I'm having a great time reading Project Hail Mary. Something I just learned from the book is that because "grace" is an English word as well as a proper noun, Rocky calls Ryland Grace the Eridian word for "grace."
I'm so curious how he chose to explain "grace" to Rocky, which definition he used. What does Rocky evoke every time he calls Grace's name?
Me too! Iâm so curious about which of the many definitions for grace he used and how he explained any of those very abstract concepts when they were still communicating on the level of âhydrogenâ and âthreeâ
Knitting finished as of last night! Still need to weave in a few ends, wash, and block.
Was aiming for 48â x 60â, came out 39â x 60â so far, but Iâm hoping to be able to block it to a little wider and Iâm ok losing a few inches of length for that
Thank you so much for all the nice things everyone has said about this blanket! Unfortunately, I do not have a pattern, so much as I have several patterns and some back-of-the-napkin style math notes that wonât make sense to anyone but me - but I do have a picture of this planning piece (since frogged to reuse the yarn in the blanket itself.)
As a few people in the notes pointed out, the dragon pattern is Tahesha the Dragoness by Ina Wendrock
But it's on a plain reverse stockinette background, and I wanted this as part of a complex cable afghan. It's going to be a wedding gift for two friends in my DnD group, so I knew I wanted it big enough that two people could reasonably share it while watching TV together on a couch, and for a dragon to still be visible when folded and draped over the back of a couch or chair, in case that's how they store it. So I knew I was committing myself to knitting 5 dragons (one in the center and one in each of the four corners), and figuring out myself how to plop the dragon in to a larger cable blanket pattern.
Back in November, I bought the dragon pattern and knit a test version of it so I could see how it worked and measure the dimensions. (You can see from the curled up edges that I did this before I found the part in the pattern notes where Ina Wendrock helpfully informs us that the dragon is knit over 45 initial stitches, to help us add it to our own projects, but ah well.) Then I started trying to figure out the other cables.
I knew I wanted some traditional cables so that it had an heirloom look to it (but with dragons), but I thought that the dragons would look too out of place if everything else looked copy-pasted from a classic fishermanâs sweater. Fortunately, there are a number of knitting designers right now doing cool things with trying to make cables that resemble Celtic knot motifs, so I went to the public library and borrowed a bunch of cable knitting books and started bookmarking what I liked. My favorite patterns were all coming from this book:
Mention the phrase ?cable knitting,? and most people?knitters and non-knitters alike?envision textured ropes, twists, and braids winding up
Which looks like it's out of print now, but wasn't in December and I was able to ask for and receive it for Christmas. (Designer Melissa Leapman's ravelry store is here in case anyone wants to check it out):
I narrowed my bookmarked cables down to patterns that had 1) an odd number of stitches; 2) a central "crossover" cable in multiple parts of the pattern so that I could "open" it up to create the medallions that the dragons would sit in; and 3) a stitchcount of less than 45, by enough that I'd have room to drop a traditional cable on either side. My favorite two would then be the center cables for the central dragon panel and the left & right dragon panels (when I wasn't doing the dragons), and then I decided on a very simple c4b twist between the panels and a tight 5-rib cable braid on the edges. I loved the first two patterns from the book that I tested and didn't have to try any of my runner-up bookmarks - but if you zoom in on the picture, you can see that for the traditional cables around the Melissa Leapman cable for the center panel, I tried and discarded a honeycomb cable and an Xs and Os variant before deciding on the one that I'm not actually sure of the name of that made it into the final pattern. For the side panels, I had thought it might be nice to incorporate a hearts cable since it was for a wedding blanket. I'm not sure how traditional these heart cables are, but I've seen them unattributed in more than one published pattern from different sources, and they're published in a number of cable pattern guides online. They worked next to the Melissa Leapman cable I wanted for the side panels, so they went in the pattern without me trying anything else.
While practicing the dragon cable, I had noticed that many of the cables started with an increase, so on the back of one of my chart print-outs, I graphed a rough plan for what I had decided to put where in terms of the traditional and Leapman cables that would go around the dragons, and numbered out the stitches if I worked the first cables in each pattern as increases instead of cables to mimic the start of the dragons. Then I added up the total number of stitches and cast on, and it worked surprisingly well! After completing one repeat of the side-panel central cables, I started "opening" up the circles where the dragon would be through improvisation (the left and right panels that were parallel always matched each other because I was doing the same thing in each row - other than that, I wound up doing it slightly differently every time, and that was ok. They look the same enough.)
I had planned to either leave it un-bordered or add the full mitered border that Ina Wendrock (who designed the dragon pattern) has on her store depending on how it worked up, but after I'd knit enough to see what it looked like, I decided that the mitered border was overkill, but it did need something, so when I finally got to the end I did an I-chord bind-off and then went back and picked up stitches along the cast-on to do an I-chord bind-off there too. If I had it to do over again, I might have done a folded hem on each side instead, but we'll see how the I-chord blocks.
So, that's how you make the dragon blanket. Either get the patterns I mentioned and try to duplicate, or just buy the dragon and add your favorite cables for the rest!
[Sorry I'm not more help, but I cannot stress enough - I did not write any of this down as I went.]
[[For the patterns that were from the Continuous Cables book, I used panel 10 from page 136 for the center and panel 27 from page 146 for the sides]]
I actually do think we should discourage women from becoming housewives. Do not become financially dependent on a man. That's how a lot of women ended up dead over the years. A man gets violent suddenly and you have to choose between homelessness or potentially dying at his hand because you have an enormous gap in your resume and no degrees or certifications or anything that will help you pursue a career that will allow you to be financially independent. He owns your bank account. His name is probably the one on the car. Try and leave and he can report it stolen. Where will you go then?
And if you do become a housewife, take steps to protect yourself. Make sure youâre legally married, for starters; stay-at-home girlfriends have very little legal recourse to claim their partnerâs assets in a breakup. Make sure your name is on the house deed/rental agreement, and have your car in your name, even if your spouse is paying for it. Have your spouse transfer money every month into an account solely in your name, so you can buy yourself things without needing permission, but also so you can save up to leave if needed.
If your spouse fights you on any of this, then donât quit your job. The tradwife to poverty pipeline is real, and so is financial abuse.
also, many women/people experience controlling behaviour and domestic violence from their partner for the first time during pregnancy. donât risk thinking âheâs just stressed, itâll get better when the baby comesâ because it wonât. neither you and your child will ever be safe with that man. get out as early and safely as you can
Knitting finished as of last night! Still need to weave in a few ends, wash, and block.
Was aiming for 48â x 60â, came out 39â x 60â so far, but Iâm hoping to be able to block it to a little wider and Iâm ok losing a few inches of length for that
If I were a murderer, and I'd meticulously planned a murder, and then I turned up at the place to do the murder and found that world-famous-murder-solver Hercule Poirot was also there, I would simply not do the murder.
the phrase "Honor Princess Detective is a tour de force" would not leave my brain until i drew this
[ID (copied from alt): A three-panel comic depicting Murderbot, Sofi, and Farai from the Murderbot Diaries in a simplified style.
In the first panel, Sofi excitedly says, "SecUnit!!! The season finale is about to start!!!" while adorning Murderbot's head with a tiara. Murderbot responds on the feed, "Yes, I see it."
In the second panel, Murderbot and Sofi are seen from behind while Farai walks past carrying a basket. She says on the feed, "You don't have to indulge her."
The third panel shifts into a more detailed and intense style in a close-up of Murderbot's serious face. It says, "Honor Princess Detective is a tour de force." In the corner, a simple style Farai resembling the nervous smiling emoji says, "Okay." /end ID]
they should invent a high ponytail that doesnât give me a headache and they should invent a low ponytail that doesnât make me look like a millerâs apprentice going off to enlist in the continental army
I forgot how time-consuming an I-chord bindoff is over here on MST3Knitathon, my attempt to finally finish this blanket while watching the fan-voted top 100 episodes of the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in reverse order from bottom to top. We've finally reached the top ten!
A list of the Top 100 Episodes of MST3K was compiled based on a survey taken of backers of the Bring Back MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 campa
10. Episode 821 Time Chasers
Summary: In 1991 Vermont, a college physics professor (whose actor desperately wants to be Richard Dreyfuss and is not) has invented a device that can take a light engine plane backward or forward in time. Having run out of funding, he tricks an executive from a major technology company and a reporter for the local paper into coming along on a demonstration flight to 50 years into the future so that he can trade access to his technology for a research grant. But when he and the reporter return to the future on a date, they find that whatever the CEO has done with the time travel technology has turned the future city into a post-apocolyptic wasteland! Unable to regain control of his invention due to laws around eminent domain of potential military tech, inventor and reporter head back in time to stop his past self from giving the demonstration. The evil CEO follows to violently prevent them from changing the past, and what follows is theoretically a race through time to prevent or preserve the development of time travel technology. In reality, it's just a bunch of pointless, drawn-out action scenes between each step of plot trying to draw everything out to movie length.
MST3K lore or notable moments: Inspired by the movie, Crow travels back to 1985 to convince young Mike to stop taking temp jobs and focus on his band so that he never winds up in Deep 13 and Dr. F and TV's Frank don't get the chance to shoot him into space. But back on the Satellite, Mike has been replaced by his crude older brother Eddie, who bullies the bots and reveals Mike's tragic early death on stage, bludgeoned by hotel keys thrown by over-enthusiastic female fans. Crow must go back again to undo what he changed, but "Eddie's" in the theater for a bit while this is going on, and Pearl points out at the end that all the time travel shenanigans have left one iteration of Crow in 1985. (Is this how he became Art and met Pearl pre-series?) (Also, Brain Guy attempts a joke by breaking into the movie credits with a fake promo for "Observer News," before rapidly losing all confidence in the bit and breaking down to apologize for it.)
What I think about its place on the list? I really liked the bookend sketches of Mike visiting Pearl in the van like they're Midwestern neighbors coming over to each other's stoops. Extremely fun Mike-and-Pearl dynamic! And the Observer cutting in to the movie credits was a delight! I don't think anything in the "Crow goes back in time" plot actually made me laugh, but it was a reasonably fun and entertaining storyline, and it was interesting watching "Eddie" in the theater segments. (Though I go back and forth between thinking that they could have done even more with the contrast between "Eddie's" style of riffing and Mike's, or if making the contrast starker would have been too jarring over the length of time that "Eddie" was in the theater.) As for the movie, it has something of a sweet community theater vibe to it as the number of locations they were able to film in and the number of extras moving through scenes show a lot of local support behind the film (and the sheer number of people and groups they had to thank!) But unfortunately, the movie can't seem to do anything with the resources that it does have. The movie gets potentially interesting in a couple of places - once where past timeline Lisa and Nick start investigating the time anomalies caused by their future selves trying to reach them, and Lisa's own body is identified in the wreckage of the plane crash she's reporting on. If the script had figured out a way to make the latter half of the movie focus more on the past timeline characters trying to put together what was going on, with past!Lisa using her investigative reporter skills to try to discern what both the villain and their future selves were doing in order to help effect events and past!Nick learning from his future self's mistakes, that immediately would have improved things. The second time it gets potentially fun is when the CEO decides to take future!Nick back to the American Revolution to kill him so that his body blends in among the war dead and its discovery doesn't cause any paradoxes, and a whole slew of Revolutionary War re-enactors who've definitely supplied their own props and costumes show up. When the citizens and officials of Rutland, Vermont give you a veritable army of historically accurate Minute Men, do something with them (besides padding)! They don't even get to shoot the bad guy! I want that man taking a musketball to the shoulder! Which yes, is all great riffing fodder (I especially love Tom Servo doing the countdown along with timer and having to keep going back because they are stretching out the seconds), but this is still the first top ten episode that I'm going to call over-rated. It's a good episode of MST3K - in some moments it's a great episode of MST3K! - but compared to the rest of the top 10 list, or even to everything else that made the top 15, this is the comparatively most forgettable episode. If you watch this episode, you'll probably enjoy it, but I can't really say that there's anything particular you would miss if you skip this one. (There's Eddie in the theater, but we had Pearl in the theater during Quest of the Delta Knights and that only made it to 62 on the list.) The extra Crow lore and Brain Guy's fun break in to the theater just isn't enough to make this one the tenth best MST3K episode of all time (pre-Netflix). At least, not in my opinion. What do you all think? Is this anyone's particular favorite, and if so, what are the things about it that you love that I'm missing?
All the little angels rise up, rise up.
All the little angels rise up high!
How do they rise up, rise up, rise up?
How do they rise up, rise up high?
They rise heads up, heads up, heads upâŠ
Itâs not that Americans say âsoss,â itâs that many (but not all) accents of US English have dropped the âawâ sound entirely. (This is called the âcaught/cot mergerâ in linguistics because after it happens, caught and cot become homophones.)
In US regions without the caught/cot merger, people say apple-sawss.
(Most US East Coast accents do NOT have the caught/cot merger - indeed the stereotypical New York accent inserts âawâs in words that otherwise donât have them, like âcoffeeâ (cawfee) and âdogâ (dawg). The Midwest accent has the typical caught/cot merger and is slowly spreading it to other regions as the Midwest accent is increasingly used as âgeneric US accentâ in movies and TV)
[Edit: there's not, as far as I'm aware, any dialect of US English where the "c" in "applesauce" is vocalized into a "z" pronunciation as in the word "saws" instead like an "s", which on consideration may be more what op was reacting to than the vowel?]
A list of the Top 100 Episodes of MST3K was compiled based on a survey taken of backers of the Bring Back MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 campa
11. Overdrawn At The Memory Bank - (822)
12. I Accuse My Parents - (507)
13. Eegah! - (506)
14. Gamera - (302)
15. Prince of Space - (816)
16. Hobgoblins - (907)
17. Laserblast - (706)
18. Soultaker - (1001)
19. Godzilla vs. Megalon - (212)
20. Jack Frost - (813)
21. Santa Claus - (521)
22. Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders - (1003)
23. The Brain That Wouldn't Die - (513)
24. The Touch of Satan - (908)
25. Teenagers from Outer Space - (404)
Retrospective on Episodes 26-50
Retrospective on Episodes 51-75
Retrospective on Episodes 76-90
Retrospective on Episodes 91-100
Overall thoughts: I've been a fan for a long time, but I never actually finished the one time I attempted to do a full series watch through, so it's surprising to me that there's still a couple of new-to-me episodes even up this high! There's a lot of perennial favorites of mine here mixed in with what I recognize are also very good episodes, but not personal favorites of mine. Most of the non-personal-favorites I suspect would grow on me after repeated rewatches. Sometimes it takes a while for all the riffs to land properly!
Overrated Episodes: While I quibbled a bit about the exact rankings of some of these in my write-ups, I don't think this bracket has anything that I'd really call "over-rated," with the possible exception of Hobgoblins. I definitely get why that's a memorable episode, but the movie is often too irritating for me to enjoy laughing at quite as much as I do the others. (Me and my problem with the 80s movies again, most likely). Everything else on this section of the list is very good and/or iconic for one reason or another.
Underrated Episodes: I Accuse My Parents and probably Jack Frost deserve top 10 spots, and I suspect all the Gameras and both Godzillas were artificially lowered by having their votes split across multiple episodes. Wonder where they would have shown up in a ranked choice voting list!
Must-sees for MSTies: For show history, The Brain that Wouldn't Die (Mike's first episode as host), Laserblast (end of the Comedy Central era), and Soultaker (Joel and Frank return as guest stars). For iconic-ness, Gamera (monster most associated with MST3K), Godzilla vs Megalon (one of only two times they've gotten to do Godzilla), and Santa Claus (one of only two Christmas episodes in the original run). For just being really high quality MST3K episodes, you could really add the rest of the list, but I'm going to pull out Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, I Accuse My Parents, and Jack Frost for special consideration.
Good on-boardings for new fans? Wait until December and then watch Santa Claus! But if you want something non-festive, The Touch of Satan or Eegah! are probably your best options if you want a good episode about a bad movie, and I Accuse My Parents or Jack Frost if you want a good episode about a surprisingly watchable movie. Teenagers from Outer Space is also a good choice for first episode of MST3K to watch, with a cheesy but charming movie!
All my Memorial Day weekend plans got rained out, so in between the absolutely oceans of housework I have, the plan is to resume MST3Knitathon and finally get started on the top ten. I've been looking ahead at the list, and spoiler alert, with the standards for a top ten episode so high, I'm planning to call fully half the episodes on the list overrated!
Iâve always been primarily a fantasy reader, but in the last few years, Iâve been reading mostly my secondary loves of science fiction and detective stories, partly because the recent fantasy boom has resulted in so much being out there that Iâm getting overwhelmed and having trouble separating the wheat from the chaff. Anyone have any favorites to recommend? Especially anything that might be available on Hoopla library app in the US?
