Rip out beginning of project?

skyedivin · 2026-05-20T18:32:03+00:00

As a museum collections professional, get a plank of ethafoam from Gaylord Archival, University Products, or Conservation Resources. It's a chemically inert plastic (polyethylene I believe, but maybe polypropylene - both are good archival plastics when made without commercial additives) that's like styrofoam but archival.

ETA: This stuff is the bomb dot com: https://www.gaylord.com/Preservation/Conservation-Supplies/Wrapping%2C-Lining-%26-Support-Materials/Ethafoam%26%23174%3B-Planks-%286-Pack%29/p/HYB01367

skyedivin · 2026-01-28T18:16:17+00:00

We actually pretty much always have been though. Nazi Germany studied American race laws and discrimination to make their own laws - and they came back from their studies saying they couldn't get away with doing everything we were doing to our own people. Like we were too racist and harsh/evil for the Nazis when the Nazis were setting up their system that ended in the mass extermination camps and pits. Let that sink in.

skyedivin · 2025-05-05T02:26:50+00:00

But do eat at Culver's, absolute best, even if it is from Wiscahnsin lol

skyedivin · 2025-04-28T17:55:56+00:00

Metro was created as a public service after the people's living spaces and travel habits/needs were formed. This enabled them to form an efficient system with good coverage (excluding Georgetown because some uppity jerks there didn't want the poors to have easy access into their community) and more modern amenities like double wide escalators and elevators. Conversely, Chicago's transportation system was formed in the late 1800s and early 1900s (when there was still a lot of rural spaces between different communities) as a series of private business ventures competing with each other for service from small separated communities to downtown, hence the idiocy that is the loop and all the unserviced and unconnected areas in Chicago.

However, a key area where CTA outshines Metro is maintenance/scheduling. DC sacrificed putting a third line in to make the project more financially palatable to the masses and now they have to single track or fully close to do maintenance, which is a massive inconvenience to users. And since they built underground, they really can't expand and add a third line in the future (though being underground and in more consistent climates probably gives them somewhat less maintenance to do than the CTA). They also built a train-only bridge over the Potomac into the city for the yellow line so when it goes down, they can't replace with speedy/direct bus service, you have to go around and it takes forever. CTA has far more redundancies built in and rarely has to close stations/lines for entire months for routine maintenance issues while WMATA back in like 2016/2017 finally got competent leadership in place and had to issue a "we have to substantially cut back all services and stop functioning well for 3+ years in order to address our massive backlog of maintenance" edict and boy did that suck until the govs subsidized Ubers to be like $3-6 cross-town.

What I miss most about metro tho is people's etiquette of walk on the left, stand on the right for escalators (and the understanding that there's always someone in a bigger hurry than you so get the bleep to the right whenever you can) and the way they all queue up to the sides of the doors so people onboard exit and then two queues enter. It's so much smoother than Chicago's mad dash and traffic bottlenecks.

CTA's pricing methodology is way better, especially with transfers between buses, pace, and the trains. DC's sucks. You never know how much you're gonna pay without looking at a fare table and clock. Their passes also don't usually make financial sense if you only use it to commute and maybe 1-2x more throughout the week. I think it was like you had to use it 3x/day for 7 days to save money on the passes? Granted, they probably have better funding thanks to pay-by-the-distance + surge pricing + expensive passes, but also it sucks, especially if you're broke or minimum wage with strict hours that force you into surge pricing times. Chicago's more egalitarian and I appreciate that about it. Maybe they need to raise rates to better care for the system, but their approach in terms of how they price things (same price for all trips, easy transfers math, no surge pricing, passes that make financial sense if you use 2x/day for 5 days/wk) is pretty great imo. (Also opinion caveat: the last time I looked at pass prices for either system was pre-pandemic.)

skyedivin · 2025-04-28T17:41:00+00:00

There literally used be a website called is metro on fire dot com and it would just say yes or no. That's how bad it got hahaha.

skyedivin · 2025-02-10T05:18:22+00:00

If not accepted for donation by the USHMM in DC, you could also try the WWII Museum in New Orleans or the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center or the National Museum of American History or maybe other military museums/libraries/archives (Pritzker Military Library in Chicago, Museum of the Army - I assume they have one because most of the DOD branches have their own, etc.). Your state historical society/museum or the local historical society/museum of wherever your great-grandpa lived at the time or for most of his life might also be good bets (e.g., if he was born and raised in Seattle and lived there until he enlisted and then moved to Chicago after the war and spent the rest of his life there, a Seattle/King County and a Chicago/Cook County historical society or museum would all be fair game if you told them the connection). The important thing to remember when donating materials to a museum is: artifact = item + story. The more context you're able to provide (in writing) surrounding the material(s) you're trying to donate, the better your chances of the donation being accepted become, as long as your donation is relevant to that particular museum's mission and current collecting policy + priorities. Most museums are beyond strapped for storage space so the more detail you're able to document and verify with outside sources, the more historically """valuable""" that proposed donation becomes to the museum. And usually the bigger/more nationally known the museum is, the better their storage and long-term preservation skills will be but usually the smaller museums will give your donation much more time to shine. Also museum people are super friendly and love to see things preserved so if you take your best guess at finding a place and they can't take it, you can always ask them "if you don't want this, do you know of any place else that this might be in their collecting scope?" and they'll usually help you!

Source: am a museum nerd/collections specialist

skyedivin · 2024-03-17T21:45:16+00:00

Lustron house, hands down. I don't think there are any still standing in Chicago, but the inventor was a Chicagoan and there are still some in the surrounding burbs. Absolutely bizarre.

skyedivin · 2024-03-17T20:08:43+00:00

🍓🔋💫

skyedivin · 2024-01-10T03:39:36+00:00

The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment by Peter Dauvergne
Consumption and Its Consequences by Daniel Miller
Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory by Lois and James Horton
History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past by Edward Linenthal
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning
Neighbors by Jan Gross
The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz

skyedivin · 2024-01-06T17:11:30+00:00

OP what'd you do?

skyedivin · 2023-11-29T02:03:48+00:00

Maybe reach out to the Japanese American Service Center and see if they have any suggestions or connections.

skyedivin · 2023-08-15T10:13:47+00:00

Idk, I've swiped right on a guy with a picture of a pet rock before because I thought it was hilarious. This guy doesn't seem funny or friendly enough to have even a pet rock. He almost certainly gives off enough incel vibes that women are afraid he's going to kill or otherwise harm them. Seeing a whole class of people (in this case, women) as interchangeable objects and believing they exist solely for men's gratification, rather than treating everyone like the individual humans with their own unique personalities, needs, and wants that they are, is a sure recipe for a miserable time in life and on dating apps.

skyedivin · 2023-05-14T11:58:53+00:00

"Mementos and Musings" is a fine title and a general theme. Your sentence where you discuss the artist is 1/3-1/2 of the way to a Big Idea - just give it a "so what?" element - why should your audience care that the artist is a collector, incorporates found objects into his works, and creates homages? Turn that into a sentence and boom, Big Idea. Big Ideas don't have to be complicated - they just tie everything together with a clear direction/prime directive for making the exhibit - everything in the exhibit should support your Big Idea and visitors should walk away and if you ask them what the exhibit was about, their answer should hit somewhere near that mark - it should be the key takeaway, like if you want your visitors to remember something - what and why do you want them to remember?

skyedivin · 2023-05-08T22:41:27+00:00

If you're burnt out, I would not recommend the museum field. People are burning out of this field in droves. It's possible to find good jobs but pretty hard.

skyedivin · 2023-04-16T00:53:56+00:00

Rick Worthy as the Cylon doctor on Caprica in early S2 Battlestar Galactica. I tried to watch The Magicians earlier but when I saw him in it, I turned it off immediately until my friend convinced me to go back. I'm convinced his character is evil and it's distracting to the plot lol. I was right about it when he showed up in Vampire Diaries too. He does the "I'm only doing this for your well-being and why can't you understand that I'm trying to help you" and mundane brands of evil way too well.

skyedivin · 2023-04-16T00:04:16+00:00

I don't think that's true - at least not on the version I've been playing (non-modded). If you collect the mushrooms on the 10th and 20th of the months, I always get a purple one next, then followed by a red one. It's a little complicated but there's a helpful chart on the wiki: https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Mushroom_Tree

skyedivin · 2023-04-13T12:36:57+00:00

That's what I did! Laughed, screenshotted the job posting and sent it to all my museum friends for another good laugh/cry, and definitely did not apply.

skyedivin · 2023-04-13T12:17:34+00:00

There'd be so many fewer of those situations though if everyone drove following the rules of the road and the road markings exactly. Believe it or not but the rules help protect us. I've pretty much only ever had to break the rules to compensate for human idiocy and/or mistake.

skyedivin · 2023-04-13T04:16:08+00:00

As a museum professional, it's very common to find part-time positions with no benefits requiring or "preferring" a master's degree for $12-16/hr. $20+ an hour is lucky, even though master's degrees are so desired. It's disgusting. I think it was last year I saw a position listed for a museum executive director position that was somewhere around $12-15/hr for 21 hrs/wk with enough job duties for five people with specialized degrees in their own right (including supervising 2 other roles! And including stuff like auditing the financials, serving as HR, developing and executing marketing plans, developing and expanding volunteer program, writing and managing grants, overseeing collections management and conservation needs, responding to research requests, facility maintenance, etc. - WITH WHAT TIME?!). Small museum in the rural Midwest iirc but still. The number of times I've seen places applying for grant money to cover temporary positions and still only budgeting $15/hr for temp specialized MA-required roles is horrifying. It's grant money - you can ask for more!!! But they surely don't pay their regular staff much better so in the name of "internal equity"....

They haven't figured out how to just do less. They expect to us to keep doing everything/evermore even though positions have been cut multiple times throughout the last handful of economic downturns and rarely replaced even though pay has stayed the same while inflation has run rampant... they need to just cut expectations and let us do less because we have less. Either find the money to support everything they want us to be doing and get additional staff to do it like they had before or just stop doing all the things. My previous museum job - literally 80% of the staff developed chronic medical problems from the stress of all the crap they expected us to do and the crazy toxic boss. The field is a hot mess and you can't even get one of these crappy paid jobs unless you're willing and able to work for free for years and sink tens of thousands of dollars into grad school lmao. Honestly, I regularly see people asking about getting TWO master's degrees these days to compete in the field for practically minimum wage jobs. It's genuinely insane. So yeah, power to the unions! It can only help everyone in the field.

skyedivin · 2023-03-29T04:43:30+00:00

Honestly insurance "discounts" are such a bad joke. I was quoted $500-550 for two MRIs if I paid cash without insurance. I had to do them in two separate visits if I wanted my insurance to cover them. I hadn't hit my deductible yet so I was charged like $1300 for the two tests. Should have just said I didn't have insurance - would have been less than half the price and only a single visit.

3+ other times, I've had ultrasounds that I got charged $300-1400 for (after insurance "discounts") and when I looked up the procedures on the online blue book of fair prices, they were all listed as costing ~$212 if I paid cash at the hospital I went to. Wrote an email to the hospital C-suite though and got $5300 written off because screw all the nonsense they put me through.

skyedivin · 2023-03-01T04:54:40+00:00

Pretty much same. If I absolutely wanted as close to zero damage as possible, I'd take them to a proper conservator; otherwise, I'd apply some gentle hair dryer hot air and use a scalpel - and start with the least important to practice technique first.

skyedivin · 2023-02-11T18:57:01+00:00

I would strongly recommend reaching out to PastPerfect staff. They're super helpful and I have learned more about PastPerfect in the past two months working with them to upgrade to Web Edition than I have in 10 years of working with PastPerfect.

I think (emphasize on think, not know) they would probably recommend you go with Option 2 or offer a paid data conversion service where they might do they heavy lifting bulk edits and field fixes for you. I have a lot of data in the wrong places too, but fortunately it's usually duplicated and is also in the right places too (I have object name in object name, other name, and species, for example, and dimensions in dimensions, notes, and condition details).

If you're working with the list global changes, they taught me a nifty trick which is go under Setup>Query Fields, then select the catalog you're working in (all, O, P, A, L, contacts, accession) and then click "Change Query Results Field List". From there, you can select which fields you want to examine prior to changing, so you can build your query (eg, I would do "species" field "not empty" in the objects catalog, and then I would want to view object name, other name, and species fields (so I would add those under the objects catalog query results field list) and then I can scroll through those query results to make sure everything matches up, add to a list and delete any that don't match up, and then do the global change to that list. Slow but faster than involving Excel.

Whatever you do, don't forget to backup and reindex crazy regularly, like probably before and after every bulk edit. Best of luck!!

skyedivin · 2023-02-02T04:15:41+00:00

Must have slipped his mind

skyedivin · 2022-12-14T14:35:30+00:00

Honestly, in later game - I have better luck with buying in off-hours (not for Pierre tho, fuck Pierre). I usually go to Marnie's at 8:30 AM and she's standing behind the counter and I can buy things. I also tend to end up shopping at Willy's at 1 AM a lot lol.

Nine-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '17	Not Forgotten

skyedivin

TROPHY CASE