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These are the actual colours I painted with, but I played around a bit with gradient maps to get a few variations... I like them all, and cannot really decide which I prefer. Ref is from this.

#the middle one looks like sunlight is streaming down on her. I love it

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Rami Kadi | Les Miroirs

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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.

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clark, discussing what to do about kon with bruce: you know what this means right?

bruce, nodding: yeah, you owe luthor a buttload of child support

clark: what - i - no??

bruce: i mean, it sucks that he baby trapped you but you don’t want to be a deadbeat

clark: he did not - i am not his father, luthor stole my DNA and put that [pointing at kon] into a tube

bruce: i want you to take one good look on how damian came to be

clark: … oh my rao… i am dead beat aren’t i?

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i mean this in the best way possible, i believe if you were a salad you'd just be a kilogram of lettuce leaves and 1 paper thin cucumber slice hidden somewhere in the middle

next time just slit me open from throat to taint

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IM SO SICK OF YOU ALL

No nuance allowed. please share for a bigger sample 💕💕💕💕💕

*by eat i mean how do you prefer your cereal.

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my favorite genre of alien picture is little grey aliens just naked in the woods like why the fuck are you here. you have a spaceship. why did you come to earth to just stand in the woods and look at us with no clothes

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what was missing

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Typed "IKEA" into google maps and for some reason it decided to show me pretty much every single IKEA location in the nordic countries combined instead of just the one closest to me and ngl I'm kinda obsessed with this review in Sweden

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Women fear my impeccable ice rizz