Hey, does anyone have a clue where I could buy Morphology (the game) or is anyone willing to part with their version of the game? I can't find it anywhere and my little brother desperately wants it, like, requesting it on both his birthday and Christmas lists level wanting it. Vat19 only links to Amazon, and it's been "Currently Unavailable" for a good long while now.
Here is an annual reminder that poor people are not a guilt-free way to get rid of your junk.
Food kitchens do not want the cans of slimy green beans that have been buried in your pantry for a year. Homeless shelters don't want your stained and torn clothes or your paper thin Shein hauls. Thrift stores don't want your torn up furniture, broken toys, or scratched up teflon pans. Homeless people on the street don't want whatever random assortment of groceries you feel like doling out from your bags.
If it's not good enough for you, if it's not good enough to give to your friends or family, then why do you think it's good enough for people struggling just to survive? Poor people don't need your trash or junk that you don't feel like throwing away, they need actual help and support.
If you want to provide real and tangible support to organizations like shelters and food kitchens, and you have the means to do so, the best way to help is by donating MONEY. Those organizations know the things they need the most and they almost always have arrangements with companies and local businesses to get deals and discounts so every dollar you donate goes way, way farther than you think.
Imagine a pinecone as heavy as a bowling ball and the size of a chihuahua. Believe it or not, such pinecones exist—and they belong to the coulter pine (Pinus coulteri), a conifer that can be found in parts of North America including California and Mexico. Infamous among loggers and foresters, this tree is nicknamed "the widowmaker" because of the unlucky individuals who met their fate as a result of its falling pinecones. This species produces some of the largest pinecones on the planet, weighing up to 11 lbs (5 kg).
They love to live on your porch and deal with pests and be really chill and then sneak in when you least expect it. They’re trying so hard to be domesticated. Sorry bud, you’re so shiny and dark and beautiful but you’re an outside friend.
ratsnake perfec t for domestication put rat snake in House good friend to human very Companion and Friend have good time with ratsnake in house. Put Ratsnake In House. No problems ever ratsnake in house because ratsnake perfect size give Help and Support to human. A ratsnake perfect pet for human can trust ratsnake to be good companion to Human. friend ratsnake.
On the one hand, I have been in the same position for long enough that I'm in excruciating pain. On the other hand, there's a cat on my lap, so I'm legally not allowed to move.
OKAY SO. FINALLY. I HAVE PROPERLY (ish) MET THE WEIRD SPINNING WHEEL
*AND CRACKED SOME OF ITS SECRETS*
(loooong post ahead, click to unfold at your own risk)
INTRO
Welcome to Daelf's most involved rambling about old tools so far :D
So, in august, friends who are rarely around were coming to Paris, so we planned a guided group visit of the Arts & Métiers museum (meaning "crafts & professions"— it's all about technology, from the transformation of materials to communication and data, to the purification and precise measurement of scientific elements, to going to space, and also they have a Foucault pendulum and fun vehicles.)
Great! We'd never been there!
I loved it from the start, but *then* we got to the first ~textile~ room and OH. MY. GOD. so many semi-automated looms, and strange shuttles, and… ONE spinning wheel? huh.
I get closer to it, and it looks… Weird.
I am instantly obsessed, but the guide is moving on, so i can't do much about it… YET.
Fast forward a couple weeks. Our son Perco is coming back from summer camp, I have to go pick him up from the train station and then we have to wait for a few hours until Fifo arrives with the car so we can all get home with the *enormous* suitcase and assorted Stuff.
… Hey, why not put all that in the lockers at the station, and go to that museum you didn't see because you were away at the time, and yeah, don't worry about the thing i want to see more closely, it's fiiiine :]
… i spent like twenty minutes *just* in that room, taking as many pictures as i could, before Perco literally dragged me away because we were running out of time -_-°
IT WAS NOT ENOUGH. OBSESSION HAD ONLY INTENSIFIED.
I mean, look at that. what the *heck* is going on.
So, a few days later, having found nothing in the online data about the museum collection, I phoned them to ask about it, ended up exchanging a few mails with the lady curating the Materials section… but her specialty is glass working, not yarn related at all, so she offered to invite me to see the thing *out of its casing* on a day the museum is closed to visitors, and HECK YES PLEASE OMG
It was planned for december 1st, and (sparing you the logistic details) early in the afternoon, I was there with my mom, who had helped me get there with my own spinning wheel.
THE WEIRD WHEEL
sadly, we were not able to take the wheel completly outside, because (as you can see in the first pic above) it's linked to a distaff by a length of combed wool, and the distaff is fastened to the wall, so we were not going to touch that.
BUT. no glass.
So.
What is "wrong" with this wheel?
"well it has only one pedal…"
yes ma'am, but that's. normal, actually ^^° Modern wheels have two because it's more comfy, that's all.
no. it has a tiny bobin that's impossible to take off from the flyer, and in direct contact to the wheel itself, which means no tention adjustment. why.
but also, a very ingenious system, moving the yarn as it is spun so that the bobin is evenly and automatically filled!
in addition to that, there's a yarn swift to the side, with a complicated string-and-pulley mechanism… and between that and the wheel, a missing part, broken.
(the vice in the background also seems to do nothing, so there might be a missing part there too.)
so…
… what to make of all this?
especially in contrast with the demonstration I did with my own wheel, and all the talking of being able (well, having the *potential ability*…) to make pretty much any yarn I could want with it, it's clear this one was the opposite:
make One Specific Yarn, but easily and fast, with All The Steps on One Tool.
Not sure how the string and pulley bits worked, but they were a way to use the wheel to spin it instead of the flyer without having to do more than tightening a thing specifically for it.
I suggested that the missing part(s) helped with getting the yarn on the swift, and the swift was there because the rigid nature of the 'fill bobin easily with very regular yarn' meant you couldn't fill it much before tension needed adjusting, and everything else meant that you *couldn't adjust tension* because the whole point of this model was predictavility and regularity.
And that's all very cool, but a bit frustrating that the lil blurb under the wheel didn't specify anything but "spinning wheel with yarn swift", dating it even more vaguely to "sometime before 1840". And that was it.
And I realized I'd forgotten to ask the lady to give me the restoration notes she had pulled from the archives, but she had also mentionned something else we (I) could look up…
THE PATENT
At first I was like. Wait. What?
But OF COURSE there would be a patent for something weird like this made in the early 19th century! The industrial revolution!!
All I'd needed was the suggestion that such a patent existed, and the information that a public archive website listed All Of Them.
So I looked. And came up with nothing about spinning wheels: all the machines were after, like, 1855.
But then I realized there was *another* archive, for older patents, from before they were all numbered!
… And I found it.
I FOUND IT.
I haven't had the spoons to read *everything* yet (because, o boi, the cursive, and the *spelling*… it might as well be not-french to me)(yes, if you didn't get it yet, i'm french so the langue itself is not a problem, but. WELP)
A few notes though!
I didn't need to read everything to know it's the right one because
a/ it has schematics of the flyer (*only* the flyer though :/ ) and the description of the parts describes the motion of the yarn guide doing its work, so even though some parts are not clearly visible or a little different, clearly, this essential part of the machine is THE thing they wanted to file a patent on, and it's the same mechanism I found on the wheel at the musem
b/ at the very start, the authors of the thing explain why they did this, and as I deducted, it's mostly Time. But also saving up fibers and bits of yarn? I get how having one person do everything could save time (they apparently even did Tests, and mention Numbers on how much time was saved) but i don't know enough about the procedures of the time to get how fiber was saved. ah well. It definitely was important, though, because they specifically mention silk in the list of fibers it can be used for!
c/ I had NO idea how incredible it would feel to see a mystery object, have questions about it, get to answer them by looking at it up close (at least closer than a regular visitor of the museum can), discuss it with a professionnal who knew nothing about this specific tool but still A Lot about the textile industry at the time, formulate hypothesis about the Why of the Weird, and then *have them confirmed* by *finding the patent its inventors filed about it because they were super proud of themselves* (quite right, too!)
It was great.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I'll try and go read the rest of the patent to see if there are more interesting details, but it might take a while…
Si quelqu'un y arrive avant moi, n'hésitez pas à détourner ce post :3
do you ever tell people you’ll be going to sleep but then you don’t and you have to not do anything noticable online for the sake of it seeming as if you didn’t lie to them
this post is classic tumblr in a lot of ways but the one I appreciate the most is that the second post happened eleven years after the first one. one of these days I’m going to see a reply to a post by someone younger than the post itself and we’re all just going to have to deal with it
Had a dream I invented something known as Chatter Chess, where you'd assign character names to every piece on your board and roleplay out the whole "battle" - every lost piece involved roleplaying a dramatic death, every strategic move involved trying to roleplay the move without revealing too much about your plan in the process, people would watch matches and once the Queens started dying people were getting REALLY into the drama of it all and once a King was finally cornered, oh man, the crowd went NUTS
This might be one of the nerdiest dreams I've ever had, look at that. Reread that and really think about what my brain did.
My husband’s job primarily employs adult men but there is one (1) teenage girl and my husband said originally he worried she might be a bit of an outcast but instead every man on the crew was like “huh guess I am a dad/older brother now.”
She was in a car crash on the way to work one morning and called my husband to let him know she’d be late and he was like wtf guess I’m gonna be late too because I’m coming to pick you up and then he told his team and they were like I think you mean WE are coming.
Imagine you are a teenage girl probably rushing to get to work and you crash your probably new car and feel absolutely miserable and now you’ll be late to work but then suddenly in the distance a car full of all the adult men you work with just pulls up and is like “we came all the way here to pick you up” the mental image right now is fr.
Apparently she tried to call her dad but it was 3am and he was obviously sleeping so she called my husband and he not only came to find her but fished her glasses out of the hood of the car (she’d dropped them while looking inside), drove her to the hospital, and told her to take the day off. She insisted on coming back to work so he used his lunch break to watch TV with her to make sure she didn’t doze off (concussion risk).
You’ve heard of the Mom friend but my husband is very much the Dad friend. He said when he answered the phone she said “hey please don’t be mad” and he’s never felt such powerful Fatherhood energy in his life.
Last month my mom sent me a link with a story about a pack of desert lions in Namibia that decided to move to the beach in a search for food, and I've been thinking about it since I read it, like
Imagine finding those big girls in a beach, of all places
A pack of desert lions in Namibia is adapting to the rugged terrain of the Atlantic coast, and wildlife photographer Griet Van Malderen is d
