This but pants

Pants often have pockets, but too small even for a normal sized wallet, or a smaller phone. And women who buy pants with shitty pockets absolutely complain about the pockets. Literally just this week, I complimented someone on her handbag, and she thanked me, and proceeded to complain about shitty pockets that necessitate having bags (she wished that she had good pockets, because then having a nice bag could be a deliberate, aesthetic choice, rather than a necessity.

Pants are generally crap, but they’re not the only thing that can have pockets: skirts and dresses can too. I love how often I compliment someone on their dress, and they put their hands in their pockets and say “Thanks! It has pockets!”. When I first saw this meme, I was delighted to see someone describing the exact same thing that I love seeing. Every time I see that posted, I see loads of people commenting on agreement. There is a truly incredible amount of solidarity in the experience of shitty pockets on women’s clothes. When we do find clothes with good pockets, it’s so exciting that we can’t wait to share that fact with anyone who compliments us on the outfit.

The trick is that most of the magic comes from the hands, not the brain. When I self taught calligraphy, I spend a long time just practicing drills. Pages and pages of lines, circles and isolated letters, where I was honing my muscle memory to be able to keep the pen at the correct angle throughout a stroke, or to make a stroke quickly enough that it looks smooth and not wobbly, but slow enough that it was still correctly aligned.

The brain-knowledge came afterwards. That’s why, even after years of not practicing calligraphy, I’m still decent at doing some halfway pretty writing. Whoever wrote the phrase in the OP must be at this point too, because writing in snow on a car window will obviously use very different hand and arm movements compared to writing on paper.

I also futilely spent a lot of time trying to write in a pretty manner when I was in school. I eventually gave up and felt like someone like me, who is not particularly artistic, just isn’t cut out for it. When I actually picked up calligraphy, some years later, I clicked with it surprisingly well precisely because I’m not an artist. It felt more like a technical skill, and I enjoyed the zen of just following the instructions for a particular script, and doing the drills.

I realised that part of my mistake in school was that I had been trying to jump straight to the level of being able to write in a decorative way. I only got good enough that I could do freehand, decorative style lettering when I had become proficient in 3 or 4 different calligraphy scripts. The only reason why it feels like the “writing” -> “art” conversion part of your brain doesn’t work is because it needs to learn through your hands.

If you’d be interested to give it a go, a pen that I loved learning with (and still use today whenever I want to be a bit fancy) is the Pilot Parallel. They come in a variety of sizes and are a super accessible way to be able to start learning a wide variety of scripts without the stress of things like dip pens. The swirly writing featured in the OP would tend to involve using a flex nib, which does typically require dipped ink, so I didn’t even touch that stuff for years, despite being enamoured with the pretty swirls. This is the book I learned from, and if I were to go back and try to regain some of the “hand-knowledge” I’ve lost over the years, this is what I’d return to.

I liked doing calligraphy because it allowed me to feel artistic without actually being all that creative. It’s also pretty great for gifts. “Half uncial” is pretty similar to the script used in Lord of the Rings, and isn’t too hard, so I used that to make a thing with one of her favourite lines from the book. Another friend got a postcard with “FUCK” written in fancy, gothic capitals. It took a while to get to that point, but it was pretty cool once I was.

I think the problem is that the vast vast majority of women’s clothing, especially fast fashion, lacks pockets of good size (or any at all). The smaller places that make garments with good pockets are usually priced higher because they’re inherently not targeting the mass market (because they can’t compete with the big companies, so their only hope is to carve out a niche in the high quality domain)

I have literally never heard a woman complain about having reasonably sized pockets.

You’re doing God’s work here. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve found myself wading into a conversation to clarify things. It always feels like I’m being a bit of a persnickety grump, but misconceptions like this are a part of why so many people are wearing ill fitting bras.

Far too many people feel like their bra is a cage, that they can’t wait to be free of at the end of the day. However, for people with larger busts especially, a good, supportive bra can feel like freedom.

Obligatory plug of the “A Bra That Fits” calculator. I make my own clothing and support garments (corsets, stays etc.), so I often get asked for advice on where to go to get fitted, and I always advise that it’s better to use resources like this (with someone to help measure, if necessary and available) rather than a professional fitting.

I knew someone who was previously wearing a D cup that she had been professionally fitted for, who went up to a H cup. It took her some trial and error to find the right band size, because what the calculator recommended wasn’t right for her, but once she got over the shock of “surely I can’t be an H cup!”, she was able to use other community resources to actually find something infinitely more comfortable than her old bras

It’s not just an engineering problem. Larger bras can be hard to find in interesting and fun colours, and there’s no reason why we can’t have pretty colours too. Plus even in smaller bras that have fancy trims and edgings, lace overlays and decorative strappy elements, they exist in addition to the main support structure of the bra, on top of it. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be done for larger bra sizes too.

It actually is done by more niche makers, so it’s definitely possible. Ewa Michelak, for example, is a Polish bra maker that is extremely well regarded amongst people who want their over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder to look pretty and make them feel sexy too. Here’s an example of something from their range for people with “very large busts” (Mildly NSFW) to give an example of what I mean.

Buying bras from abroad is a faff, and extra expensive due to import fees, but the fact that I know multiple people who do it speaks to how the quality and availability of the majority of bras for large boobs is just rubbish, both in support and aesthetics.

The problem is that this advice was made up by no-one. It’s like that perennially relevant IBM memo that says something like “A computer cannot be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision”

I can appreciate the thought, because as a part time wheelchair user, it does often wear me down when I feel like I’m perpetually perched on the periphery of any conversation.

However, like you say, this is just far too impractical for most people. I have a small, active wheelchair, and even that would probably put me in front of friends sitting on the bench beside me.

However, I can totally believe that this was made in earnest. I’ve seen some ridiculous “accommodations” that are ostensibly for disabled people that just show that the able bodied designer just didn’t involve any disabled people in the design process at all. And that’s why “nothing about us, without us” is a long used slogan used by disability rights campaigners.

If anyone wants to see an example of good accessibility design, I love how they designed the packaging for the Xbox Accessible Controller. They included lots of people with varied needs across multiple stages of the design process, and it really shows. And the end product is so elegantly functional. I like this quote from Solomon Romney, a “Microsoft Retail Stores retail learning specialist”:

"The whole thing sort of blossoms open in this really beautiful, fluid way. The package just sort of opens and hands you the controller. What’s wonderful about it is the effortlessness.”