Following up to this post, here’s a fantastic look at Victorian “fancy dress balls”–they were all the rage at the time, but really picked up in the later half of the century where the focus was more on self-expression than hiding oneself, as was the case at 18th-century masquerades (Phantom hearkens back to this earlier tradition, but the idea of a masquerade hiding one’s true identity also works perfectly for its theatrical setting).
Hereare some wackier costumes from fancy dress balls. I’m in love with this one:
And look! A bee!
Here’s a fashion plate with some costume ideas from across the centuries (and of course, we wouldn’t be in the Victorian era if there weren’t a bit of tone-deaf cultural appropriation with the Native American costume.):
It was actually common for women to wear shorter skirts at these balls so they could show off their fabulous boots (as you see above, and as is the case with Christine’s stage version of the Star Princess dress):
Depending on your host, masks of all kinds were welcome, so you were free to be as unsettlingly disturbing as you wanted while you lounged by the punch bowl and made rabbit eyes at the eligible young heiress whose hand in marriage comes with fifty thousand pounds a year and a lifetime of resentment because women’s rights didn’t exist yet:
Suppose you can’t make it to the most fashionable balls London or Paris this season. If it’s 1883 and you are Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and happen to have $6 million of disposable income at your fingertips, why not throw your own fancy dress ball for New York City’s elite (and spend millions on champagne alone)? And why don’t you one-up every single one of your guests by dressing as that most wondrous of new inventions, Edison’s electric light? I defy the Rockefellers to steal your spotlight when the spotlight in question could very easily electrocute them.
Like flowers? Of course you do. Like spring? Oh, my God, do you ever. Like pretending you’re but a mere shepherdess, giggling and flouncing away from the advances of the blacksmith’s apprentice? GOOD LORD, YES. Like the 18th century? HELL YES, OH MAN, GIMME THAT ROCOCO SPRING FLOWER EXPLOSION:
BUT WAIT! You’re not gonna let that Rococo Spring Flower Explosion HARLOT flounce away with your suitor, are you? HELL NO, YOU ARE NOT. Which is why you are prepared to send her running dressed as a GORGEOUS FREAKING BUTTERFLY:
But where would a butterfly be without a lovely flower upon which to perch? Enter your secret lesbian lover, the Rose:
Or, if you’re uncomfortable with NOT being the center of attention every waking moment, you could just pull the equivalent of one-upping the bride at a wedding by wearing white and come dressed as the DAMN SUN:
But maybe you’re more of the goth persuasion. Might I suggest a tasteful sorceress?
A dainty Batman ensemble to match your wife’s delicate moth angel gown?
Vampire mistress of the night, perhaps?
Actually, bat motifs were an extremely popular costume option, not just in the 19th century, but also at 18th century balls:
But if it’s 1880 and you want to carry on grandma’s bat tradition, this might be a more modern take on a pocket-sized blood-sucking demon:
Or this:
You are so thrilled to attend the costume ball like the goth nightmare you are, you can hardly contain your enthusiasm:
Here is a tastefully acceptable take on Satan. Might I sample your punch, Mrs. Higgenbottom, before I make away with your soul?
“Oh, Ella!”
“Yes, Constance?”
“Oh, I do so love your seagull gown.”
“Oh, why thank you, my dear friend!”
“But I’ve not the slightest idea what I shall wear to the ball!”
“Why, Constance, it is a simple matter of identifying something near and dear to your heart and then adapting it into a suitable costume. I, for example, find solace in the sea, particularly in the birds of the sea, and most particularly when they nose-dive into and defecate upon the boat, shrieking like banshees in heat. Hence, the seagulls adorning my gown. What do you like the very most, Constance?”
“MOTHER-EFFING LOBSTERS.”
Or, maybe you’re just a shameless ho and don’t give a brass farthing about showing your ankles, your calves, your thighs, or your hoo-ha at the Embassy Ball, in which case, blaze it:
someday I will write a pokemon world building fic about fossil revival and how it relates to things like the mew/mewtwo project because it has fascinated me since i was a small child
topics to explore:
–the idea that fossil pokemon are REVIVED, not cloned. what the hell. are they raising the dead? the pokemon that come out the other end are not base level babies, what is HAPPENING there
–the fact that all fossil pokemon are part rock type, apparently because they were revived from stone. how is the process of revival altering them?
–for that matter, pokemon that are rediscovered in the wild like relicanth and kabuto, are they different than revived specimens?
–how did the expedition that brought back mew relate to the fossil reviving labs? are there mew fossils?
–the whole ditto being derived from mew thing, which is my favorite pokemon theory, being a plot centerpiece. possibly a pre-series sort of thing about the creation of ditto.
I would want the protagonist to be a fledgling scientist who is clearly marked as a future pokemon professor by having a plant surname but all the extinct plants are so WORDY.
like Glossopteris is not a great name
REDWOOD his professor name is going to be Professor Redwood.
Except it isn’t his last name right now! When we meet him he’s living with his boyfriend, whose last name is Redwood. They’re actually both researchers! Malcolm, our protagonist, is a paleontologist, while his as-of-yet unnamed boyfriend works for Sylph Co working out the bugs in early models of the pokemon healing machine we see in pokemon centers. His specific project is figuring out why they make psyduck headaches worse, so their place is just FULL of psyducks.
Malcolm, introducing himself at his new job with Cinnabar Labs: Hi, my name’s Malcolm, I just moved here with my boyfriend and his ungodly hoard of weird duck pokemon. Yes, that was him trying to herd them all out of the pokemon center on Sunday. We also have a Meowth and a Kadabra but they’re much better behaved, I promise.
The Kadabra speaks some sign language and while he’s technically Malcolm’s boyfriend’s pokemon, he’s so smart they consider him more of a family member. The Meowth is Malcolm’s.
The plot follows the early days of Cinnabar Labs’ success with fossil reviving, with Malcolm starting out enthusiastic and gradually finding more and more things that feel wrong leading up to the Mew experiments, at which point things go downhill FAST.
This process starts when they bring back a ton of Kabuto trying to get one to survive the process, and Malcolm brings one of the struggling specimens home to nurse it through the first days. He then promptly gets attached.
I’m naming his boyfriend Grant because using the last names of Jurassic Park characters is really entertaining me, I’m deeply sorry
The lab is empty of people, leaving Malcolm alone with the whirring and rumbling of the machines. The pumps are especially noisy, sucking in fresh seawater to feed into the heater. It’s attempt number four at creating survivable conditions for the Kabuto in the tanks, going for a natural environment this time. Sterile hadn’t worked, and neither had trying to artificially recreate ancient seas.
The veteran researchers had already given up on this batch, unwilling to work a second all-nighter just to watch another failure play out. They’ll go over the tank footage tomorrow, take readings, examine the dead, and start over.
Malcolm can’t bring himself to follow their example. He’s asleep on his feet and hasn’t seen Grant in two days, but he just can’t leave while any of their test subjects are clinging to life. At least Mitzi is still here to keep him company; his Meowth snores softly from atop the water heater.
There’s only one Kabuto left now, subject 26. It’s not the one Malcolm would have pegged as the most hardy of the bunch, given that it was missing a front claw from the moment they revived it. Still, it’s hanging in there, scuttling in a lopsided loop around the tank.
Malcolm watches as it carefully balances itself on its back legs to spear a chunk of food left on the tank floor. It’s a much slower movement than even the more sickly Kabuto he’s seen try to eat. Malcolm wonders if that’s why this one died the first time, getting outcompeted for food.
Wait.
All the pokemon they’re working with are fossil pokemon, which means they died once already. Healthy, fit pokemon don’t usually just drop dead on the seafloor. Of course all the ones they’re reviving are dying right away, the machines are calibrated to alter them as little as possible for their state at the time of fossilization, a time when they were dying.
He scrambles for the phone, attached to the wall near the door, and calls his home number. It rings for a long while before Grant answers, his voice hoarse with sleep.
“Hello?”
“Babe, it’s me, I need you to–”
“Malcolm, it’s two in the morning–”
“Grant, it’s important, I’m bringing a Kabuto home, I need you to start up your prototype right now.”
“Wait, what?”
“They need medical attention, Grant, that’s why they’re dying, I’m not letting this one die too!”
“Okay, okay! I’ll wake the pokemon, we’ll be ready when you get here.”
“i am a monument to all your sins” is such a fucking raw line for a villain it’s amazing that it came from halo, a modernish video game, and not some classical text or mythos
classic texts have nothing on the crazy people come up with in modern times tbh
“I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.”
– Joshua Graham, Who Is A Fallout New Vegas NPC, Something Most People Throwing This Quote Around Don’t Realize
“If the world chooses to become my enemy, I will fight like I always have.”
– Shadow the Hedgehog in what is widely considered one of if not the single worst game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise
this is the source for this text and it haunts me on a regular basis
“Pick a god and pray.”
-Fredrick from Fire Emblem Awakening
Huh, it’s almost like art isn’t just fine art…
this is my addition to this ever growing list of raw quotes originating from unexpected sources
From the same series that gives us quotes like “Mountains? More like nothings,” “What’s an egg?” “Treeeeees… They are us,” “Nice try, giant worms,” and made the quote “Who’s a good boy?” bring images of deformed satanic beagle puppies to our minds… We get quotes like:
“Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.”
“The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present.”
“Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the table top and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held.”
when you get rid of the add but it keeps coming back.
It got better.
Making it my goal to reblog this once every day lol
When you get so many ads at once that the site you’re on crashes and you have to reload the page.
When an ad plays awesome music
reblogging again because its back and better than ever.
When the add says you can skip it but it doesn’t let you skip
When the ad shows you something you’re interested in, you click it, and it opens two tabs with one being a clear phishing scam and the other for some fuck app
When the same ad has played so many times that you can recite it word for word in time
When the ad is fiNALLY OVER
One of the best post ever.
This just gets so much better every time it shows up on my dash.
I grew up believing that women had contributed nothing to the world until the 1960′s. So once I became a feminist I started collecting information on women in history, and here’s my collection so far, in no particular order.
Lepa Svetozara Radić (1925–1943) was a partisan executed at the age of 17 for shooting at German soldiers during WW2. As her captors tied the noose around her neck, they offered her a way out of the gallows by revealing her comrades and leaders identities. She responded that she was not a traitor to her people and they would reveal themselves when they avenged her death. She was the youngest winner of the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia, awarded in 1951
23 year old Phyllis Latour Doyle was British spy who parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for D-day. She relayed 135 secret messages before France was finally liberated.
Catherine Leroy, War Photographer starting with the Vietnam war. She was taken a prisoner of war. When released she continued to be a war photographer until her death in 2006.
Lieutenant Pavlichenko was a Ukrainian sniper in WWII, with a total of 309 kills, including 36 enemy snipers. After being wounded, she toured the US to promote friendship between the two countries, and was called ‘fat’ by one of her interviewers, which she found rather amusing.
Johanna Hannie “Jannetje” Schaft was born in Haarlem. She studied in Amsterdam had many Jewish friends. During WWII she aided many people who were hiding from the Germans and began working in resistance movements. She helped to assassinate two nazis. She was later captured and executed. Her last words were “I shoot better than you.”.
Nancy wake was a resistance spy in WWII, and was so hated by the Germans that at one point she was their most wanted person with a price of 5 million francs on her head. During one of her missions, while parachuting into occupied France, her parachute became tangled in a tree. A french agent commented that he wished that all trees would bear such beautiful fruit, to which she replied “Don’t give me any of that French shit!”, and later that evening she killed a German sentry with her bare hands.
After her husband was killed in WWII, Violette Szabo began working for the resistance. In her work, she helped to sabotage a railroad and passed along secret information. She was captured and executed at a concentration camp at age 23.
Grace Hopper was a computer scientist who invented the first ever compiler. Her invention makes every single computer program you use possible.
Mona Louise Parsons was a member of an informal resistance group in the Netherlands during WWII. After her resistance network was infiltrated, she was captured and was the first Canadian woman to be imprisoned by the Nazis. She was originally sentenced to death by firing squad, but the sentence was lowered to hard lard labor in a prison camp. She escaped.
Simone Segouin was a Parisian rebel who killed an unknown number of Germans and captured 25 with the aid of her submachine gun. She was present at the liberation of Paris and was later awarded the ‘croix de guerre’.
Mary Edwards Walker is the only woman to have ever won an American Medal of Honor. She earned it for her work as a surgeon during the Civil War. It was revoked in 1917, but she wore it until hear death two years later. It was restored posthumously.
Italian neuroscientist won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor. She died aged 103.
EDIT
jinxedinks added: Her name was Rita Levi-Montalcini. She was jewish, and so from 1938 until the end of the fascist regime in Italy she was forbidden from working at university. She set up a makeshift lab in her bedroom and continued with her research throughout the war.
A snapshot of the women of color in the woman’s army corps on Staten Island
This is an ongoing project of mine, and I’ll update this as much as I can (It’s not all WWII stuff, I’ve got separate folders for separate achievements).
File this under: The History I Wish I’d Been Taught As A Little Girl
Part 2
Annie Jump Cannon was an american astronomer and, in addition to possibly having one of the best names in history, was co-creator of one of the first scientific classification systems of stars, based on temperature.
Melba Roy Moutan was a Harvard educated mathematician who led a team of mathematicians at NASA, nicknamed ‘Computers’ for their number processing prowess.
Joyce Jacobson Kaufman was a chemist who developed the concept of conformational topology, and studied at Johns Hopkins University before it officially allowed women entry in 1970.
Vera Rubin is an astronomer and has co-authored 114 peer reviewed papers. She specializes in the study of dark matter and galaxy rotation rates.
Mary Sherman Morgan was a rocket scientist who invented hydyne, a liquid fuel that powered the USA’s Jupiter C-rocket.
Chien-Siung Wu was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, as well as experimental radioactive studies. She was the first woman to become president of the American Physical Society.
Mildred Catherine Rebstock was the first person to synthesize the antibiotic chloromycetin.
Ruby Hirose was a chemist who conducted vital research about an infant paralysis vaccine.
Hattie Elizabeth Alexander was a pediatrician and microbiologist who developed a remedy for Haemophilus influenzae, and conducted vital research on antibiotic resistance.
Marie Tharp was a scientist who mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and provided proof of continental drift.
Mae Jamison is an astronaut who holds a degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University and was the first black woman in space.
Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and considered to be the world’s first computer programmer.
Patricia E Bath is ophthalmologist and the inventor of the Laserphaco Probe, which is used to treat cataracts.
Barbara McClintock won a Nobel prize for her discovery that genes could move in and between chromosomes.
That’s it for now, part three will be on its way. (Josephine Baker was requested in the first installment, just know I did not forget her! She’s in a different folder, titled ‘famous people you didn’t know were complete badasses, and she, along with Hedy Lamar and Audrey Hepburn will be in the next installment 🙂 )
Part 3
Josephine Baker, though today remembered for her dancing, singing, and larger than life personality, actually played a significant role in WWII. She joined Women’s Auxiliary of the Free French Air Force, got her pilot’s license in 1933, and by 1944 she raised 3,143,000 francs for the war effort. She entertained the troops, which was a doubly whammy of justice. She refused to entertain segregated troops, so the French military was forced to integrate the troops for all her performances. She also smuggled secret messages in her music across countless borders.
Audrey Hepburn is known as one of the most beautiful and talent actresses of the 1950′s, but her contributions to the world started far before her first film and continued until well after her cinematic heyday. In WWII stricken Austria, Audrey, then an aspiring ballerina, would give secret ballet performances to raise money for the Austrian resistance. She even helped smuggle secret messages for the resistance. On one such occasion, she was stopped by an enemy soldier. He asked her what she was doing and she, pretending not to understand, presented him with a bouquet of wildflowers she’d been absentmindedly picking. She was let go and the message was delivered safely. It was her experience in the war which would later prompt her to become one of the founders of UNICEF.
Hedy Lamarr was an actress well known for her piercing gaze and deadpan wit. What she’s less known for is being a brilliant mathematician who invented the frequency hopping spread spectrum. Without her invention, we wouldn’t have bluetooth or wifi.
Ching Shih was one of the world’s most successful pirates. At the death of her (pirate) husband, the former prostitute took command of his ships and started her pirating career. At the height of her career she commanded 1800 ships and more than 80,000 male and female pirates. She became powerful enough to challenge every empire’s naval forces in the world and her Red Flag Fleet was feared from the Chinese coast to Malaysia. Unable to defeat her, the Chinese government caved and offered her amnesty. She surprised everyone by taking it and became one of the few pirates in history to retire. She also took care of her crew even after her retirement; most of Ching’s pirates were pardoned. She died a respectable millionaire.
Sophie School was an active member of the White Rose non-violent resistance group in WWII Germany. In 1943 she, along with her brother and the rest of the White Rose were arrested for passing out leaflets encouraging passive resistance. She and her brother were beheaded by guillotine just a few hours later. Her last words were “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
(Written by Emporer-of-nerds) Constance Markievicz (was a) Very important figure in the Irish independence movement, first woman elected to the British House of Commons, and one of the first women to hold a cabinet position in government (Minister for Labour of the Irish Republic (which was a short-lived revolutionary state predating the current Ireland/Éire))!
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English ambassador to Turkey in the early 1700s, and documented her experience carefully. When she saw the Turkish perform an early method of small-pox vaccination, she urgently wrote home. She is responsible for the first variolation small-pox vaccinations in Europe.
Marie Curie is fairly well known. Unfortunately she’s often known as the ‘assistant’ to her husband. She was a pioneering physicist and chemist, who’s work with radiation was groundbreaking. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and the only one to win one in two fields for her discovery of polonium and uranium. It’s also notable that she was the first woman in Europe to receive a doctorate degree. Her discoveries made the x-ray machine possible, and Curie immediately put it to work. She invented a small, mobile type of x-ray machine and worked with her daughter at casualty collection points in WWI, using the machine to locate shrapnel and bullets in wounded soldiers. She died of pernicious anemia, a result of years of radioactive exposure. Many of her notebooks are still too radioactive to be read.
Margherita Hack was an Italian astrophysicist and became administrator of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory, bringing it to renowned respect and fame. She was a prolific science writer and was awarded the Targa Giuseppe Piazzi for the scientific research, and later the Cortina Ulisse Prize for scientific dissemination. Asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honor.
(This installment was a little all over the place as far as achievements go, and short, since it was mostly requests! Hypatia of Alexandria was also requested but she, along with Sappho and others, are getting their own installment. The next installment will center around women of the literary world!)
Great respect for this!
Note that there were many many more, both before and after photography was invented.
Don’t ever let some fuckboy tell you that women just cleaned and cooked until very recently.
I feel like I want, like, amazing, huge portraits painted of all these women in the finest fine art oils, and for them to adorn hallowed halls everywhere.
@your-naked-magic-oh-dear-lord Sophie Scholl has a movie. It’s called Sophie Scholl: Die Letzen Tage. It’s in German but there are websites that have subtitles. I highly recommend it.
Thanks a lot!
“Battle for Sevastopole”, the movie for the Ukrainian female sniper Liudmyla Mykhailivna Pavlychenko.
this year for christmas i want a central nervous system
this year for christmas i want a fair trade with a fair trade for a fair trade with a great deal to the plot and plot twist and let us see how much we do to make sure we can get the best deal to get a better team to trade them with a trade deal
This year for Christmas I want a corset
For this Christmas i want a good cry Oh
This year for Christmas I want a bit of a wild time AHDHSKJDHS
This year for Christmas I want a little bit more than I ever ever wanna be like and I’m just not a bad guy but I’m just gonna go out and get out my bed to get a job
This year for Christmas I want to be able to see quantifiable progress in increased work capacity without things being equal to the gym
This year for Christmas I want to be a few but it and he a few but it and he a few but if I got a few but I didn’t like I got a few
This year for christmas I want to draw ashitaka now.
This year for Christmas I want you to be able to live with my plants and animals and the girls are so beautiful in every single way
This year for Christmas and New year to you and your family point at every opportunity to look at this point I have to do with the fact that I am going to be a little bit of a sudden i’m supposed to be a little bit of a sudden i’m supposed to be a little bit of a sudden i’m supposed to be a
This year for Hanukkah I want a man that is my favorite character of all time Phone what
You want Gids
This year for Christmas I want to go see the elf and the flowers
Apparently I want Nissa for Christmas.
This year for Christmas I want to get the same thing
Wow I wasn’t aware I was such a fan of status quo
This year for christmas I want to talk to you for a minute. You’re just too smart for this class.
This year for Christmas I want a Christmas tree
This year for Christmas I want to be a giant rat in princess bride and I’m so happy about being autistic the sheer joy of recognizing symptoms of adhd and depressed and they’re identical twins so I can do that and I don’t know what it is
This year for Christmas I want to be a good idea to advertise the bus stop.
ruby-dear archive 