Vive la France

There are plenty of Israelis within Israel who are opposed to Israel’s war crimes and other crimes against humanity. If you doubt this, I recommend checking out the journalistic outlet +972, which has an editorial team of both Israelis and Palestinians, and have been speaking out against the Israeli state since 2010. They’ve written at length about how hard it is to operate within Israel when journalism such as theirs is heavily suppressed, but much of their work is also available in Hebrew, because they aren’t just writing for an international audience

Smart if so. Israel’s only been able to keep up its campaign of aggression because of US support (and I’m not just talking about this most recent war), and this seems like it could help drive a wedge between Israel and the US

It sounds like you’re in the affected area. Please accept my well wishes if that is indeed the case. What’s happening right now is disgusting beyond words, and I appreciate you giving your perspective

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

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

I find that I don’t have to tinker with settings anymore than I did on Windows — which is to say that it’s pretty occasional

But what I like about Linux is that in the rare instances of struggling to make stuff work (like when I found out how to run mods in Baldur’s Gate 3 — big love to the random person who made an excellent Steam Community guide on how to mod Bg3 on the steam deck), at least at the end of it, I come away from the process with some additional knowledge that’ll be useful beyond the problem I was dealing with.

The OS is just way more transparent and communicative in a way that facilitates learning (once you learn the basics of how to communicate with it, such as not being terrified of the terminal)

It has changed a bunch, but I don’t mind it. It has gotten larger, and with that comes a greater number of trolls and spammers. I don’t see as much tankie discourse nowadays. There seems to be more political content, but that’s likely a reflection of the world.

Communities have become more concentrated — after the Reddit APi debacle, it was common to find the same community across many instances, and these were often inactive or sparsely used. Now many of these have been consolidated into fewer, more active communities.

Some communities are niche enough that you can easily read over a week’s worth of posts in one small burst, but remain active due to the dedication of moderators who do things like weekly threads.

There are frequently recurring big names who post frequently. These people aren’t necessarily the same as at the beginning, because there are still a few individuals who make up a majority of posts. I worry for these people sometimes, because it must be a lot of pressure to know that if you stopped posting, the community may wither away. Some of these communities are just silly little meme comms, but I imagine people still feel a sense of ethical duty towards these things.

The rules pages for communities are much better now. It’s easier to know where you stand in different communities, especially in areas where there may be overlap between the communities’ scopes — there has been gradual iteration that has helped people to understand how things relate to each other

When I first got here, I was struck by how much it reminded me of my early time with Reddit. It was much easier to have productive conversations with people. I felt sad because it highlighted how bad Reddit had become. It has always been a bit of a toxic cesspit of a site, in some ways (when people ask me what pseudonymous social media site I used most as a teenager, I am often embarrassed to admit that it was Reddit), it had a lot of good going for it — people engaging in genuine conversation despite everything. I can get that a lot more reliably here.

Things have changed, but Lemmy is still capable of fulfilling my desire for genuine conversations with random internet people. I often write long comments, and I often feel that my time was well spent. Sometimes I non-judgmentally call out people for being unpleasant in their comments, and it leads to productive conversations. I honestly live for that shit, and Lemmy reliably helps me to scratch it. I am better able to navigate the site to find what I am craving.

I wish there were more posts and comments sometimes, but I recognise that this is a bit of a monkeys paw wish, in that a greater userbase will degrade the experience further. Nothing lasts forever though. When Lemmy dies, whenever that ends up being, I will have been glad for my time here

Commenting to follow

This was at an Unknown Mortal Orchestra (a psych rock band) gig at an old and fancy venue. At one point, the lighting was such that members of the band were silhouetted against the upper ceiling; it was also cycling such that different band members were casting shadows. The image doesn’t capture the phenomenon very well, but it’s enough to invoke the memory in me, as well as the awe I felt at seeing it.

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

I’m really glad to hear this. FIFA might still be arses about it, but by New Zealand’s team being good sports about this, it will make it easier to hold FIFA accountable

Edit: also props to Mexico for making it clear they’re open to host also

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)_/¯

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.

Half baked sort-of meme:

What guys think feminine solidarity is:

<Gossipping about dates and sharing makeup advice>

The feminine solidarity that guys don’t see:

“Putting your skirt over the AC unit feels amazing”

Idk why, but this tickles me a lot. I think it’s because I know what it looks like to have a large circle skirt draped over an AC unit, and it’s distinctly unfeminine.

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)

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.)

Sometimes when it’s super hot and I have a large skirt on, I stand next to the AC unit and put my skirt over it. Absolute heaven

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.

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.

Edit: and also lanky thin guys in dresses too

Edit 2: Might be useful context to know that I am a woman, so this comment should be read with the understanding that I am “thirstposting on main”, as the kids say