the lecturer references a particular paper verbally that isn’t on the slides). Focus on engaged listening rather than taking notes (and if you’re neurodivergent, “engaged listening” may involve doing something with your hands, such as crochet or fidget toys)
- The big one is that after the lecture, without looking at notes or your books, you should try to write down as much as you can remember from the lecture, as a free recall test. After you’ve done this, you can look up anything you couldn’t remember.
Though I should note that there isn’t a consensus on the best way to learn. There are some broad themes that research agrees on though. It does seem pretty close to consensus that splitting your learning up into multiple stages is best, and that free recall exercises like this are super powerful. A lot of the specifics are up for debate though
- Comment on THE BRITISH COLONIZED OUR NIPPLES 🇬🇧☕️🧐 2 weeks ago:
Which leads me onto my final, and largest issue I had with your statement. Even ignoring its inaccuracy, I’m not keen on how you’re using corsets to contrast with how saris were worn historically — it reads as “corsets are bad, and saris, which are the polar opposite of corsets, are good”. It’s not actually the “corsets bad” part of that that I have beef with (the rest of my comment already thoroughly addresses that point), but rather the juxtaposition of corsets and saris. Rhetorically, it feels like the bit about the freedom of unstitched saris is implicitly reliant on the notion that corsets are restrictive and bad. This means that, if you were to read my thoughts on corsets and say “okay, I see now that I unintentionally misrepresented corsets as being more restrictive than they are”, that would implicitly diminish the weight of your point about unstitched saris.
Which is to say that unstitched saris and the recent nipple reclamation movement is a beautiful piece of history and culture that does not need to compare itself to European culture in order to be valuable. Defining oneself in opposition to an oppressive force is just another way of being subordinate to that force and is an obstacle to genuine liberation (this thought brought to you by someone who had a “not like other girls” phase as a teenager, where I looked down on all things feminine as a reaction to my growing understanding of patriarchal bullshit).
Corsets, are, of course, relevant to the discussion, in that they’re a part of the British culture that was forced on so many people across the world. However, I think it’s important to avoid putting too much emphasis on directly comparing the features and benefits of historical sari wearing to British fashion. The beauty in material history, for me, is in understanding how things like clothing developed over time as a result of a particular cultural context. I have no doubt that if I could delve into the history of saris, I would find a history just as rich and nuanced as I have found for corsetry. I’d see how things changed as a result of new technologies, silly fashion trends, economic circumstances, cultural exchange with neighbouring countries and religions and more. Or to put it a different way, the beauty is in how a piece of clothing can be an anchor for a particular situated perspective.
One of the many tragedies of colonialism is that it acts outside the natural and beautiful mechanisms of cultural development, and tries to overpower the existing culture and history of a place with its oppressive stench. Writing this comment had got me grieving for an alternate timeline in which the British had come to India and, although initially shocked by clothing they considered to be indecent, came to understand this was just because their sensibilities and preferences had been calibrated in a completely different cultural context. Then that might’ve been the foundation for realising that India having such a drastically different culture and history to Britain was precisely why there was so much that we could have learned from India, if we had been open to engaging in genuine cultural exchange, as equals. Maybe in that world, we’d see fashion trends in Britain be influenced by how unstitched saris were worn (as opposed to appropriating materials and methods divorced from their contexts). Maybe that would lead to a world where British ideas of decency developed to the extent that we might be seeing fashion become more open to the idea of bare breasts. Maybe in India, we could be seeing Indian fashion designers borrowing Inspirations from the more structured British fashion, incorporating them into the rich history of saris and other traditional clothing. You know, the kind of genuine cultural exchange that we can see happening if we study the developmental history of British fashion alongside French fashion. But alas, that kind of dialogue is only possible between equals, and the British came to colonise, not to have conversations.
I have gotten a little off track there with that wistful tangent, but it’s because I’m having difficulty articulating the point that compelled me to write these comments — I wouldn’t have written nearly this much if not for this larger point that I’m struggling with.
I think that I’m trying to say that in British history, corsets were not a garment of oppression. In my hypothetical, alternate timeline, corsets would not have been a garment of oppression in India either, and could have coexisted with bare-breasted, unstitched saris in continual conversation with each other; in that world, directly contrasting the features of corsets and saris would have made more sense. However, due to colonialism, they very much are a garment of oppression for India and many many other countries. That sucks, and I wish it weren’t the case, but it is. And at that point, it often becomes necessary to throw away the artifacts of oppression in their entirety, in order to reclaim the history and culture that colonialism attempted to erase.
I guess the TL;DR of this is that the value of this history exists independently of British historical, and need not justify itself in opposition to such
I’m not sure I managed to capture what I wanted to say very well, but I hope I’m close enough that you get my gist. Please do let me know if there’s anything you would add or amend about my points, because my goal here isn’t to lecture at you, but to engage in a conversation (which is possible even if you don’t find yourself inclined to reply). If you feel I have been an asshole at any point in these comments, I am open to being called out on that. After all, the last thing I want to do is to be yet another British asshole attempting to speak over and override people. I can’t go back in time and prevent colonialism, but I can attempt to recognise the impact of historic (and ongoing) oppression, and aim to subvert that by engaging in conversations between equals. I learned a lot from this post, and my hope for my first comment was that I could reciprocate by telling you about something relevant that I know a heckton about. I wrote this second comment because the rhetorical shape of how you used corsets as a contrast reminds me of something I have slipped into quite a few times in the context of some of the axes on which I am marginalised. I tended not to notice it until allies and friends pointed it out to me, and that changed now I framed things. I was hoping that I might be able to do something similar for you, because I’ve found that the shape of oppression looks uncannily consistent, no matter what axis it occurs on. I’m unsure of whether I have been coherent enough to actually achieve this, mind. In hindsight, I should have probably gone to bed at least an hour ago, and not attempted to say something so complex when I’m this tired, but oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Comment on THE BRITISH COLONIZED OUR NIPPLES 🇬🇧☕️🧐 2 weeks ago:
I wholeheartedly agree that the comment you’re replying to was in poor taste (indeed, the reason why I left the comment I did was because I wanted to redirect the conversation to something more in-keeping with the spirit of the article (and because it personally irks me to see corsets reduced down to just being sexy, and the modern perception of corsets often ends up erasing or overwriting the historical richness of them)
However, I want to challenge your assertion that “a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional.”. I have a few points of contention with this, and I hope that I don’t come across like an asshole in picking at this statement — I am writing this comment because this thread has made it clear that we are kindred spirits in terms of our passion for learning about material culture and history.
The idea of historic corsets being super uncomfortable and restrictive is largely misinformation, driven by how corsets function in a modern context. It’s not really a garment that works with fast fashion. For instance, here is a €100 corset, which I would consider to be extremely cheap. This kind of thing is what I’d reluctantly recommend if a friend wanted a corset that was a cheap as possible. This is quite shocking for many, because €100 for one garment is still pretty damn expensive, especially if that’s still what I’d consider to be cheap. But it’s simply not possible to make a corset cheaply (not even when produced by exploited workers in countries where labour is cheaper). Here’s an example of an actually decent corset from a corsetière and pattern maker respected by historical fashion enthusiasts. It’s $350, and that’s its heavily discounted clearance price (They don’t have any full price examples atm)
But the problem goes deeper than that. Modern corsets are often made using drastically different methods that produce a garment that is inherently uncomfortable. This applies even to extremely high end, or bespoke brands. Most corsets you’ll buy today are way heavier and more rigid than historic corsets, due to using more layers of fabric (fabric that’s often synthetic, and thus less breathable), and lots of steel boning (as opposed to synthetic whalebone, cane, or cording, which would be more historical).
Abby Cox is a fashion historian who has a great video analysing why modern corsets are so uncomfortable . She compares a variety of modern corsets to authentic Victorian corsets. I think this is a great example because it is true that Victorian corsets were more structured than corsets from previous eras. It really highlights how our modern perception of corsets is based on things that are fundamentally ahistorical. I also like this video because Abby is viscerally offended by some of the modern corsets, which captures my own feelings on this.
It’s also important to understand corsets in their historical context too, especially what function they provided. For example, bones corsets are super useful for helping distribute the load of many heavy skirts. That’s part of why I like to wear corsets — I have a belt thingy that I wear with an excessive number of pockets, pockets and tool loops on it, and that’s so heavy that it can be uncomfortable to wear without a corset underneath. It’s essential to understand that people wore corsets because they were comfortable. I’ve seen people complete obstacle courses while wearing corsets that appear super restrictive to the modern eye, but are actually well fitted, light and not restrictive of movement. The majority of people wearing corsets back then were people who needed to be able to do work (including manual labour) in them, and if corsets limited that, people wouldn’t have worn them.
Now, that isn’t to say that trends in fashion and patriarchal expectations of how a woman should dress isn’t part of the picture here — it 100% is, and that’s part of the historic context that’s important to understand. In a patriarchal society, it’s impossible to fully understand women’s fashion history without taking into account gendered expectations. However, even that is something that can be easily misunderstood from a modern eye in a manner that erases the agency of the historic women who wore these clothes.
Some of the silliest trends in women’s fashion history were heavily driven by women. People see images like this and often go "ones that make people go “look at how much more oppressive the patriarchal expectations on women were back then”, but that’s missing so much context. My favourite example to drive home this point is the farthingale skirt, which is a wide framed structure that is worn beneath skirts to give a hoop shape near the hips — the image I shared is an example of one. I really love the example of absurdly large farthingale skirts because, far from being a silly trend pushed upon women by patriarchal expectations, this was actually a thing that pissed off a lot of men of the time. Men were like “boo, the skirts that women are wearing these days are bad, because it’s so much harder to get close to them”. Women were like “oh, you don’t say? <Makes skirt even wider>”. When this pissed the men off even more, they just made them wider still. I’ve read some interesting academic articles that examine how farthingales were a means for women in the Elizabethan era to take up more space — both literally and figuratively. In a sense, the farthingale skirt was a form of feminist resistance.
And this kind of thing happens across eras — much of the modern misunderstandings about how restrictive Victorian corsets were is based on male-centred scaremongering that was like “look at those silly women with their tight corsets. They’re causing serious damage to their ability to be baby makers” (though often these claims of harm had no evidence to support them, but were propagated because loud and powerful men have a disproportionately large impact). Fashion history as an academic discourse is relatively new, in large part because it is only relatively recently that it was able to gain enough respect to be understood as a valid field of academic inquiry. Even now though, it still occupies a marginalised position in the discourse (much like the women who made and wore these clothes, and the many women within this field of study).
If you’ve read this far, then I earnestly thank you for your willingness to hear me out. Despite all I’ve written, I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface. To bring it back to your statement that “a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional”, my TL;DR response is that this is a factually incorrect statement that I am challenging you on because this is the kind of misinformation that harms our modern understanding of the reality of historical corsets.
I apologise if that’s a bit blunt. I certainly don’t blame you for holding this incorrect belief — like I said, these kinds of myths are so prevalent that they affect even high end modern corsetry. I wrote all of this because I felt it to be a part of my ethical duty to correct you, but also, I wanted to do it in a manner that would be conducive to learning. We’re both coming into this conversation with different lived experiences and cultural contexts, so it’s inevitable that there are going to be blind spots where we either hold inaccurate beliefs, or lack knowledge about cultures that we aren’t already rooted in. For instance, I never knew about Jnanadanandini Devi before reading the linked post, and I’m grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to learn something that’s far beyond the small facet of fashion history I’ve had a chance to study.
I have more to say, but today I learned that Lemmy comments have a character limit. I will continue below.
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
I’m actually a woman, who is thirsty for a utopian future in which men of all sorts wear pretty sundresses. I have heard plenty of guys say they wish that it were socially acceptable to wear them though (and whilst I’m very much an advocate of “fuck what everyone else thinks, wear what makes you happy”, dressing in a gender non-conforming manner can be actively dangerous, which is depressing for so many reasons)
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
Whilst I appreciate your suggestion, I’m actually a women who loves the many pleasures of skirts and dresses (including but not limited to: easy access for sex; hiding objects in secret petticoat pockets; placing my skirt over the AC unit during a heat wave).
I wonder if I should have mentioned in my comment that I’m a woman, because if I read it as if it’s from a man’s perspective, then it does give a “damn, I wish it were socially acceptable for me, a man, to wear a dress”.
But no, the angle of my comment was that I would go absolutely fucking feral for men in sundresses. (aside from being queer enough that I don’t care about gender norms much, and actively find it attractive to see people dressing in subversive ways, I am also recalling a random gif I saw way back that involved two muscular dudes wearing sundresses for a joke and deciding “actually, we look and feel hot as hell in these”. That gif changed me, man.)
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
You know, this comment was actually pretty inspiring for me. I only own one sundress, and it’s been sitting in my “to be repaired” bag for way too long. However, I am spending this weekend with a partner, and so I am suddenly motivated to repair that damn dress.
- Comment on it really do be like that 2 weeks ago:
Men should get to wear pretty sundresses too.
I don’t even mean in a femboy sense (though that’s great too). Gimme beefcakes and bears in sundresses, damnit.
- Comment on THE BRITISH COLONIZED OUR NIPPLES 🇬🇧☕️🧐 2 weeks ago:
One of the things that I love about corsets is that they have a long history, where the shape and style of them changed over time. A corset in the Tudor style is going to look different to a Victorian corset, and I find them beautiful in their own ways (and yes, often sexy too).
Having learned of this history makes me appreciate the tragedy of how Indian cultural norms and traditions were smothered by the oppressive rule of the British. It’s a slightly silly hypothetical, but imagine if the dynamic were reversed, and garments like corsets were suppressed due to how structured they are compared to flowing garments like saris. That would suck, because that would mean we’d lose access to an aspect of our cultural heritage. Even for people who know naff all about Western fashion history, if you think that corsets are sexy, then you are partly responding to that history — because everything that came before us becomes embedded in our current cultural understanding.
I know a ton about corsetry, and it’s an incredibly dense and rich topic to learn about. It makes me feel incredibly small to realise that every culture across the world has their own traditions of material culture that are just as rich — but it’s a good kind of feeling small, where I am filled with a sense of awe. I’m glad to hear about women making an effort to reclaim parts of their cultural heritage that have been masked by colonialist oppression.
- Comment on THE BRITISH COLONIZED OUR NIPPLES 🇬🇧☕️🧐 2 weeks ago:
I love the image near the bottom of the article — those women look joyously beautiful p
- Comment on Delicious 2 weeks ago:
They would make cool earrings
- Comment on Forg 2 weeks ago:
Forg
- Comment on Anon has a hobby 2 weeks ago:
Aha! Yes, I know this because I have played Oxygen Not Included, and now I am feeling very smart.
- Comment on Anon has a hobby 2 weeks ago:
That certainly wouldn’t make this better, but it does make it weirder, in a sense
- Comment on Dumb glasses 3 weeks ago:
Sousveillance is such a good word. I learned it through an SCP story
- Comment on Why conservative men repeatedly crash Grindr 3 weeks ago:
Being opposed to misogyny (even when it’s directed at awful people) does not make me a compatriot of theirs. The problem with the system is the oppression, not that the wrong people are being oppressed.
I don’t know what justice would be appropriate for all the harm these women have done, but I know that bigotry such as gendered oppression is antithetical to justice (even when it’s directed at people who have used their privilege on other axes to oppress others).
- Comment on Why conservative men repeatedly crash Grindr 3 weeks ago:
What an absurd statement. In no world am I standing by Trump. I’m a queer cripple who literally only has a place to live right now due to the solidarity and support of other oppressed people.
I don’t want to be the boot because the people I love and I have already been bled so much by the ruling class and no amount of revenge will be able to give me the life I could’ve led if not for the oppression I have faced.
- Comment on How I want to be flirted with 3 weeks ago:
🎶 My ass is a dump truck! My thighs are also dumbtruck 🎶
- Comment on Why conservative men repeatedly crash Grindr 3 weeks ago:
We are justifiably angry at Republicans like this because they are enthusiastically a part of the boot that we are being crushed beneath. However, there is a distinction between wanting to be free of the boot, and wanting to be the boot.
It feels cathartic to be mean to people like this, and let’s be real, this level of unkindness is but a fraction of the cruelty they inflict upon us. However, this path does not lead to justice. I don’t want to be like them — not even a little bit.
- Comment on Let's discuss... 4 weeks ago:
The meme doesn’t say anything about attractiveness though. As a not very attractive goth girl, I like goth style because it makes me feel less self conscious and more powerful in myself. The silly stompy boots help a lot with that
- Comment on Anon blows his dad's mind 4 weeks ago:
I have a friend who is a vicar, and she tends to use They/Them for God, which I find interesting.
I also met a few people who use different pronouns for the Holy Trinity. She/Her tends to be either the Holy Spirit or the Father (the Father being She/Her seemed odd to me, but this person felt quite strongly that the Holy Spirit was They/Them, and that Jesus was He/Him).
They/Them tends to be used for either the Holy Spirit or Jesus (Jesus says “I am He” at one point, and the argument here is that this isn’t Jesus saying his pronouns are He/Him, but rather that “He” refers to the entity who made Jesus — I.e. God).
He/Him tends to be used for Jesus or the Father.
Even amongst people who don’t use pronouns other than He/Him for the Christian God or one of God’s aspects, I’ve heard quite a few people argue that He/Him != he/him (and that They/Them != they/them etc.) and thus God uses neopronouns.
- Comment on so cozy 🐟 4 weeks ago:
And Steve probably wouldn’t blame you for that either. He’d just try to soften your heart by being his usual, earnestly enthusiastic self.
Damn, this thread (and replying to your comment in particular) just hit me with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. I’m so glad that I got to grow up at the time when I did, because now I have the privilege of grieving for Steve Irwin. Steve will always be a part of my fond childhood memories.
- Comment on We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI 4 weeks ago:
I’ve found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it’s a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.
- Comment on The Hole 5 weeks ago:
I’d rather see multiple comments giving the same safety advice if it means people are more likely to be able to see it.
Telling kids “you’re only allowed to dig a hole that’s at least as wide as it is deep” is likely to go over a lot better than “you’re not allowed to dig a deep hole because it’s unsafe”
- Comment on Just one more square bro 5 weeks ago:
Basically just to see if they can. We can think of the problem from multiple angles. The general problem is: “if we have a larger square with side length of a, what’s the maximum number of smaller squares (with side length of b) that we can fit into that larger square?”. If we have a larger square with side length of 4, then we can fit 16 squares in. If the larger square had a side length of 5, then we can fit 25 squares in. So this means that if we want a neat packing solution, and we can control how large the outer square is (in relation to the inner squares), then we want each side of the larger square to be a whole number multiple of the smaller square’s side length.
But what if that isn’t our goal? The fact that packing 25 squares into a 5x5 square is an optimal packing solution with no spare space means that it will be impossible to fit 25 smaller squares into a square that’s less than 5x5 large. But what about if we do have awkward constraints, and the number of smaller squares we have to pack isn’t a square number? The fact that this weird packing solution in the OP has 17 squares isn’t because 17 is prime, but rather that 17 is 1 more than 16 (it’s just that 17 happens to be prime).
This is a long way of saying that because packing 16 squares into a square is easy, the natural next question is “how large does the larger square need to be to be able to pack 17 squares into it?”. If this were a problem in real life where I had to pack 17 squares into a physical box, most people would just get a box that’s at least 5x5 large, and put extra packing material into all the spare space. But asking this question in terms of “what’s the smallest possible box we could use to pack 17 squares in?” is basically just an interesting puzzle, precisely because it’s a bit nonsensical to try to pack 17 squares into the larger square. We know for certain we need a box that’s larger than 4x4, and we also know that we can do it in a 5x5 box (with a heckton of spare space), so that gives us an upper and lower bound for the problem — but what’s the smallest we could use, hypothetically?
As a fellow autistic person, I relate to your confusion. But I’d actually wager that there were a non-zero number of autistic people who were involved in this research. It sort of feels like “extreme sports” for autistic people — doing something that’s objectively baffling, precisely because it feels so unnatural and wrong
- Comment on Just one more square bro 5 weeks ago:
The optimisation objective is to fit n smaller squares (in this case, n=17) into the larger square, whilst minimising the size of the outer square. So that means that in this problem, the dimensions of the outer square isn’t a thing that we’re choosing the dimensions of, but rather discovering its dimensions (given the objective of "minimise the dimensions of the outer square whilst fitting 17 smaller squares inside it)
