[Image Description: All-caps black text on a white background reading, “You have to marry whatever is on your phone/computer background. Who is it?” End ID.]
“Don’t just throw ripped jeans away, you can repair them using these 10 cute Visible Mending techniques!!” unfortunately my friend the first point of failure for every single pair of jeans i have owned in my life has been the Crotch and Ass. Knees: fine, cuffs: fine; but 3 years in, and all that stands between the world and my astronaut-patterned taint is 0.5µm of denim worn so thin that every squat threatens to tear it to shreds like wet toilet paper. If the Tiktok craft community could figure out a way to resurrect jeans afflicted in such a way that doesn’t involve adding a whole ass buttpatch like some sort of inverse assless chaps situation then that’d be great
May I recommend the sashiko family of techniques? I’m not sure if you’ve seen this particular method but it’s one that is likely thousands of years old and is especially good for areas like the inseam or the knees that generally get more wear than other regions:
Many of the visible mending hacks one sees are designed to be aesthetic and not structural, as OP points out, but this technique is different:
1) you’ll notice that the mended area is larger than the actual damage. All of the stitched area indicates where additional fabric is added for strength.
2) the pattern of visible stitching is PRACTICAL in this work. The reason pants wear down along the inseam is that the fabric is constantly being rubbed against the other leg. Here, the stitching is what’s rubbing against itself, and the embroidery will fail first, meaning the fabric underneath will last longer.
3) this technique is very, very simple once you draw your grid, and there are plenty of places online that sell water soluble graph paper that you can sew into as a guide and then wash out.
Please please please don’t give up on home sewing and mending because of content farms - I promise there’s a whole world of incredibly simple and reliable techniques that - while perhaps time consuming - are PROVEN to increase the longevity of your clothes AND give you further opportunities to express your creativity and style!!!
As much as I want to support ethical farming practices I will be buying the cheapest bag of frozen chicken thighs as much as the next frugal/poor person which is why animal welfare needs to be legislated, not left up to the invisible hand of the free market or some bullshit. Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats.
When I was “I want him” about a male character im not saying I wanna fuck him. I want him like a spoiled little girl wants a pony, I want to him so I can put him on my shelf for safekeeping, I want him like a good hearty stew on a winter’s evening, I want to put him in a jar and shake it.
If you know anyone who seems really chill to the point of being virtually indestructible, like nothing could ever bother them in any way, could get hit by a train and just shake it off and be totally fine, laughing it off as soon as they’ve dusted themselves off and stopped bleeding, but who occasionally just randomly falls apart to complete fucking smithereens with seemingly no cause nor warning, only to get back up again a few minutes/hours/days later like “ok yeah I’m fine again that was weird lmao”, and you’ve ever wondered what the fuck is up with that:
They are actually not ok and most likely are not ok at any point. The whole “hardiest person you know who just collapses randomly sometimes” thing isn’t a deliberately constructed façade, as a matter of fact it might be something that they actually personally believe themselves to be. But in reality this is somebody who’s either unintentionally learned or has been deliberately trained to hide negative emotions and mask symptoms at all costs, as the #1 priority that goes over any other survival needs.
So even though it may look like they go from 1 to 100 completely at random and unpredictably, and then swing right back again to being totally fine, you have no way of knowing how long they’ve been at 95% before the last line of defense broke down and the system collapsed. And once they flip back up, odds are that they just managed to scrape their shit back together again just enough to get their backup masking systems running. The “check engine” light never turned on because the wire was clipped years ago.
If this is you, this is your callout to seek some sort of help. I’m telling on everyone in this room including myself.
Every engine failure is “unpredictable” and “random” if you’ve taped over the Check Engine light.
Spent the last four hours or so starting on a new project: mapping the locations of famous horror movies set in America. It’s a work in progress, y’all’ see more when I’m done.
this is like when the RAF tried to figure out where to armour their bombers by looking at the distribution of bullet holes; the empty area on the map is where nobody lived to tell the tale.
It follows population density pretty closely except that the desert Southwest is over represented. Is that because it’s close to Hollywood? Cheap to shoot in? High density of chupacabras?
That’s just where the spooky is. Everything else is just noise from large populations.
Since @argumate​ brought this back, here’s what the map looks like today:
I started adding any horror movie at all, not just well-known ones. Also, it’s global now!
It lets you look at some cool regional trends, like how ghosts are huge in New England while aliens and vampires have a cluster in the Southwest.
that the original had a lot of black in Pittsburgh is unsurprising, given where a certain George Romero came from, but it now has an interesting relative density and variety.
(i blame the Tom Savini practical effects school in Monessen, personally)
I wish this was an interactive map I want to find and watch my “local” horror movies!
Ask and you shall receive! Here’s a link to explore the map for your local horror movies!
‘the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes’ what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so
also the exploding appendix
there’s an entire book about all the ways the human body is fucked up, but the highlights I remember are:
-The blood vessels for our rods and cones in our eyes don’t run behind them but rather in front of them. It’s like putting the power cables *over* a camera’s lens
-the nasal sinus cavities fucked up during evolution. when our skulls shortened, we went from having a straight shot from one end to the other to having basically a basin which can collect mucus, which then has the actual exit for the chamber at the top of it. this normally isn’t a problem bc cillia can work viscous mucus up it, but when we get sick and produce super watery mucus, it no longer works, which is why our noses get stuffed up.
the book is called Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. I recommend it.
Most mammals can’t get scurvy. They make their own Vitamin C. But in primates, the gene to make it is broken. Normally, when an important gene breaks, the organism dies and has no surviving descendants, but when it broke a few million years ago, our ancestors were living in a lush climate with lots of fruit and survived the failure just fine.
Then humans invented fire and clothing, and moved to colder climates where fresh food was only available part of the year, and scurvy was born.
And our reproduction, oh heavens. There are SO MANY WAYS that human reproduction is fucked up that simply DO NOT APPLY to other animals, even the our nearest relatives, the great apes. When a gorilla is giving birth, she finds a nice hiding place in the trees, squats down for like half an hour, and pushes out a baby. Humans, not so much. In fact, the outcomes of unassisted childbirth in humans are so poor that most anthropologists agree that we must have invented midwifery in some form before we became fully human.