We Are Losing Nearly Ten Percent Of The Planet’s Insect Population Every Decade Due To Human Influence.

was talking to my mom about how white people ignore the contributions of poc to academia and I found myself saying the words "I bet those idiots think Louis Pasteur was the first to discover germ theory"

which admittedly sounded pretentious as fuck but I'm just so angry that so few people know about the academic advancements during the golden age of Islam.

Islamic doctors were washing their hands and equipment when Europeans were still shoving dirty ass hands into bullet wounds. ancient Indians were describing tiny organisms worsening illness that could travel from person to person before Greece and Rome even started theorizing that some illnesses could be transmitted

also, not related to germ theory, but during the golden age of Islam, they developed an early version of surgery on the cornea. as in the fucking eye. and they were successful

and what have white people contributed exactly?

please go research the golden age of Islamic academia. so many of us wouldn't be alive today if not for their discoveries

people ask sometimes how I can be proud to be Muslim. this is just one of many reasons

some sources to get you started:

PubMed Central (PMC)

Arabic Medicine in Literature

Google Books

A History of Medicine: Byzantine and Islamic medicine

but keep in mind, it wasn't just science and medicine! we contributed to literature and philosophy and mathematics and political theory and more!

maybe show us some damn respect

@snake-spotted

“The snakes are very cute and the blog is super positive.”

“if you like seeing adorable little snakes on your dash, then this is the blog 4u!!”

@mtg-cards-hourly

“Inspired several commander decks”

I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test

This is one of the more ambitious pieces I've done for a bit, and I did it on an absurd deadline, but my trans dragon back patch is done! The project ended up taking 130 hours of working time to finish, using two strands of cotton floss for both fills and outlines. The base pattern was from my own collection and was originally from 1936.

How would you describe the art style of the fashion design illustrations? I love the antiquarian looking style

hello my dear! 💖

what an interesting question! 💕💕 either fortunately or unfortunately, you asked either the best or worst person to talk about this lmao 😅😅 as an art history phd student, pretty much all I do is analyze images, so I definitely have some Thoughts™️

first, I'll say that style varies hugely based on time period and publication. even within decades, I've seen a wide variety of styles used, so if you had particular images in mind that you wanted me to talk about, feel free to let me know and I'd be thrilled to discuss those more specifically! ☺️☺️

because there is such a diverse range of stylistic approaches to illustrating fashion plates/images, I'm hesitant to make any sweeping generalizations here, but I will pick out a few themes that I've seen come up a lot:

2d medium vs. 3d object – one of the key features of fashion plates is that, ultimately, they are trying to sell you a garment/style. of course, clothing is three-dimensional, and especially when looking at things like bustled garments, they take up a lot of space in real life that is difficult to represent in a 2d medium. because of this "conflict" between the necessity of depicting the garment and the realities of the medium of drawing/print, we tend to see some odd positioning of the figures. they might be awkwardly bent or twisting in order to show off both a bodice and a bustle at the same time (the figure on the left here is a good example). we also see some "flattening" of the picture plane, wherein the placement of a normally voluminous feature (like a bustle) doesn't really make sense in a naturalistic space, but rather is almost parallel to the chest/bodice of the figure, when in real life it would project backwards rather than weirdly sideways (you can see this in almost any 1880s fashion plate featuring dresses, but this one is a nice example). [also please note that this is not a condemnation of these choices, but rather an analysis of why they're necessary in this medium]

ye olde photoshoppe – connecting to my first point, fashion plates are trying to sell you something, and therefore their artists have incentive to make that product look as attractive/appealing as possible. I do get comments from time to time about how "people don't look like that" or "that's not how bodies work," which, while true, also elide the fact that these artists are not necessarily trying to be naturalistic in their depiction of the human body – they're trying to show you the most marketable version of the human body as determined by the cultural values of their day. just as today we might see impossibly thin models on magazine covers or clearly fake thigh gaps in online retail, so too are the creators of these fashion plates embellishing and exaggerating the human form to make it as appealing as possible to consumers – they're selling a fantasy, not a reality

non-specificity – another thing that is fairly common across historical fashion plates is the non-specificity of facial features on the figures portrayed. if you feel so inclined, take a scroll through the blog and compare the faces of the figures in the illustrations (obviously this does not work in the same way for photographs). you'll likely find that you keep seeing the same face over and over again. what's more, that face has almost no distinctive features, and is almost doll-like in its perfection. given what we've already discussed, this isn't a surprise, since fashion plates are meant to sell garments, and therefore a portrait-like rendering of a specific model isn't really the goal. the figures in fashion plates essentially are dolls – they are meant to be "dressed" in whichever style is being sold, and visually appealing yet non-specific enough to potentially interest a large population of possible consumers

whew! okay I will wrap up my ramblings now, but I hope this was at least a little bit helpful or perhaps mildly interesting! ☺️☺️ as you can see, I love doing this kind of visual analysis, so (as I mentioned above) if you have specific images you wanted me to talk about stylistically, feel free to let me know!! ☺️💕 and thank you again for this great question! 💖💖

if you've made it to the end, thanks for reading my ramblings, and let me know what y'all think about the stylistic features of fashion plates if you have thoughts! 🥰🥰

Astronaut readjusts to life back on Earth

> Don’t give him a baby for a while.

Dress

c. 1880-1890

Grand Rapids Public Museum

we cannot go through ONE family meal without my parents going ok can someone set up the cheese board :)

it was too much i had to make my own post

line cook here. ACCURATE

if you don't get the hate, here's what you don't understand.

it takes up to 2 hours to close down the kitchen.

The last 60-90 minutes before closing time you do almost no cooking because the restaurant doesn't have many people in it and you've already cooked most of their diners.

So if someone walks in during, like, the last hour, the cook is in the middle of an industrial deep clean of the kitchen.

(these numbers can vary quite a bit from place to place but i have worked several restaurants with these actual times and the concept remains the same)

Say the place closes at 10. If you wait til the restaurant is already closed to start all your cleaning duties, you'll be there until at least midnight.

More than that your boss knows that on an average night you can start your clean up as soon as the last rush ends and get out of there around 10:45, even 10:15 on a slow night if you get lucky. That means there are plenty of restaurants where if you do take until midnight the manager is going to come up to you at some point that week and ask you what went wrong that night, and you'd better have an answer.

So this example restaurant closes at 10 pm. The dinner rush ends around 8:30, and shortly after that the cook is going to start getting every single dish possible over to the dishwasher because the dishwasher always gets hit hard and late, and the machine runs for 2 full minutes and only holds so many dishes, so the way that works out is if you wait an extra 30 minutes to give the dishwasher all your stuff it can mean adding like 60 minutes to the end of his shift. And you're gonna KEEP finding shit to send to the dishpit right up until you leave probably.

all these little square and rectangle containers in this cold table have to be pulled out and changed over into new containers, replaced by new full ones, or in some cases filled from larger containers in the back, which can result in even more empty containers to send to the dishwasher.

while it's all pulled apart to do this, you have to clean up all the spilled food and sauce and juices and stuff from the joints and ledges and shelves and drip trays

Once you get your line changed over in this way, and fully stocked, anytime someone orders something that makes use of a bunch of that stuff, you have to restock and re-clean it some. It might already be covered in plastic. Some of it might already be stuck in the back to make room to take apart your cutting board counter to clean. To cook a dish isn't TOO much of a problem at this point, but you're really hoping for zero orders because you still have so much other cleaning to do.

Meanwhile the salad bar and appetizer section and server station and everybody are all doing the same thing. Even the bartenders are stocking olives and lemons and sending back whisks and stir spoons and shakers and empty 4quart storage containers that used to hold the back-up lemons and olives and things. Every section is dumping their must-be-cleaneds to the dishpit as fast as possible because early and fast is the only thing they can do to to help that dishpit not absolutely drown into overtime.

The poor dishwasher is always the last to clock out, soaking wet and exhausted.

Around this time you probably scrub the flat top, which has turned black from cooked on grease and is still about 500 degrees. Line cooks are divided in opinion on water-based or oil based cleaning methods for this, but they all involve scrubbing with (usually) a brick of pumice stone using every ounce of your strength while you try not to burn yourself

you scrub it from fully blackened to gleaming silver and now if somebody orders something that needs the flat top to cook, you can either fuck up your cleaning job or fake it in a couple frying pans and pass that tiny fuck you down to your dishwasher (who usually understands, especially if you help them take the garbage out or clean your own floor drain later)

If there's deep fried stuff on the menu then the fryers have to be cleaned out, which includes straining the oil out into enormous and super-heavy pots full of oil so hot that if you spill on yourself then it's probably a hospital visit and if you slip and fall face first into it it'll be the last thing you ever do.

Then you gotta scrub out the fryer. Like you gotta take the (hot) screen out and reach your arm down into the weird rounded pipes and curved areas (so hot, burn you if you brush against them hot) and scrub off whatever is down there

Depending on your kitchen you might have to do up to four of these. Then you'll have to pour the (dangerously hot) oil back in

oh, and if you didn't dry the pipes and get ALL the water out of the trap and tank?

water reacts with hot oil in a sort of mentos and coke way that can send a tidal wave of oil past the open flame of the pilot light ...HUGE dangerous mess and/or burn down the kitchen if the oil lights up.

Unless! If the oil has been used too hard and needs to be changed, it's time to carry those open topped super heavy pots full of will-kill-you-hot oil and dump them in the barrel outside by the dumpsters so you can put room temp fresh oil in the fryers. whew!

The clean up is not just some light wiping down that can be easily interrupted, is what i'm saying.

You might have to do some kind of walk-in duty (moving around 50lb cases of lettuce and 50lb bags of onions to get to the stacks of five gallon buckets full of salad dressings and sauces to move so you can reach the giant metal pots and bus tubs full of prep and get it all organized and make sure it's all labeled and i have to stop now i'm having flashbacks)

THE POINT IS

by 15 or however many minutes to close, the line cook is doing an intense deep clean and probably has the whole stove taken apart to detail.

For some industrial stoves this means lifting off large cast iron plates that weigh like 20 lbs each and are still quite hot. Whatever metal burners are on there, you gotta take off and clean, you can see here the lines that indicate the large thick cast iron rectangles that sit on top of the burners to allow heavy pots to rest on. Those five (each has one front burner hole and one back burner hole, see?) have to be lifted off and cleaned with soap and a wire brush usually, and then the underneath area also has to be cleaned because a lot of shit falls through the burner holes on a busy night.

if you didn't do it when you did the flat top you have to do the grease trap (which can be like a full five minutes and is always disgusting).. You gotta clean out all the little gas jets in each burner with a wire or something so the burners all flame evenly, and sometimes you have to remove some of the natural gas piping that connects the burners to access where you have to clean.

you gotta clean out the bottom of the oven and the wire racks, and, oh gods, you gotta take down the filter vents from the hood fans above the stove.

See all the lined parts along the top of the wall?

those are hood vents, and as they pull air up they also pull a lot of grease and they have to be taken down and cleaned, then you gotta climb up there and scrub where they go before you put them back...

And then there's the mopping and floor drains and...

Anyway, that's what the line cook is doing when you walk in fifteen minutes before closing and order something that needs to be cooked on that stove. They are doing an entire industrial cleaning of a professional kitchen.

In some restaurants maybe one or two of these jobs will be every other night or even only twice a week, but in many, possibly most kitchens, ALL of these things happen EVERY night. You don't want to leave any food mess that might attract insects or rodents for one thing, so a really good kitchen is as close to brand new as you can get it every night.

IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ORDER SOMETHING ANYWAY, HERE IS WHAT TO DO

open with an apology and ask the server to go ask what the cook would prefer you to order.

Any good server will already know what the cook is hoping for and what will make their line cook go into the walk in and scream. If it's significantly less than an hour to close and they say some variant of "oh anything is fine" they are either telling the lie their boss wants them to say, or they actually do not know what their line cook wants, and you can either use human connection and a conspiratorial just-between-us tone to get them to drop the customer-is-always-right act, or get them to actually go ask the cook.

It might be as specific as "the lasagna is easiest on the kitchen" or it might be a simple guideline like "nothing that requires the flat top" or "any of the sautés are easy" but a good line cook will probably have a system for if they have to make a couple of the most popular items after they start their close, so the answer is likely to include something most people like and you should be good to order that.

but for the love of all that's holy, please only do so at great need. Leave that last 30-60 minutes to the truly desperate and the crew's duties.

AVOID BOA CONSTRICTOR . COM/JEREMY STONE REPTILES

Normally I don't post things like this but I cannot stand by and not say my piece on this. The ball python hobby has been going down the shitter for a long, long time. Not the keeping part of it, no, the big minimalist breeders who see these living, breathing creatures as nothing more than a dollar sign in a plastic tote, are absolutely ruining the hobby for us. Jeremy Stone, owner and runner of boaconstrictor(DOT)com, was throwing ball pythons high up into the air, 'juggling' them, to show potential customers how 'docile' they are. Absolutely no respect to the animals, and with how much he dropped them I would be surprised if one or two of them didn't have a broken rib. If you want to watch the video, a screen grab was taken before he dirty deleted it. It's here. (Sorry its on facebook, I havent seen it on any other platform yet) Not only is he risking these animals being majorly injured, he is showing just how little most big ball python breeders actually care about their animals. Because this is how other big box breeders are reacting:

(Screenshots are not mine, but are shared with permission) NONE OF THEM SEE ANYTHING WRONG WITH IT I am appalled and disgusted. I look at my babies, at Leliana most of all, and I could never imagine treating any of them with even the slightest bit of disrespect. These animals are so sweet, and so curious, and so special. And they're being treated like garbage. Adding on to that, now PETA and other places that exploit pet ownership for money will take this video and try to use it to end the reptile keeping hobby. Because they see this and can share it, and can make it seem like us small hobbyists, that actually love and care for our animals, are treating them like that. He is making us all look terrible. Needless to say, I am not breeding ball pythons anymore. I can't stand the thought of any of my babies going to someone like that. As much as I vet through people before they buy, I can't stop them from rehoming, and there is always a possibility that they'll end up in the hands of someone who only see them as a dollar sign. I'm not 'getting out of the hobby' as it were, they are my babies and they are here to stay. I just won't be breeding them anymore. I may breed other species in the future, but I can't stand the way the ball python hobby has turned out.