Mask information

Hello friends,

I am telling you about masks!

Reader Jenna W wanted to know about masks.

Basically a mask is something you put on your face to make it look different BUT with a crucial difference to make-up or face paint - ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? DO YOU PROMISE YOU ARE UNDERSTANDING BECAUSE THIS COULD EFFECT YOUR FUTURE DEPENDING ON WHAT YOUR LIFE IS LIKE!!!

With face paints and make-up you smear it on your face, sometimes very artfully with brushes or sometimes just all over the place like who even cares I’m Becoming Green. But with a mask you pop it on your face and pop it off is the idea! Now there are beauty products that are for Smearing that call themselves masks and you may think to cleverly trip me up by mentioning those but you won’t win my treasure by doing this because of a wonderful fact about me entitled I don’t care about any of that shit. You wanna call some stuff that is plainly not a mask a mask for pleasure, go ahead, me, you, and God all know you’re wrong so if you’re cool with that situation do what thou wilt!

Sorry I had to pop off at slime merchants but Actual Masks are cool and smearing slimes shouldn’t get to steal their valor. Like go ahead and say the word “mask” out loud to yourself. Did you do it? If you did I’m very pleased and if you didn’t you really missed out because it feels very good inside of and exiting the mouth. Now there’s a broad spectrum of masks out there, I imagine the first one was probably a animal face a cave person cut off and put on their face and everyone was like oh Fuck, Krogg has taken on a bear’s aspect. That’s so cool. Some probably feared and hated Krogg for doing this, as people fear and hate those who wear cool masks today.

Masks PROBABLY fall under the category of something everybody invented around the same time although it would be pretty funny if England or somebody didn’t and then a bunch of French guys showed up to do some war in like pretty crude masks and they were like oh no France is full of monsters! And they’d be right but for the wrong reasons. I think, unless you want to tell me about a very cool culture nobody ever thought to teach me about, that masks were usually just for special occasions like religion or orgies for most of history until they figured out you could do practical things with them. Let me tell you some nice masks.

RELIGION/TRADITION MASKS

There’s loads of masks in other cultures for different religions and traditions. In Honky Culture where I come from we don’t have that so much except for halloween which is stupid. Like I’m sure if you go a little bit deep in there’s a few masks for like, druids or something but it don’t happen that much which is a ROTTEN SHAME. The religious or traditional masks from other cultures I don’t really know very much about other than they are very cool looking so probably its better I don’t try to think of a super good joke about them. If you want to see these you can probably go to a museum and depending on what kind of museum you might be able to find out about them from somebody whose culture they come from but like, you’re gonna have to google if you want that particular experience most museums are kind of just in a situation of okay we stole this shit but we stole it like 150 years ago so we’re kind of not sure how to make that one right in a way where our museum isn’t like a huge empty building full of signs with apologies written on them.

MASQUERADE MASK

This is a nice kind of mask that I think comes from like masquerade balls which I believe are a thing of history Europe. Like if Shakespeare came into your house through a point where reality is weak and malleable and you were explaining modern stuff to him and you started explaining this he’d say like alright, I’m not stupid. These generally go over the eyes with two little eye holes so you can still see. Usually these have some kind of nice design on them like maybe an elaborate embroidery or it’s made to look like a swan face or something, there’s lots of ways to do this. Usually it’s tied around your face with string but sometimes you hold it with a little rod? My understanding is that a masquerade ball used to be just kind of a fancy party but now there’s kind of an implicit thing that this means there’s going to be weird sex stuff? Like maybe in an Eyes Wide Shut type of way but even if it’s just the slightest wink it’s the horniest slight wink you ever saw.

HALLOWEEN MASK STRING VERSION

Ok so this is a mask of somebody like Dracula or Kermit Frog or maybe someone from politics or Star Warms like Look Skywalter. It’s a mask that is fun to play with and kind of nice because of how barely attached it is to you. You can kind of fiddle with it in a very satisfying way and wear it like a little bit on a little bit off very fashionable.

HALLOWEEN MASK RUBBER VERSION

This is a big step up from this other kind of halloween mask because it covers your whole head with just some holes for seeing and breathing and even those are sometimes not very good. These are often very cool looking when they are a monster or pretendo creature and deeply hideously disturbing when they are supposed to be of someone real, especially if they’re going for accuracy instead of a sort of caricature aesthetic. Unlike the kind of casual vibe of the other mask when you put these on your face is going to start getting wet immediately which is pretty gross. You see the mask and you’re like hell yeah I’m werewolf but pretty soon you is wet dog.

EYEGLASSES

These are a kind of mask you put on your eyes to make it so you can see stuff. It’s a very basic mask of just two eye holes and then little thingies to make them rest on your ears (not sure what they’re called so let’s say they’re splendulas), although they can be designed with lots of different lenses in the eyeholes and shapes for the mask part. Maybe the stuff you are seeing with them is a 3D movie or maybe it is just regular stuff that your eyes can’t see too good, there’s all kinds of things that eyeglasses mask can help you to see. Sometimes people will wear this mask for fashion without anything special going on in the eyeholes, this is Allowed but often considered very goofy behavior. The situation of that is that we often think glasses make a person look smart, but it is crucial to your life especially if you are a younger person to truly understand and internalize this IF NOTHING ELSE I HAVE EVER SAID IN THESE EMAILS - sometimes people are nearsighted and really really dogshit stupid. There’s just no correlation at all between how strong your eyesight is and whether you are smart at all. Eagles can see super good and if you ask them to do your taxes you’re going to be totally screwed.

SUNGLASSES

This is a cool kind of glasses that you wear to protect your eyes from the sun’s hateful rays. These have all kinds of designs, often times oriented more towards fashion than actual protection of eyeballs. These are kind of different to a lot of masks which cover the face and leave the eyes exposed, this exposes the face but leaves the eyes obscured or totally hidden which is very cool to people because sometimes they want to hide the wet wet portals to their souls. That might be to do with fashion or something evil they are doing? It is considered silly to wear sunglasses inside but if you want to do it nobody can stop you.

SIDE NOTE: there is an expression about seeing the world through rose colored glasses that means seeing things as nicer than they are, which is one of those things that sounds like a quaint reference to something that nobody’s thought about since your grandparents was baby but a few years ago I bought Fashion Sunglasses with red color and straight up looking through them everything genuinely seemed much nicer to me. I was like ohhhh this is very good, yes, thank you.

SAFETY GOGGLES

This is a kind of mask that keeps things going into your precious little eyeballs. Sunglasses and eyeglasses can somewhat deter this but they’re just not built for it! I’m sure you can get prescription safety goggles if you want to have just one stop shopping for Looking, you could even get it maybe with lenses that turn a color in sunlight to protect your eyes but despite how extremely practical this would be everyone would think you are a weird loser. Usually these is just made of big plastic but if you look hard I’m sure there’s a kind of glass, but that might be impractical unless it’s very fancy glass because what if a rock hits it and you have glass shards in you eyeball? That’s not what you wanted at all!

SKI MASK

This is a mask you wear to commit the sin of skiing, it’s basically a huge sock with holes in it for your eyes and mouth? Maybe they make them with just eyes, these became incredibly popular for burglars to where it became more of a burglary mask than a skiing mask so I imagine they have tried to really change up the design so if you see someone dressed up to ski you don’t think Here Comes The Harm Causer. I don’t know what this looks like because of my moral code’s radically anti-winter sports bias which exempts only sledding and snow crafting (snow ball, snow man, snow angel)

PLAGUE MASK

This is a kind of medical mask that history doctors would wear around plague victims to stay safe from plague and for some reason it looks like a terrifying leather bird? Go ahead and look it up. I’ll wait.

Ok so if you just looked it up or already knew you might be thinking what da hell. Why did they decide to make it so frightening and the answer is I don’t actually know. I don’t know why they decided to do the design as huge evil demon bird, I feel like if you are a medieval person who already thinks the devil probably personally made you sick having the scariest possible doctor did NOT HELP. Also I don’t think these masks did anything against the plague so dudes was going like ok so I’ll protect myself from plague by dressing up like the primeval genetic memory of being killed by a giant bird and then still totally getting the plague. A weird thing for everyone involved!!!

GAS MASK

This is like if plague mask made a wish to actually be useful. It is still very frightening looking, it’s got big goggles on it like plague mask but instead of bird it looks like elephant but a kind of Death Elephant? I think they have less elephanty gas masks now but the classic one that Germans wear for sex is elephantine with a thingy on the end for to breathe from? Basically the situation is if you are exposed to a ton of poisonous gasses because of a gas attack in a war or maybe your child was playing with your collection of poisonous gasses and had a mishap, you put this on and you are able to breathe safely! Wow! These are all still pretty frightening looking because I think there’s been in a hundred years of gas masks about 8 weeks total spent on trying to figure out what a friendly one could look like.

SNORKEL MASK

This is a goggles with a tube attached to the nose so you can put your head under some water but breathe in air from above the water! This digivolves into Scuba Mask which attaches the tube to a big tank of oxygen or something so you can go and say hello to sharks which I’m told is okay to do sometimes if it’s specific kinds of sharks who look at you less like hamburgers and more like a weird but probably harmless mannequin.

SURGICAL MASK

This is a special mask doctors and nurses wear so that when they eat a bunch of spicy food they don’t accidentally drip jalapeno infused saliva into your open chest during a surgery. I think these are mostly just for keeping your spit from getting all over the place but some people wear them to keep from getting sick which prolly is okay but not like the best type mask for that at all.

RESPIRATOR MASK

This is a mask for keeping yourself safe from breathing stuff in like other people’s disease particles or even just like a lot of dust if you work or play in an environment with loads of dust? They got really technologically advanced ones for if you are being extra safe with such as gizmos as well as dohickeys in them to pump in clean air but if you don’t got hell of money you can buy ones made out of special papers and things that will help a lot. I wear a VFlex N95 mask around town to have safety from Particles and because my face is too Large for the regular N95 which is a shame because they make lots of fun color regular N95s but if you want the one that fits on my huge melon in a fun color they’re like oh are you Specific? That’s gonna be eight dollars apiece for the nice looking mask sorry pal. These are pretty good for keeping yourself from breathing in bad stuff and especially good for keeping yourself from breathing bad stuff on to others if you are sick or suspect you might be sick because someone sitting extremely close to you keeps talking about how they have “some kind of weird cold” and they can’t really taste anything right now which sounds cartoonish but is exactly how it went the only time somebody gave me the coroneyvirus.

Thank you for reading my big mask email! If you would like to find out about something, tell me and I will try to already know about it.

Love,

Ryland Duncan