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@blondeniffler
UGH is is literally so much to ask that I have time and money to learn how to tailor clothes and embroider and knit and make cakes and bake bread and do makeup and hair and nails and do all my own diy projects around the house and
like I know this is probably so hard to make but my brain says I could do that and I need to do that
btw since this I have been beautifully and painfully trying to learn to cook, crochet, sew, paint etc and oh boy am I mediocre at a bunch of things but I’m having fun
If Jane Bennet was the narrator of Pride and Prejudice, we'd have a new type of unreliable narrator that I can't personally think of any examples of in literature (though they are common in real life) where the person is too nice to describe immoral and/or foolish characters and their motives accurately.
Jane Bennet: It was all just a big misunderstanding you see. Mother was very distressed and very eager for us all to marry well. Mr. Darcy said some things he didn't mean, and well, I was perhaps too reserved about my affections for Mr. Bingley. There was a bit of a panic with Lydia, but in the end, three of us are married now!
Elizabeth in the background: That is NOT what happened!
Kitty Higham from BBC Ghosts is exactly this type of narrator. she's not the narrator of the show as a whole, but when telling her own story, she's...much more lenient on her abusive sister than she should be
The Sound of Music (1965) dir. Robert Wise
bros yall probably already know what i’m about to say but i’ll say it anyway just in case
learn to sew, the joys of sewing are never ending. I sewed a witch hat last month, this week i turned some old pants into shorts, if my favorite socks and tshirts get ripped i can stitch them back together, i made a mouse plushie from an old airline blanket.
you can do a lot of things by hand sewing, albeit slower. but there are more basic cheaper machines too. if you don’t want to invest in a machine sometimes there are public places where you can use the machines. I did most of my sewing at my university campus library, some public libraries have machines too. but if none is available remember you can fix stuff by hand (i learned hand sewing solely so i can repeatedly fix my favorite socks, and it’s doable)
so yeah learn sewing, it’s a good skill
I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can't provide.
I know for a lot of people that's irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.
So, I've been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it'd be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.
Like, "Oh, God, I don't want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry", or, "I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it'd make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?", or "Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let's just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble".
Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it'd be neat.
This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.
Historically, the Church and its widespread monastic structure functioned as a dumping ground for second/third/etc sons and all the daughters one can't afford to marry off adequately, with the military eventually picking up the slack for the former post-Reformation to the point where it's been argued that the need for something to occupy these dispossessed sons played a role in Europe's ongoing conflicts between its nations and the eventual push of imperialism and colonization over the rest of the world.
In a world where homosexuality were more accepted, it would offer a new option: spare a comparatively-small outlay of resources from the main family fortune to equip a house and accoutrements, which would be reabsorbed into the family as a return inheritance in a few decades, and contract a marriage which would be deliberately unable to produce legitimate offspring.
You get the advantages of creating marital ties with another wealthy family, the people married therein have a spouse and the status achievements that go with marriage, and the risk that your child goes off and marries someone unsuitable or inconvenient is removed entirely, as is the risk that they could marry someone and have legitimate, inheritance-claiming children with them. Sure, they can have affairs and thus get children if they're married to a same-sex spouse, but those children cannot be passed off as legitimate issue of the marriage, and so they pose less of a threat to the the main body of the family's wealth.
And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!
"Nicholas, we've arranged for you to marry Eric, in the neighboring kingdom."
"But father, I'm not...."
"I'm well aware. I've just decided that you shouldn't reproduce."
One of my favorite things is taking someone to the Great Lakes for the first time - or describing how you can fly over them and see only hundreds of miles of glittering blue water and no coasts at all; how they have their own Coast Guard (the only lakes to do so); that the Earth's rotation steers their currents; that they're studied using ocean models; that they have wrecked more than 6000 ships - and watch them realize that the word "lake" is misleading and that they had no idea of the size and majesty of them at all.
Some fun facts about her majesty, Lake Superior:
It has a surface area of 31,700 sq. miles, roughly the size of South Carolina or Austria.
It's incredibly deep and has enough water to cover all of North and South America to a depth of 12 inches.
Waves over 30 feet have been recorded.
Its deepest point is 1,333 feet, which is the third lowest point in North America
Its average temperature is around 36 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius), which inhibits bacterial growth in bodies, diminishing bloating and gas, and frequently shipwreck and drowning victims to sink to the bottom and never be recovered.
Happy 12th birthday newsies on Broadway!
I had an interview with a local paper this week about this rock snake I started on the longest street of a nearby city (where I work) because it's bringing people so much joy:
I said something during the interview that the interviewer seemed really shocked by, so in case it's important for anyone else to hear: When asked about the rock snake and some scavenger hunts that I've hosted for adults, I said -
"We don't stop enjoying the things we liked as kids; they just stop being offered to us. And when you're a kid, fun things like art projects and scavenger hunts are always brought to you, so you're not taught to make a habit of seeking them out as and adult."
She said "Wow yeah... life is so stressful... and you don't think to... wow."
So if anyone else needs direct permission to be a whimsical adult child today, I hereby grant it to everyone. ❤️
with thread and fabric being very very labour-intensive in pre-industrial times I wonder how much of the cost of a ship was in its rigging. even a small sail is a lot of fabric compared to clothes, and it has to be quite high-quality. and even a small boat needs a decent amount of good rope.
from what little I've read, it seems like it, I read an article ages ago estimating the cost of manufacturing textiles (helping a friend write a Viking romance novel) that stated that time spent on sailcloth spinning, weaving and sewing was the primary limit on Viking ship production. Can't find it now and I was not the most rigorous researcher back then, but I can find this, which estimates a single sail worth of fabric costing 270g of silver before sewing even begins.
Some very good information in there! Here's a more or less direct answer to my question in the op:
According to Anna Nørgård, from the Viking Ship museum in Roskilde, a wool 61 square metre sail, woven in a twill with 8 threads in warp and 5 threads in weft, would take c. 4,148 hours to spin and weave. The preparation of the yarn, warping, and set-up would add another 830 hours. Altogether, it would take her c. 5,000 hours, or 416 days to make such a sail if she would work twelve hours a day (Nørgård 2016). However, if weaving in a tabby the spinning and weaving would only take c. 3,477 hours, excluding the 830 hours needed for preparation of the fibres, warping and set-up.
But this is only a small fraction of the textiles needed, because the 33 Vikings crewing the ship need clothes, and in the North Sea, quite a lot of them:
Apart from the clothes they wore, it is likely that each crewmember brought at least one extra set of clothes on a journey. Based on archaeological analyses of textiles in combination with experimental archaeology, it has been estimated that each crewmember had a minimum of clothes representing more than 6.5 kg of raw materials, or 30.5 square metres of fabric, which would have taken 3,343 hours to spin and weave (Table 2). Furthermore, well-made nautical clothing, possible of leather, and sleeping covers would have been necessary for survival. If all crewmembers would have brought the same amount of clothes and outfits, this equated to 215 kg of raw material, requiring more than 11,000 [sic] spinning and weaving hours (Table 3).
(There's a 0 missing in the last sentence of this paragraph, it should be 33*3343 ≈ 110,000 spinning and weaving hours; Table 3 has the correct number.)
This was also striking:
The need for raw material was still substantial; c. 331 kg of raw material equates to wool from 331 sheep. According to modern calculations these sheep would need 33.1 hectares of well-fertilised pasture (10 sheep/hectare (Bender Jørgensen 2012; Fag undated). Even if the Viking Age sheep were half the size of modern sheep, and only used half the pasture, more than 16.5 hectares were needed (20 sheep/hectare).
This fits kinda nicely with one of the conclusions from Bret Devereaux's series on textiles, which led me to this question. With minimum comfort meaning one new full set of (Roman) clothes per year, Devereaux concludes (emphasis his):
Using the average of Aldrete and Fischer’s figures (erring a little high to account for Fischer’s lack of preparation time) we might figure something like 2,683 hours to produce our 220,000cm² minimum requirements. Our upper ‘comfort’ level might be three times this or 8,049 hours. [...] Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). [...] A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort
Another way to put this, I guess, is that one woman working her hardest can keep herself and one other person comfortably clothed. Or, it takes half a year for one woman to comfortably clothe one person for a whole year. That makes a lot of sense, if you think about it: fibre and textile work is overwhelmingly done by women and overwhelmingly what women do in these societies, and women are half of all people.
With 7.35 hour working days it takes ≈ 680 working days to make the sail from before. So even at half a woman-year of labour per sailor, clothing the crew of 33 is substantially more work than making the sail. But actually these Vikings are bringing ≈ 450 woman-days of clothes each, so it's an even bigger difference. That's almost 2.5 times more than the comfortably clothed Roman; Devereaux's estimate is 66 m² for comfort for a Roman family of six, so 11 m² per person, less than the 30 m² per Viking in Andersson Strand by the same factor.
I mean, obviously the Vikings need to be dressed much more heavily travelling the North Sea than someone farming near the Mediterranean does. But with the estimates in the previous paragraph, if Mediterranean sailors dress roughly like people on land, clothing the crew dominates rigging the ship in terms of textile work.
This does make me wonder what minimum/comfortable standards of clothing looked like in Scandinavia compared to in the Mediterranean... in the colder climate it's going to take more to stay warm, it's as simple as that.
I think someone commented on Devereaux series on making iron that behind every Roman legionary there were a dozen woodcutters fuelling the furnaces and forges that make his sword. I guess the upshot of all this is that behind every Viking raider there are three women keeping him warm and dry.
(Hmm. I'd still want to know how much woodworking labour goes into the ship. Andersson Strand doesn't say anything about ropes for rigging either. But man, pre-industrial textile production SUCKS, the crew's clothes probably come out the vast majority anyway.)
Ah, this NYT article makes references to the idea I mentioned earlier, that time to make sails is the main limit on manufacturing
The textiles women produced made our civilization what it is.
In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.
Tracking down that claim leads me to this 2012 article on the introduction of sails to Scandinavia, which I think must be the thing I read way back then (it's behind a login wall so I've rehosted it here)
The Introducion of Sails to Scandinavia: Raw materials, Labour and Land
Their number includes the time spent to weave the cloth as well, they estimate 20 hours to weave one square meter of sailcloth putting the number at 50 000 work years to spin and weave all 1 million square meters of the 11th century fleet.
Experiments indicate that a good spinner can produce 30- 50 m yarn per hour using spindle and distaff. For a wool sail of 90 square metres, that would mean 4.800 hours of spinning – two and a half modern working years.2 As regards weaving on the warp-weighted loom commonly used in the Viking Age, weaver Anna Nørgaard inserts on average 25 wefts per hour. It takes 20 hours to weave one metre of sailcloth, and she estimates that it would take almost 3.200 hours to make the 157 metres needed for such as sail. The total consumption of time for spinning and weaving is 8.000 hours or four and a half modern working years. This does not include the time needed for harvesting the wool, or finishing processes such as fulling (Nørgård 1999, 8). Still, it would make the one million square metres of the Viking fleet represent some 50.000 years of presumably women’s labour.
This one is really good, detailed tables on resource estimates including land usage, time, and materials for sails as well as bedding and clothing.
rudy time
I wish it was rudy time all the time
i think about this one so fucking often i had to clip it
that was like watching someone very skillfully assembling a stained-glass window just to watch someone else dropkick it