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Jeny’s interlock cast off exactly mirrors the long-tail (and the backward loop) cast on AND is a very good stretchy bind off.

This baby sweater is knit bottom up, but I made the sleeves top down, picking up stitches around the armhole, so to get the same edge on the ribbing, I did the long-tail cast on on the body and the interlock cast off on the sleeves.

#knitting

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Remember this joke?

Well, I am going to do something similar only with photography. This is a photo someone took for an Amazon review of their Clinique products.

Honestly, it is not a terrible photo. They did some staging. They have an interesting background. All of the labels are legible. It is properly exposed. This would be a perfectly acceptable product photo for an Etsy page.

I've been taking these advanced photography courses in preparation for whenever I am able to create a new studio in the house. And my teacher is a photography badass. I just watched a 6 hour class on how to recreate a professional Clinique ad. And at first glance it looks deceptively simple. It's just some skin care products being splashed with a little water.

Which is why I wanted you to see an average person for reference.

This is what Karl Taylor came up with.

And I don't think I've learned so much about photography in one tutorial before.

Product photography is just loads and loads of problem solving. You have to light the chrome caps with a gradient. Which requires giant diffusion scrims.

Those big white panels are literally only there for the two chrome caps.

You need a pure white background, but you can't let light spill all over the studio, so you put up giant black light blockers.

And you have to add another light just for the orange bottle on the right.

Oh, and if you want the bottles to glow, well, you have to hide a silver reflector behind them.

But you still want the edges of the bottles to be darker so they have some contrast. So you add some black tape to the sides.

And in order for the reflective labels to have bold black lettering, you have to reflect black cards into them.

Ack! Karl's beautiful bald head is showing up in the chrome caps! He must put on the naughty blanket.

And once you get every aspect of every bottle perfectly lit, you finally get to yeet some water at it all.

I don't love product photography because I have a weird obsession to help greedy corporations make their wares look more beautiful. I love it because it is a complicated and challenging new puzzle every time. Every product is a different shape and requires a different technique to make it look its best.

I don't know if I will be able to live up to Karl's standards.

This is about the level I was at in 2017 before I quit photography.

I have so much more knowledge in my brain now. I'm really hoping I can surpass that.

#photography

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I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.

Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.

But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.

It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.

But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.

#sexism #transphobia #fundamentalism #long post

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Also on topic of Consent: whenever somebody says "Kids should have bodily autonomy!" some guy always is like "You are too unrealistic. What will you do when a kid is seeing the doctor and doesn't want to get a shot? Would you just let them refuse the shot?"

Yeah I probably would. You're straight up asking the wrong person if you want the nice normal answer here. Doctors and nurses forcibly doing (relatively routine) things to my body against my protests when I was a small kid fucked me up so bad that as an adult anything medical related is a huge trigger for me, I've had persistent intrusive thoughts and recurring nightmares about medical procedures, and I can't have even the most basic tests and health checks done on top of it.

I hate talking about it because I can't get comfortable calling it "trauma" and I don't have any other words that are useful, but it's made my life so much harder and really scary since if I start having a weird symptom, there's nothing I can move myself to do about it.

I figured out a loophole where going to a pharmacy instead of a doctor's office for vaccines reduces some of the stress, but I was still in stress and misery for days before I went to get my tetanus shot. The repulsion is so intense it feels like I literally don't have control over myself, it feels like I can't make appointments or plans about such things out of my own free will, and so every year I have guilt guilt guilt guilt guilt about how I should get the flu shot, and it does nothing but ineffectually hurt me.

Vaccines save lives and all that, but when it comes right down to it, I don't think it's actually a net benefit to public health to give any percentage of kids lifelong psychological scars so deep and painful they're almost completely barred from accessing health care as adults.

I know I'm not the only one, far from it.

#medical

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a collection

#raffles

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Today in resumes that confuse and distress me:

- Person who didn't write their own description of their duties at their last job, instead copy-pasted the official job description so their resume looks like a job posting.

#lace's personal stuff #hr stuff

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[video description: a minute and a half sketchy animatic of a scene from Harrow The Ninth  book where Mercymorn hates everyone because they mockingly interpret her scribble of the Beast in not-beastly shapes. ]  I got procreate and I thought: what if I draw mercymorn like fifty times. and then i did. edit: audio is from the audiobook! voiced by Moira Quirk! 

#amazingggg #the locked tomb

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Here I was thinking the point of the exercise was gonna be about how fathers can have a sense of entitlement over their daughters' bodies and lives, the trope of men threatening to harm their daughters' boyfriends, the expectation that women are fragile and men are supposed to protect them and how it's used to control women while making men feel good about themselves...

There are reasons why a man might feel uncomfortable saying he'd let his daughter be alone with a stranger, other than a genuine belief that all men he doesn't know are a threat.

Not leaping onto that fraught "man or bear" TikTok drama post. Instead I'm going to start my own. 😌

I have been shown SEVERAL videos where a wife asks her husband "Would you rather our daughter be in the woods with a man... Or a bear?" The fear on these men's faces. My favorite video was:

Husband: Do I know anything about the man?

Wife: No, you know nothing about the man.

Husband: *long pause* ........doiknowanythingaboutthe

Wife: You know nothing about the bear, either.

Husband: *longer pause, visually going through all the steps of grief* ..........I would........... choose for her to be in the woods........ with........ a bear..........

Like. These men know lmao.

#sexism #'they know!' no they don't #like most people talking about society who haven't actually crunched numbers #they believe what they've been taught to believe and what is convenient for their self image to believe #not to mention how 'all men are bad - all other men are worse than me - so you should stay with me' gets used as an abuse tactic #when you hear a man say all men are bad #'maybe he honestly believes that' should be like 5th on the list of possible explanations #and even him sincerely believing it doesn't mean he's right

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#ok that's funny

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my top 5 harrow moments

���then perish”

calling a recipe book an ‘instruction manual’

saying the teens had underdeveloped brains at her wise age of seventeen

soupgate

telling ortus he looks like a potato even though she’s never seen one

#the locked tomb

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#tide pools #forever tide pools #tumblr polls #cool rocks are the runner up

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Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

#amazing

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out of curiosity do you know where/why peter t daniels separates scripts into 'true' alphabets, abugidas, and abjads? ive always found issue with this

hang on lemme borrow the book from archive.org for an hour and get back to you

#the name abugida comes from the Amharic language's term for its writing system #in which symbols that are the same consonant plus a different vowel (or vice versa) do look similar #so yeah #and fun fact the word abugida is actually directly equivalent to the word alphabet #(alpha-beta) #because a-bu-gi-da is what you find yourself saying if you start reciting the names of all the amharic characters in the traditional order

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Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

Continue Reading.

#the headline would be better if it said #'breakthrough Could mean' or something like that #but it's not a lie and it's only confusing if you aren't coming to it with the knowledge that #it usually takes a significant amount of time to get from 'breakthrough results of a study' to 'treatment available at your local pharmacy'

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But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

#I looove stuff like this

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The combination of 'unnervingly flawless self-control' with 'occasional tendency to engage in reckless, dangerous, and borderline self-destructive or death-seeking behaviour' in a character is SUCH catnip to me

#ok yeah I've been called out

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guillermo del toro’s pinocchio is a beautiful film but my god no one has adapted that story like neverafter. you can never look at it the same way again after listening to lou wilson, a black man, explaining that he chose to play as pinocchio because it’s a story about a little boy who isn’t allowed to make mistakes. that in pinocchio's story, he is fundamentally barred from childhood at once upon a time. he must earn something that everyone else is granted from birth. the other boys get to tell lies and play and get into trouble, but when pinocchio does the same thing there are grave and violent consequences. his pinocchio is trying to understand why the world is so unfair, why the rules are so different for him, why everyone else gets to be a real boy.

and I think about it every day.

#dimension 20