Happy Birthday To My Best Friend Grey 🐇🩵🫂🛌

HhhAAAaaaattt?!!

Happy Pride Month y'all!! 💖🧡💛💚💙💜

https://www.gcv.org/historic-pattern-database/

This museum just posted a whole bunch of corset patterns for free from their collection!

If you've never seen how pandas look when they're first born and you've never seen a mother panda carrying them there's no way to prepare you for it

Reblog if you're not homophobic

Every url that reblog’s will be written in a book and shown to my homophobic dad. 

What is night? Restless and dark, a heavy cloak upon my heart.

My eyes burn and my hand shake, but sleep eludes me, cold hands gripping me in the dark.

I cling to the bedside light, stare at it until my vision blurs. I long for sleep.

My chest feels too tight for my heart, pounding anxiously in its cage. My breath is too short.

What is rest? It is night yet my mind races, and I lay awake.

And Finrod fell before the throne

Piece inspired by the Duel of Finrod and Sauron from the Lay of Leithian rock opera.

See under the cut for some more inspirations (and a Leithian photo dump)

The pics with the screen background come after I already started on my piece but they match perfectly the aesthetic I was going for and I just wanted to post them anyways.

Another big inspo was the art used for The Battle of Finrod and Sauron by Clamavi de Profundis, here’s a mediocre screenshot:

Last in my inspirations were several fanarts I saw on tumblr using the a similar colour scheme with abstract swirls to represent the song of power.

Sewing Machines & Planned Obsolescence

I've got these two sewing machines, made about 100 years apart. An old treadle machine from around 1920-1930, that I pulled out of the trash on a rainy day, and a new Brother sewing machine from around 2020.

I've always known planned obsolescence was a thing, but I never knew just how insidious it was till I started looking at these two side by side.

I wasn't feeling hopeful at first that I'd actually be able to fix the old one, I found it in the trash at 2 am in a thunderstorm. It was rusty, dusty, soggy, squeaky, missing parts, and 100 years old.

How do you even find specialized parts 100 years later? Well, easily, it turns out. The manufacturers at the time didn't just make parts backwards compatible to be consistent across the years, but also interchangeable across brands! Imagine that today, being able to grab a part from an old iPhone to fix your Android.

Anyway, 6 months into having them both, I can confidently say that my busted up trash machine is far better than my new one, or any consumer-grade sewing machine on the market.

Old Machine Guts

The old machine? Can sew through a pile of leather thicker than my fingers like it's nothing. (it's actually terrifying and I treat it like a power tool - I'll never sew drunk on that thing because I'm genuinely afraid it'd sew through a finger!) At high speeds, it's well balanced and doesn't shake. The parts are all metal, attached by standard flathead screws, designed to be simple and strong, and easily reachable behind large access doors. The tools I need to work on it? A screwdriver and oil. Lost my screwdriver? That's OK, a knife works too.

New Machine Guts

The new machine's skipping stitches now that the plastic parts are starting to wear out. It's always throwing software errors, and it damn near shakes itself apart at top speed. Look at it's innards - I could barely fit a boriscope camera that's about as thick as spaghetti in there let alone my fingers. Very little is attached with standard screws.

And it's infuriating. I'm an engineer - there's no damn reason to make high-wear parts out of plastic. Or put them in places they can't be reached to replace. There's no reason to make your mechanism so unbalanced it's reaching the point of failure before reaching it's own design speed. (Oh yeah there is, it's corporate greed)

100 years, and your standard home sewing machine has gone from a beast of a machine that can be pulled out of the literal waterlogged trash and repaired - to a machine that eats itself if you sew anything but delicate fast-fashion fabrics that are also designed to fall apart in a few years.

Looking for something modern built to the standard that was set 100 years ago? I'd be looking at industrial machines that are going for thousands of dollars... Used on craigslist. I don't even want to know what they'd cost new.

We have the technology and knowledge to manufacture "old" sewing machines still. Hell, even better, sewing machines with the mechanical design quality of the old ones, but with more modern features. It would be so easy - at a technical level to start building things well again. Hell, it's easier to fabricate something sturdy than engineer something to fail at just the right time. (I have half a mind to see if any of my meche friends with machine shops want to help me fabricate an actually good modern machine lol)

We need to push for right-to-repair laws, and legislation against planned obsolescence. Because it's honestly shocking how corporate greed has downright sabotaged good design. They're selling us utter shit, and expecting us to come back for more every financial quarter? I'm over it.