ā¦.Facebook foraging groups are truly an experience sometimes.

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Cosmic Funnies

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occasionally subtle

shark vs the universe

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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Love Begins

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almost home

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@iguanastevens
ā¦.Facebook foraging groups are truly an experience sometimes.
Love when a cat puts all 25 pounds of their 9 pound body right on your soft internal organs.
GET YELLED AT
photos by carl bergstrom
Double-crested cormorant (Nannopterum auritum)
Great blue heron (Ardea herodias)
ā...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 (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner ā even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ācomfortā margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).
Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together donāt really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as weāll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.
On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they werenāt required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.
At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).
...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner ā who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her ā is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Leeās wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ādistaff line,ā the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ādistaff counterpartā for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called āspinstersā on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (Iām not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).
E.W. Barber (Womenās Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that āthe only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily foodā which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was āwomenās workā as per her title.
(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity ā which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity ā tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)
Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelopeās defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as āmaidsā in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see āmaidsā in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Romeās monarchy. The purpose of Lucretiaās wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.
...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically āhomemakingā in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this ā they generally arenāt confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.ā
- Bret Devereaux, āClothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Roundā¦ā
If I may tag onto this: it's really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I'm at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was... a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody's up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I'm not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled ...) and the spinner didn't suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn't be easy, but it also wouldn't be terrifying back-breaking labour.
I would like to amend the above: spinning all day every day in order to keep your family afloat must absolutely have been terrifying back-breaking labour eventually. Or wrist-breaking.
In unrelated news, last year I got a repetitive strain injury from too much spinning, and had never been so grateful in my life that I can simply stop spinning and suffer no financial hardship from it.
It's also interesting how much spinning remained a symbol of idealized femininity and even in societies where it was highly professionalized, later on in history
In the lead up to the American Revolution, you see newspapers talking about women ā many if not most of whom had never spun a day in their lives, either because they were wealthy and didn't have to or because they were poor but didn't have time to among all of the other things they had to do for their families or their jobs, and professional spinster's existed, so why would they? -Getting together "spinning bees" to try and make homespun thread for homespun fabric so they could boycott textiles coming from England. These women were hailed as paragons of patriotic womanhood (never mind the fact that we have no evidence they ever produced scalable amounts of textiles, or even like⦠High-quality anything. Most of these bees seem to have been one-off events that were almost more about performing femininity and patriotism than actually producing threads/fabric)
And moving into the 19th century, the image of the spinning wheel became ubiquitous here in the US when talking about women in earlier American history. Longfellow's poem about his Mayflower ancestors features the female protagonist at her spinning wheel, even though textile production wasn't really a thing in the new colony at the time when the events he wrote about took place. Popular illustrations showed colonial women spinning at home. In the early 20th century, an art photographer named Wallace Nutting and his wife Mariet Griswold staged images of imaginary colonial interiors that almost always involved some type of antique spinning wheel as set dressing (to the great annoyance of later museum workers, who are forever having to debunk his photos in various ways)
And within those societies, there's been an idea that "women these days" are so lazy for not spinning and/or weaving their own cloth and instead of having it done by professionals. Making textiles from scratch remained a marker of idealized femininity long after it was the norm for most households in many places
Do you know of any arachnids who ventured towards carcinisation?
no because the term "carcinization" was created to describe the tendency for marine decapod crustaceans to convergently evolve crab-like body plans, it was never supposed to be applicable to other animals!
I blame pop science for spreading it around as a funny term that got misunderstood and misapplied basically from that point onward. most other animal groups don't get their own term for this phenomena and carcinization does NOT apply because... these animals aren't evolving into crabs. only decapods do that ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
(decapods are the marine crustacean group with ten legs- true crabs, lobsters, hermit crabs, robber crabs, mantis shrimp, prawns, slipper lobsters, and all of their infinite assorted relatives in the deep blue sea)
give us back carcinization, bunjy. first warning.
one more word from you and no dessert tonight
Thats the context for this meme???
I feel like I've been robbed the whole time. This is magical.
I'm dying
can he be in a normal situation for like 5 minutes
been sort of obsessively combing through articles and websites and resources about top surgery and recovery more and more as I gear up to My Big Day and while I hate to report I may have gotten through most of the scientifically rigorous and reputable sites I am at least, now, stumbling over some of the funnier AI generated slop images i've ever seen in my quest for Patient Information
They missed. š
when (some orb-weaver?) spiders are hungrier they build/adjust their webs so the strands are more taut, meaning the web is more sensitive, and smaller prey than normal will make it vibrate (every bite counts when you're starving!). but ALSO: if you station a well-fed spider on a web that was built by an extremely hungry spider, that spider will go capture the kinds of tiny bugs that the looser web it would have built itself wouldn't have alerted it to. they outsource the decision-making for which prey to go after to their web! they just adjust the settings til they seem about right for the moment and then go along with whatever the web picks up. "the spider will eat whatever it's aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness by spinning different kinds of webs." that's so cool....
ScienceNews article on this phenomenon, if anyone is interested
truly few things instantly put me in a bad mood more than humidity
WHY is the fucking AIR out here TOUCHING ME
get OFF
It's been 7 years.
It's Another Beautiful Day of Not Being On Mount Everest. just how Every day of my life will be Another Beautiful Day of Not Being On Mount Everest, on account of how I am Never Ever Going There.
I wish people were as scared of getting into a car accident as they are of being true crime'd. Maybe then they wouldn't be on their phones while driving.
This comic is genuinely how I remember which is which.
To be quite honest with you all I do think that aro/ace-spectrum fans in fandoms where people are desperately inventing crossover ships and humanizing non-human characters in order to have a conventionally attractive guy to ship the main character with, instead of possibly having to enjoy a story with no romance in it, have the right to refer to everyone else as cowards.
Sorry you almost had to entertain the idea that people like me exist, I'm sure that was very painful for you.