well. here we are.

"ey, im, is" pronouns. my other blogs are magicmumbled, thehappyzoologist, and verve-n-spunk (art blog)

[queeranarchism]

On Class and Climate Struggle: Decolonising XR

So XR Scotland just did a surprisingly awesome thing, publishing the statement On Class and Climate Struggle: Decolonising XR. I’m gonna copy paste the whole thing because it is so good that this is happening and to be honest, I would not be at all surprised if someone else at XR tried to make it disappear.

Oct 19th 2019

In the last week, two widely-shared images have summed up deep-rooted problems at the heart of the Extinction Rebellion movement. One, a white man wearing a suit jacket being pulled off the top of a Tube train by people needing to get to work. In Canning Town, a mostly working class area of London that has been hit by years of austerity.

The other, a card and a bunch of flowers sent to police officers by an XR arrestee, thanking them for their ‘professionalism’. Brixton police station, where black men have died in custody.

These scenes have shown nothing new—XR has long been criticised for failing to connect with marginalised communities. But they have shown how urgently XR needs to openly address these issues.

A core message of XR has been ‘we are all in this together’. That climate catastrophe is coming for everyone, whatever class, race or creed, we can all be united by a common cause in the face of a shared threat.

BUT: – People in the Global South are already experiencing floods, drought, famine and unbearable heat that won’t affect the North in same way. – They have been robbed of the resources to be resilient to climate change by the economic system that benefits the richest 1%. – People living in poverty, in both the Global South and North, due to structural injustice (often people of colour and disabled people) are and will be adversely affected in ways the rich are protected from. – Migration caused by impacts of climate and ecological emergency is met by hostile border policies that leave people to drown and keeps them in indefinite detention.

Yes, the crisis will come for everyone. But there are massively unjust ways this is damaging some people more than others. And when we erase that, when we ignore the voices of those on the frontlines and who have the most at stake, when we focus only on ‘our children’ and not the people who are dying now, we risk leaving space for eco-fascism. By refusing to name the causes of both the climate crisis and other social injustices–colonialism and capitalism—XR will continue to alienate the people who are already living at the sharp end of the system that is ultimately killing us all.

In the run-up to the October International Rebellion, members of XR Scotland chose to highlight these issues, and to respond to the concerns of women of colour in our group being dismissed by key figures in XR UK, by creating banners reading ‘DECOLONISE XR’ and ‘CLIMATE STRUGGLE = CLASS STRUGGLE’. Many people, and other groups in XR such as Extinction Rebellion Youth, Global Justice Rebellion and XR Internationalist Solidarity Network, applauded these banners. Others in XR UK questioned this ‘messaging’.

At last week’s roadblock action targeted at the Government Oil and Gas conference, protestors from groups other than XR Scotland began singing the chant ‘police, we love you, we’re doing this for your children too’.

A woman who was with the XR protest started to shout: ‘Say that to Stephen Lawrence and Mark Duggan’s family; say you love the police to the people of Tottenham. Say that to my friends whose lives are ruined by this system. Listen, if the people on that road were all people of colour they would be getting charged at with riot gear. My black and brown friends get stopped and searched EVERY DAY’. Other XR members told her off for raising her voice and talking about something that was ‘unrelated’.

While some Scottish rebels went around asking people individually not to sing that chant, another XRS rebel—a young woman of colour—took the megaphone to ask ‘please don’t sing that—it’s really alienating to people from marginalised communities’. A middle-aged white woman then took the megaphone away from her, to say that she does love the police, that she is doing this for their children, and her own children. A woman of colour’s critique was very literally silenced by the concerns of the white woman.

Narrating this incident is not to individually blame that white woman—her actions were a symptom of something systemic in both XR and wider society. But what it reminds the white, middle-class people that dominate our movement is to stop taking the megaphone. To be quiet, and listen.

After listening, what comes next is more difficult. How can XR use its resources in genuine solidarity? How do we shift from being an overwhelmingly white and middle-class movement to centring those who have been excluded? And without tokenism, or requiring disabled, working class and people of colour to do the work that those with more privilege should have done long ago? But taking the time to listen, absorb, and reflect, is the essential first step.

Recommended recent critiques of XR:

– Athian Akec, ‘When I look at Extinction Rebellion, all I see is white faces. That has to change’ https://www.huckmag.com/…/you-cant-have-true-climate-justi…/ – Minnie Rahman, ‘You can’t have climate justice without migrant justice’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/extinction-rebellion-white-fa… – James Poulter ‘Extinction Rebellion’s Tube Protest Isn’t the Last of Its Problems’ (including interview with XR Scotland’s Mikaela Loach) https://www.vice.com/…/extinction-rebellion-tube-disruption… – May Fraser, ‘The Police Line’, https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2019/10/16/the-police-line/ – Kevin Blowe, ‘It’s Not Just a Bunch of Flowers’ https://medium.com/…/it-is-not-just-a-bunch-of-flowers-bc50… – Hannah Dines, ‘The climate revolution must be accessible – this fight belongs to disabled people too’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/climate-revolution-disabled-p… – Kuba Shand-Baptiste, ‘Extinction Rebellion’s hapless stance on class and race is a depressing block to its climate goal’ https://www.independent.co.uk/…/extinction-rebellion-climat… – Bae Sharam ‘What are you doing to dismantle your middle class white privilege when participating in XR protests? https://medium.com/…/what-are-you-doing-to-dismantle-your-m… – Karen Bell, ‘A working-class green movement is out there but not getting the credit it deserves’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/a-working-class-green-movemen… – Sharlene Gandhi, ‘Extinction Rebellion need to focus on the fact that climate displacement will largely impact communities of colour’ http://gal-dem.com/extinction-rebellion-need-to-focus-on-t…/ – Aranyo Aarjan, ‘It’s time to add global justice to XR’s demands’ https://www.redpepper.org.uk/xr-global-justice/ – Damien Gayle, ‘Does Extinction Rebellion Have a Race Problem?’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/extinction-rebellion-race-cli… – Wretched of the Earth Collective, ‘Our House Has Been on Fire for Over 500 Years’ https://worldat1c.org/our-house-has-been-on-fire-for-over-5…

[eldritchscholar]

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

[benegesserwitch]

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

[darkersolstice]

@we-are-threadmage

[systlin]

Someone port Doom to a blanket

[rolypolywardrobe]

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

[isnerdy-deactivated20190101]

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

[dollsahoy]

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

[butts-for-days]

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

[costumersupportdept]

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

[synebluetoo]

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level. 

[lewyn-martell]

[sunflower-cane]

fire pit: *Crackles loudly*

my shitty joints: *cracks louder to assert dominance*

[brightephemera]

The current usage of “a few bad apples” bothers me.

A few bad apples spoil the barrel. If you put a rotting apple in with three dozen good ones, every adjacent apple will be rotting within days. “A few bad apples” does NOT mean “we have a good barrel but, oh well, sometimes bad things happen.” “A few bad apples” means “Our entire organism is rotting from the inside out, triggered by the actions of a few and perpetuated by the natural processing of the whole.” When you say “we had a few bad apples” your next words had BETTER be “we excised them, quickly and permanently, and checked the remaining ones to make sure they’re still good.”

This has been my rant, thank you.

[ihavealotoffeelings]

The full phrase as I’ve always heard it is “don’t let a few bad apples spoil the whole barrel”, which I guess people sometimes wrongly interpret as “so enjoy all the good apples in there and don’t be so darn picky about the bad ones” and not, y’know, “get the bad ones the heck out of there before the rot spreads”.

[clowniconography]

[millennial-review-deactivated20]

[curiosityistheleastofmyproblems]

A skeleton and its shadow. Pen and ink drawing by Joyce Cutler Shaw, 1992.

[catsofinstagram]

‪From @riepoyonn: “Record of Amelie and Canele’s growth. When twins were 3months→5months→1yearold ✨” #catsofinstagram ‬ [source: https://ift.tt/2qi2C32 ]

[finishingschoolbooks]

How to Ride a Werewolf

Now remember, a lady rides sidesaddle, NOT astride. Your mother would be in hysterics at the very idea that a daughter of hers would ride a werewolf astride! Why, next you’ll be showing ankle…

[annabellioncourt]

I HAVE NOT SEEN THIS POST IN A YEAR.

[emeraldsiren19]

LOL

[celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725]

I’m riding a werewolf astride and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!

[bumblbytrash]

I’ve never seen this before in my entire life and I feel like I’ve been left out on the good shit

[moomoobooboo-deactivated2020102]

Please read Gail Carriger’s Finishing School & Parasol Protectorate books. They’re steampunk supernatural romantic comedies. The Finishing School series is a prequel to the Paraole Protectorate books.

[finishingschoolbooks]

How to Ride a Werewolf

Now remember, a lady rides sidesaddle, NOT astride. Your mother would be in hysterics at the very idea that a daughter of hers would ride a werewolf astride! Why, next you’ll be showing ankle…

[annabellioncourt]

I HAVE NOT SEEN THIS POST IN A YEAR.

[emeraldsiren19]

LOL

[celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725]

I’m riding a werewolf astride and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!

[bumblbytrash]

I’ve never seen this before in my entire life and I feel like I’ve been left out on the good shit

[moomoobooboo-deactivated2020102]

Please read Gail Carriger’s Finishing School & Parasol Protectorate books. They’re steampunk supernatural romantic comedies. The Finishing School series is a prequel to the Paraole Protectorate books.

[o-the-fool]

witches on this site who act like walmart selling witch costumes and starbucks making ‘witch’s brew’ drinks is cultural appropriation and then go n steal up bits of native american, african, african american, etc. culture… save everyone the time n just say ur racists!

[whimsycore]

They also love forgetting the people persecuted the most during the witch trials were Jewish/RRomani or just Not White in Europe

[saturnineaqua]

SAY IT

[queeranarchism]

hey have you seen this XR bullshit? I’m floored honestly. How can anyone make this poster and not go “hm, this kinda really looks like a government psy-op”????

YES! Honestly I didn’t know what to say about how absolutely ridiculous this is. Honestly, at this point, almost nothing surprises me anymore of XR bullshit. One Mastodon user did make a nice version of this and I think the poster has more meme-potential:

[queeranarchism]

[havanasliu]

men will watch the most trash shit ever released but when it comes to a girl squad movie it needs to meet the highest bar to be considered watchable and worthy of their oh so valuable time lol i have to laugh

[astrangeenchantedboy]

i was thinking abt that earlier bc my coworker said "so birds of prey doesn't look very good" and i said "i don't care if it's the most trash ass movie ever made, i'm excited and i'm GONNA watch it!" he said "what, just because they're women" and i said "uh. yeah."

especially in genres, women are held to a weirdly high standard. there are like eight fucking movies where tom cruise plays himself in ridiculous high-stakes spy settings and no one bitches that they're unrealistic or stupid or whatever but margot robbie does it once and suddenly it's all about the integrity of the art.

[averagefairy]

working full time is terrible why do we just accept that having 8 days off a month is normal and okay........ being alive could be cool but we waste it at our JOBS.... sorry i’m just heated about capitalism again i’ll be fine

[fbdbsgdg]

8 days....never thought about it like that 😓

[revere-irreverence]

This seems really whiny to me. Like, I agree with you, work sucks, but our ancestors didn’t get to browse tumblr at their desks or have the option to gleefully spend their ENTIRE WEEKENDS horizontal on the couch stuffing their faces/watching tv/playing video games/wacking off.  They didn’t have weekends. They just slaved away as fucking peasants from dawn to dusk until they died in childbirth or got the consumption.

I am perfectly happy working 8 hrs a day because I don’t have to:

grow my own food

find my own clean water

heat my house

shit in the woods

[nubiana-americana-deactivated20]

[aggressivelycalm]

Hi, I study social and cultural anthropology. Humans working 40+ hours a week is 100% an industrial revolution thing and was not normal in the early stages of our existence. In fact, hunter and gatherer societies that still exist to this day spend about 15-20 hours a week TOPS working. The rest is dedicated to sitting around and telling stories and jokes, dancing, singing, eating, sleeping, fucking and so forth. Read a damn book.

[ekelarsons]

The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant

Medieval peasants lived grueling, terrible lives. But their vacation days beat out the policies now common even in progressive societies.

[dementia-by-day]

Don’t ask someone with dementia if they “know your name” or “remember you”

If I can, I always opt to ditch my name tag in a dementia care environment. I let my friends with dementia decide what my name is: I’ve been Susan, Gwendolyn, and various peoples’ kids. I’ve been so many identities to my residents, too: a coworker, a boss, a student, a sibling, a friend from home, and more. 

Don’t ask your friend with dementia if they “remember your name” — especially if that person is your parent, spouse, or other family member. It’s quite likely to embarrass them if they can’t place you, and, frankly, it doesn’t really matter what your name is. What matters is how they feel about you.

Here’s my absolute favorite story about what I call, “Timeline Confusion”:

Alicia danced down the hallway, both hands steadily on her walker. She moved her hips from side to side, singing a little song, and smiled at everyone she passed. Her son, Nick, was walking next to her.

Nick was probably one of the best caregivers I’d ever met. It wasn’t just that he visited his mother often, it was how he visited her. He was patient and kind—really, he just understood dementia care. He got it.

Alicia was what I like to call, “pleasantly confused.” She thought it was a different year than it was, liked to sing and dance, and generally enjoyed her life.

One day, I approached the pair as they walked quietly down the hall. Alicia smiled and nodded at everyone she passed, sometimes whispering a, “How do you do!”

“Hey, Alicia,” I said. “We’re having a piano player come in to sing and play music for us. Would you like to come listen?”

“Ah, yes!” she smiled back. “My husband is a great singer,” she said, motioning to her son.

Nick smiled and did not correct her. He put his hand gently on her shoulder and said to me, “We’ll be over there soon.”

I saw Nick again a few minutes later while his mom was occupied with some other residents. “Nick,” I said. “Does your mom usually think that you’re her husband?”

Nick said something that I’ll never forget.

“Sometimes I’m me, sometimes I’m my brother, sometimes I’m my dad, and sometimes I’m just a friend. But she always knows that she loves me,” he smiled.

Nick had nailed it. He understood that, because his mom thought it was 1960, she would have trouble placing him on a timeline.

He knew that his mom recognized him and he knew that she loved him. However, because of her dementia, she thought it was a different year. And, in that year, he would’ve been a teenager.

Using context clues (however mixed up the clues were) Alicia had determined that Nick was her husband: he was the right age, he sure sounded and looked like her husband, and she believed that her son was a young man.

This is the concept that I like to call timeline confusion. It’s not that your loved one doesn’t recognize you, it’s that they can’t place you on a timeline.

What matters is how they feel about you. Not your name or your exact identity.

[deebott]

This is so sweet omg

[wizardnuke]

fake relationship but its a king and his concubine that was once an amazing soldier but he couldn’t go up the ranks for whatever reason so the king was like listen. hear me out. you can be my strategy dude. u just gotta be okay w walking around shirtless a lot. and soldier dude is like man that’s an UPSIDE and yknow they end up falling in love

[aethersea]

some idiot advisor: I can’t believe his majesty lets his boytoy attend these council meetings, it’s an insult to the noble institutions that uphold our nation, it’s an outrage—

a somewhat smarter advisor: you’re just mad bc he pointed out how dumb your naval attack strategy and no one laughed when you made a mean joke about him

[fieldbears]

Boytoy has gone from a top fighter who was well respected but in constant danger to wearing silks and eating grapes on daises. That fucked up rotator cuff was the best thing to ever happen to him

[mzminola]

Bonus points: at least half the other concubines are experts in assorted fields, the monarch brings them to relevant meetings to both play up a reputation for frivolity, and make sure at least one person there doesn’t have an outside agenda.

[aethersea]

my harem? 

did you mean: my chief strategic advisors