I agree with this post but also I have just been hit with the startling realisation that Chilchuck is who the dwarves thought they were hiring when they went to pick up Bilbo and now I desperately want to read *that* version of The Hobbit

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

• turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us
• don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace
• a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)
• instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian
• including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too
• including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue
• for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend
• when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!
• if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

• fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples
• the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates
• costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)
• v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece
• lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces
• nypl digital collection for photographs
• national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art
• national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific
• stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource
• wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain
• auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

also please note that this scientist is in fact the retired man who invented the xbox.

oh fuck i listened to a podcast that was interviewing him and the process he went through to make this bread, ologies with allie ward

like he went through full on clean room levels of prep to ensure that this was 100% yeast from old egypt and had to bend over backwards to ensure everything involved was uncontaminated

he then revealed that the original xbox logo...

is a sourdough boule

“This creature with no natural social instincts outside of mating allows me to freely interact with it, while causing it little stress” is fucking DOPE AS SHIT

also… are you SURE? like, we’re still finding out so much about animals. Wolverines fathers, who we thought were not involved in caring for kits, turn out to travel around and collect all their kits from multiple mothers and take the whole group out on camping trips. Some spiders have tiny frog pets (!) or group up to communally raise their young. Wild sharks, crocodiles, and snakes have formed strong, documented relationships with people. 

this man Gilberto (Chito) Shedden nursed this crocodile back to health after it was shot in the eye, and they were best friends for the rest of the crocodile’s life.

this python came in out of the wild as a baby snake and curled up next to the family’s infant, Oun Sam­bat (or Oeun Sambat?) and they were inseparable for 12 years

Cristina Zenato removes hooks from sharks and they let her stick her hand down their throat to do it and they even bring other sharks who need help to see her.

It’s a relationship that goes beyond a single helpful interaction. For example one of the sharks that would show up when she first started swimming with them was a shark she called Foggy Eye who really didn’t like to be touched. One day, Foggy Eye showed up with a hook in her mouth that Cristina Zenato removed, and ever after, Foggy Eye cuddles when she visits, putting her head in Cristina’s lap and enjoying some petting

 We don’t know SO much. Some wolf spiders will adopt unrelated orphaned spiderlings and raise them. We recently discovered that the ant-mimicking jumping spider (below) produces “milk” and suckles its young until they are nearly fully grown.

SO. Don’t assume we know all about what creatures do or feel or whether or not they form social connections or bond with others.

We’re told octopuses are solitary.

That’s the story.

They live alone. They die alone.

Except for Octopus City where they live in a social collective.

Except that I watched with my own fucking eyes a giant Northwest Pacific Octopus who my friend social for an aquariums interact. He hadn’t seen her in a year. He reacted to meeting us and to getting treats? But all he wanted to do was see her, touch her, show her his enrichment items. After a year he recognized her and the response was “YOUR BACK AUNTIE YOURE BACK I MISSED YOU LOOK WHAT I WAS DOING WHAT DO YOU THINK BUT YOURE BACK hi nice to meet your friends YOURE BACK.”

Fucking yeah ok 👍 solitary nonsocial. Idk. If it acts like it loves you then it does. In its way.

The guy who literally wrote the book on wolf social hierarchies realized like pretty soon after publishing that he was completely wrong because he had only been studying animals in captivity, but the erroneous information on “alphas” captured men’s imagination so they still cling to it despite it being just flat out wrong - according to the guy who CAME UP WITH THE THEORY so you know it’s legit.

Europeans who first encountered the platypus assumed it was a hoax.

Knowledge is seeking the limits of our species’ understanding of the universe

Wisdom is looking PAST the limits of our knowledge and staying fucking humble about everything we don’t know.

for people who saw this and went "maybe I should read the books or pick it up again" YES YES YOU SHOULD ABSOLUTELY

If you love fantasy, incredible mythologies, beautiful POETIC magic system, insane lore, characters to fall for again and again, and BOATS

Please read the earthsea saga, it has change my art forever, I wish for more people to experience this joy !!

“we know it takes this amount of explosives to work, but what if we doubled it anyway?”

Some myths I'll always remember:

* Are elephants scared of mice? (They only did that because they were in Africa and had access to elephants.)

* Will a bull run amok in a china shop?

* Is it better to run zig-zag or straight when chased by an alligator?

I love these because NONE of them turned out the way they expected. They went into all three with pre-conceived ideas of how it would go, and each time they "failed." Elephants WILL cower from mice. A bull moves very gingerly through a china shop. It doesn't matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON'T CHASE YOU.

And each time, they reacted with just... pure glee. "Holy shit, we were wrong! Oh my god! This is great! We were so wrong!"

And that, to me, is what science is. Being excited about being wrong because either way it's information.