delighting in arrows

[iokheaira]

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?

[ngoziu]

Actually, we need to talk about fandom and the NHL's conservative politics

(read on my Patreon)

You just finished reading every queer hockey story available to man—and holy Wayne Gretzky—you're a newly minted hockey fan. You love the gays; you want to watch the sexy men zoom around in the boy aquarium, and it's Friday night. So you tune into an NHL game.

You're a brand new hockey fan and you can see that there's twelve men on the ice, a bunch of others on the bench, there's coaches, assistant coaches, goalie coaches, referees, retired NHL players doing analysis and color commentary. You scan the faces, and all are consumed by the reason for tonight's gathering: working together to get a vulcanized piece of rubber into a goddamn net. We've left the outside world behind; color, creed, orientation, immigration status, and gender matter not. All that matters is the effort these athletes put out on the ice.

Yet, as a new, leftist hockey fan, pick any one of these people, and flip a coin—and there's a decent chance that this person has conservative politics. If they're American and registered to vote, there's a 43.9% chance they are registered as a Republican and if they voted, they voted for Donald J. Trump.

src: From Peter Lutz on Vote Hub

And I'm sure if you asked the other 38.5% of NHL players, they'd say something along the lines of "I don't really do politics." You know, the type of "uh...I think everyone should stop fighting" response that the willfully under-informed offer when you bring up genocides.

Oh man. Oh gosh. That's so weird. You got into hockey because of the myriad of stories that celebrate queerness and marginalized identities and intersectional feminism—so what is up with this league? Why is it so different from the stories that use it as an athletic backdrop? Has it always been like this? And how did you end up here? Why are so many other fannish/bookish left-leaning people like yourself finding solace in a league where there are millionaires who will gladly win it all and shake hands with a self-proclaimed fascist?

If you're at all like me, a leftist Black woman, it's a simple cycle.

You discover the world of hockey and the NHL which is strange and fascinating. The blood, sweat, and tears compel you. Yes, it's filled with white people—like it's mostly white people whatthefuckisupwiththat—but they're a different sort of people because this niche underground culture is...strange and fascinating! They have slang and enormous asses! (edit: I speak on hockey and whiteness in this Vanity Fair article.)

It is very gay. The homosociality of hockey breeds a male repression unmatched by any other form of physical exertion. You feel safe here now; you feel justified. Nevermind the fact that toxic masculinity is the thing you're actually observing. You were born with slash goggles on. If these men can't untie the bow on their unconscious desires and unrealized tenderness, you can do it for them.

Reality strikes. A good rule of writing is that characters are what they do. And whenever you peek into the real world of the NHL...you see what the league and its players do—or don't do. Time after time again you're presented with political inaction from the league, racism, misogyny, transphobia, and apathy towards the things you really care about. You learn slowly, that the NHL is a league that moves at glacial speeds, pun intended. It is, simply, not progressive.

Well, at least you have hockey romance and that is progressive! You don't need professional men's hockey! You can make a difference! Yay!

...But oh good God, now you've spread the gospel of hockey to dozens—maybe hundreds of people with your hockey fandom. And some of the people with whom you shared your fandom? They may never make it to step three. (Picture me running from laptop to laptop, closing the Word documents of various hockey romance writers. I kind of sound like Jimmy Stewart: "Stop! St-stop it now! We're spreading it! Dontcha know we're spreading it, huh? You're sending 'em down to the boy aquarium, but that's no boy aquarium! That's MAGA territory, you see! These people think Bernie Sanders is crazy!")

Am I saying that watching an NHL game is like buying a signed copy of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? No. (But someone do the math on that.) Any time we engage with any of the major sports we put money in the coffers of billionaires. (The PWHL is owned by billionaire Mark Walters, who is the owner the Lakers, Dodgers, and Sparks. He donated to Obama and the DNC and is always happy to visit the White House—even if it's to hang out with Trump when his sports team does well. Do NOT get me started on the MLB)

All I am saying is that, you, new hockey fan, can save yourself a lot of time and frustration by knowing precisely the league that is being marketed to you. You will be disappointed with player politics. You will be lulled by the basest forms of rainbow capitalism. 43.9% of American NHL players are registered Republicans. You will find yourself accepting the bare-minimum. (I was way too proud of Sidney Crosby for like, knowing a gay person?)

I deeply regret having made Jack Zimmermann's "uncle" Wayne Gretzky. I didn't know the guy would go to Trump's inauguration... He's not even American.

[stitchposts]

ive been embroidering for nearly half my life and it still blows my mind how cheap it is as a hobby tbh. it can be as expensive as you want to make it, sure. I've definitely invested in nicer tools when I had the finances to do so. But relatively compared to other hobbies it's kinda nuts that a splurge on materials is like. 9 bucks for a pack of some of the fanciest needles you can buy. Silk thread for 6 dollars. The industry gold standard thread is the stuff already available at every single craft store in the USA. If you follow exacting patterns that require a lot of color changes it can add up, but those are often projects that require weeks or months of work. Let's say you had 50 color changes and the project uses most of each skein. That's months of hobby-ing right there, for about 50 dollars plus the cost of base materials which is under 10 dollars.

[stitchposts]

#posts that singlehandedly make me want to take up embroidery

heyyyyyy buddy pspspspsppssppsspsp come over here, look at the pretty embroidery just laying there on the ground, you KNOW you wanna go look at it closer, dont worry about the box on the stick over it that part doesnt matter its irrelevant

[thanegreyhaven]

@stitchposts You might be able to answer a question I've had for quite a few years! One of my favourite series of books growing up were the adventures of Conrad Starguard. He's a modern guy that accidentally get sent back to medieval Poland about 10 years before the Mongols invade and wipe out Europe. So he starts the Industrial Revolution early and gets enough machines guns (amongst other things) built that they hold back the descendants of Genghis Khan. One of the things he does is introduce crochet work and instead of making doilys with it, they make T-Shirts. Because the modern T-Shirts he brought with him (he was camping at the time, so he had a large backpack full of stuff) are kind of knit, so they recreate that with crochet hooks? Is that possible at all?

[stitchposts]

[turns my jester cap backwards to show i mean business]

Short answer: fuck no

Long answer: without reading the book I can't really refute more than what you have said here but let's give this a whirl. I am sure it is a very very fun book series! I honestly am going to not be mean because I don't wanna be a hater about it and its not about accuracy so much as having a good time, yknow? I am sticking with two factors here because we're answering your childhood question: the firearms production and the textiles. These are the two things I can focus on quickly.

Part of the issue with reliable firearms is that they are dangerous. We know guns are dangerous, this is nothing new. I can't really summarize 800 years of history that quickly but one of the main issues with mass production is quality control. You would need to refine a large amount of metals, build firearms to spec, and train a defense force on safely using them, and wikipedia says the guy had only 10 years to do it.

The textiles, I am of course far more qualified to say that he would have been laughed the fuck out of the region for trying to introduce t-shirts. There is in particular this... 20th century idea among the general populace that modern clothes were the Most Comfortable things in the world, esp once we really relax dress codes after the late 1970s onwards, which is when this series was written (started in the 1980s it seems). Industrialization made clothing cheap, not better. Again extremely broad strokes being applied here but historically having extremely good fabric for your clothes was how you showed off your wealth, not the cut of the clothes alone, especially when styles changed on a far slower basis than today's trends. Trends and fads absolutely happened, and clothing would be taken apart and refashioned, often over decades. T-shirts started off as underwear in the late 1800s. It slowly evolved into its own thing to be worn, as part of a younger countercultural movement over decades and working class style, especially with laborers and former military who continued to wear it after having been accustomed to being issued t-shirts as part of their uniforms. We're so far removed from it today that most people don't know that it started off as underwear.

I'm of the opinion that 13th century Polish people would see one single layer of clothing like a knit t-shirt for what it is intended originally to be: as the bottommost layer, the underwear. And they would see it as poor quality, nonsensical, ugly, and cheap underwear at that, that fails to stay sanitary and is harder to clean than tabby woven linen, which you can safely beat with a fucking rock in boiling water with caustic soaps when wet to scour it and then lay on grass to dry to activate properties to bleach it white. Having hard-wearing underwear that you can boil and beat and bleach helps you stay clean, and changing that out often and not the expensive outermost layers that everyone sees means you can be nicer to the stuff that has the expensive dyes and embroidery and heavier materials like wool or furs that are just harder to wash, physically. This is all extremely flippant and un-nuanced but when you have a whole culture around cleanliness that your very clothing choices reinforce and require for participation in society, why on fucking earth would someone grab a t-shirt over plain woven linen. Especially when historical clothing was by and large pretty damn comfortable.

[rudeboimonster]

[pose ref used]

i got so enamored with the idea of a jester hat backwards but then i realized. how would you even depict that but i was too far in

[stitchposts]

SCREAAAAAMS

[iokheaira]

OKAY so about those T-shirts.

(Not disputing linen supremacy in Europe, though in India and elsewhere in its native range cotton has an equally extensive tradition.)

I disagree about mediaeval people thinking that a T-shirt would be cheap, because in mediaeval Poland cotton was an imported product and therefore expensive. Even the cheapest modern T-shirt is made out of a very very fine cotton thread and it's an incredibly fine knit and it's soft, and if it's dyed or patterned, that also ups the value. The seams may look weird but the stitching is even and the polyester sewing thread is so smooth and fine.

All this makes the T-shirt a unique novelty item.

You *cannot* mass produce modern T-shirts without advanced machinery and the machinery to produce that machinery.

Funnily enough, you could source handspun cotton singles yarn of the right kind - people in the areas of modern day India and Pakistan had already been producing much finer thread for centuries, if not millennia - but hand knitting at the right gauge would be... not impossible, but think piano wire needles, a very fast expert knitter working full time at full speed and even then you're looking at hundreds of hours. For a plain result that's honestly not worth the cost of labour unless you add patterning, and by then you're looking at something that's maybe not Dhaka muslin prices, but certainly silk velvet - another incredibly expensive luxury item.

You see, rich people like kings did start to have knit items since the 13th century, such as the cushion covers of Prince Fernando de la Cerda of Castile that were made of silk in a very fine gauge, like 20 stitches/inch. A modern hand knit sweater typically has 4-6 stitches/inch, while 17th/18th century silk stockings might have a gauge of 10-12 stitches/inch. My extremely ratty, basic old t-shirt? I just counted and it has +30 stitches/inch, a finer knit than those royal cushion covers.

So to the mediaeval Polish people, our intrepid time traveller has extremely fancy underwear - or possibly an extremely fancy surcoat if the T-shirt has a band or team logo on it. Points are reducted if it's ratty, but maybe it was a hand-me-down from a rich liege lord to a vassal to a favoured servant etc., going down the levels depending on the number of holes (un-mended holes will get you Judged for sloppiness, maybe the time traveller has fallen on hard times?).

As for choosing crochet, of all things, as the mediaeval Polish army t-shirt mass production method? It's stupid as hell.

Crochet is several orders of magnitude slower than knitting for this particular purpose and produces a thicker, less flexible fabric from the same yarn thickness and requires more yarn per square inch. You can produce both stunning and comfortable garments with crochet very quickly if you're good, but it's not going to give you the kind of fabric you're wanting to reproduce for your T-shirt, and definitely not at mass production speed. And as noted, not even hand knitting can provide that kind of a result at mass production speed.

Luckily, there already exists a solution with ready-made infrastructure, supply networks and experienced manufacturing personnel!

Yeah, you guessed it. It's the woven linen shirt. Comes in cheap and expensive versions, domestically produced in large quantities, easy care (by professional launderesses, who are an essential part of any mediaeval army) and durable.

To return to the original post, 1000% agree about embroidery being excellent value for very little money! You can spend as much as you like, but even in Europe where DMC (the gold standard of floss) is more expensive, you can pick up a no-brand multi-colour pack of floss for cheap and sometimes thrift stores have amazing finds. If floss is too fiddly for your hands, there's also perle cotton, not to forget wool on canvas... the field of embroidery styles is vast and there's something for everyone!

[iokheaira]

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?

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Hey, if you do crafts (especially things like crochet, knitting, embroidery, etc), make sure to look up how to identify when a listing is AI generated. You do NOT want to waste money on an incredible looking kit or pattern that is physically impossible to make, especially if you're on sites like etsy hoping to support an actual artist.

[pleasespellchimerical]

OP's tags:

#as an embroiderer: big red flags are curved straight or satin stitches #stitches that you cannot identify or figure out at all #thread that fades into other colors #backgrounds that match the piece weirdly well (like a floral embroidery piece with a matching vase and flowers on the table) #and a lack of videos of the piece and photos from other angles

[elenorasweet]

Here's a guide for identifying real freaking cross-stitch patterns that are doable, and not AI-converted confetti:

A guide for crochet patterns:

How to Spot FAKE (AI) CROCHET So You Don't Get SCAMMED

How to Spot FAKE (AI) Crochet is full of practical tips for being able to quickly identity aritifically created crochet patterns and images.

And one for embroidery:

Artificial Intelligence In The Embroidery Community

Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) is affecting our lives in a multitude of new ways. Every type of art/maker community is being affected, inclu

I don't knit, but I'm sure someone has a comparable guide somewhere. I know crochet and knitting seems like more of a problem- the crochet "patterns" make vastly different items than what's pictured, and you can find some of those on r/CraftedbyAI because some people do follow those "patterns" to make a point.

Cross-stitch and embroidery seem like they'd be easier to fake, right? Like, cross-stitch patterns are basically pixel art, so what's the harm?

The cross-stich often has dozens or hundreds of colours and they change every single pixel, which is basically impossible for a human to reproduce. It's just not a pattern, dammit.

The embroidered ones break my heart, though:

Wherein someone is making a lovely embroidered piece but they end up dissatisfied with their work because it doesn't look as impossibly plush and bright as the fake.

It makes people who are new to these crafts feel like they're not doing it right, or gives them insane expectations, and it can drive people away from the craft.

I know of several cross-stitch pattern shops on Etsy that have closed because it's just not worth the investment when they're competing with AI-generated nonsense that can charge pennies because it doesn't take any time or effort to make.

Fuck AI-generated patterns and crafts.

[gn005virtue]

I'm actually knitting right now! Most of the resources I can find are targeted towards crochet because amigurumi and crocheting cute little creatures is super hot right now, but this information definitely applies to knit pieces as well.

Quick Tips for Identifying AI Content

It is probably not shocking that the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created a stir in the technology world - especially in recent

Unmasking Artificial Crochet: How to Spot AI-Generated Designs - Hooked by Kati

Learn how to identify AI crochet to avoid pattern scams.

People Are Using AI To Sell Fake Items on Etsy

In my last article in my AI Griftwatch series, I covered the recent phenomenon of AI-generated images of fake crochet items popping up all…

Most (if not all) AI-generated images that feature knitted objects possess at least one of these traits:

-Rows (or even entire components of the project) splitting or merging in ways that make no sense. This sweater looks impressive until you try to make sense of that lump near the left shoulder or whatever is going on with the collar. You can even see one row splitting into two near the bottom for seemingly no reason at all.

-Impossible stitches. Those lumpy squares (?) in between Mario's eyes are not real stitches. Neither are the stitches that fade seamlessly into tufts of material on the lion's mane.

-Impossibly huge projects. This elephant is almost twice as tall as the person next to it, and you'll realize that the stitches are actually massive when you take the time to think about how you could make it yourself. If you look closely, you'll also see a fifth leg on the elephant!

-The overall "vibe" of the image is glossy, shiny, plastic-y, or smooth to a degree that is almost unnerving. Yarn comes in lots of different colors and textures, but what's depicted in the image below is a bit too vivid and perfect to be real. Excessive blurring/out-of-focus areas on the project itself can also be signs of AI use.

Apologies for the long addition, I just loathe this stuff with a passion. The only people who benefit from the proliferation of AI images in fiber artist's spaces are scammers, and they make things worse for literally everyone else.

[iokheaira]

Slight nitpick: you can do CERTAIN TYPES of fade/gradient in embroidery with specialty gradient dyed thread and/or optical mixing of 2-3 colours (thread painting/silk shading, or blended stitches in cross stitch). These typically don't have the same candy-gloss unreal filter as AI generated images do, though.

Also, in that cute hedgehog embroidery, the real version uses a standard number of strands, I think 2 (it's very well done too so it's sad the person is disappointed), but some modern embroiderers use the undivided thread with 6 strands, which is much thicker and would look closer to the AI image. You can even add padding, either base stitches or cut pieces of felt, under the surface stitches for a more 3D look (see also: stumpwork). A bigger problem is the unreal bright shine, which you might replicate with silk or viscose but then only in a very specific light... (And very long curved satin stitches without visible couching, but the hedgehog doesn't have those.)

I know of one example where the embroiderer spun the thread (2 ply merino/silk blend, about as much as you'd need for a mid-sized lace shawl) out of gradient-dyed fibre, resulting in very long colour progressions that you can't get in standard DMC/Anchor gradient (ombré) embroidery thread. (You could also dye commercial laceweight yarn to get that effect, but you'd need to adjust the lengths of thread you use to avoid fraying - the advantage of handspun is that you can add twist to make the thread more durable.) Oh, and what did she make with that thread? A Long Dog full size sampler!

The sampler in question:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DAOCx-lI38O/?img_index=1&igsh=azA3ZTV6OHBvYmhm

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by vampy (@fibresbyvampy)

What I'm saying is that expert-level work can create things AI can only dream of! The problem is that newbies who haven't been exposed to craft IRL and are only trying to learn via YouTube or Tiktok and get kits on Etsy or Temu can't easily judge what's easy and what requires mastery and/or inventing a new technique or specialty materials or equipment. What I hear about AI generated guidebooks is even worse - so beginners, look for old books and videos and learn about the craft before going on an Etsy shopping spree. If possible, meet real people or go look at real objects in resl life, whether at home, in a craft store, museum or county fair!

One pro tip, though: if the photo of the finished item looks like someone took it with their off hand in terrible lighting and there's a cat or a bag of Doritos or a pyjama leg or reflections of the glass museum/exhibition case holding the item in the image, it's probably real. (Fancy photo might mean the person used a filter or is a great photographer - or it might be AI. That's where you start looking for inconsistencies or implausible sections and whether the maker has explained the process in any way.)

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

Alt text is so incredibly useful when it comes to speakers of other languages. I follow a bunch of fiber artists from different parts of the world, Ukrainian fashion designers and Chinese antique garment collectors and Iranian university professors of textile art history. There are discussions happening in different languages, and resources like books and scholarship, simply not available in the English or French I know.

And a lot of them never even use the Latin alphabet a lot of the time! So sometimes I can photograph a book page or screencap an Instagram story and get my phone's OCR to give me text to paste into Google Translate, and I can sometimes use a Cyrillic keyboard to type out what I'm seeing, but but as soon as something is antiquated or handwritten or viewed at an angle, my goose is cooked. I can't even get the original phrase to try to translate at all.

Unless there's alt text. Because alt text gives me exactly the data I need in the exact right format to take to a dictionary and get the gist of what's going on.

It makes me reconsider how my own content is accessible or inaccessible not just to blind or visually-impaired people, but people who aren't perfectly fluent in English. Because I and a lot of my friends are native English speakers who usually only speak 1-2 languages total, I'm prey to assuming that everyone in my intended audience is like us. That of course everybody can easily process English text, whether it's printed or written in cursive or using some antique calligraphic hand. And of course, that's not true. Now when I look at my analytics for my business's rare medieval name, I occasionally see translation site traffic where people in Farsi or Ukrainian or Chinese have translated me in return.

The curb-cut effect is a wonderful thing, I think. The primary reason I've used alt text is a good one, and it also turns out that it's really useful for a lot of other people too.

[clockworkprism]

This is one field I think AI can actually help. Grabbing text from an image and translating it, would be a very useful tool. Screen readers that can automatically read text would be great.

But there's the down side that translation is a skill and this means displacing entry level roles. I have no doubt expert translators won't be hurt, because translating to a different language is more than copy pasting in a dictionary, but even that basic skill needs practicing that AI would eliminate. Still, on balance maybe it's better to have broadly accessible AI capable of doing that (and a more streamlined model wouldn't need to consume a household worth of energy per query)

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

I can't believe I'm speaking positively about AI, and yet...

It's my understanding that this is the area large language models and generative AI originated in, not a new area where AI could be introduced. And machine translation, optical character recognition, voice recognition, and text-to-speech functionality over the past 20 years have revolutionized adaptive tech for people with sensory disabilities or language barriers.

After all, that's how I do most of my alt text these days—screencap somebody's tags on my phone, press a button that recognizes text, and then select, copy, and paste the text I want into the alt text field. I specifically got an iPhone 13 so I could have that feature. (Well, that and dark mode, so I could take better pictures of my dark cat.) It's also how I read literal books in unfamiliar languages, with my phone hovering over the pages.

On the other hand, here's an NPR article from a month ago: If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?

Because actually, although the job has changed a lot over the past two decades, the demand for human translators is growing. The more people can cheaply translate things by machine, the more they see the value and possibility in translation, so they're more willing to try communicating across language barriers. The number of laid-off departments of translators is actually much smaller than the number of businesses willing to begin hiring translators for the very first time, since they don't need a department to laboriously rewrite everything; they just need a translator to proofread their foreign language materials for nuance and tone.

It does represent more of a shift to the gig economy, which sucks, but it's hard to lean against the prevailing wind of the times that far.

[iokheaira]

As a pro translator to and from Finnish (a fairly small, non-Indo-European language) who occasionally deals with AI, or machine translation, let me expand a bit: first, some things aren't worth the cost of money and time of being translated by a human person, even a rank n00b, so before they didn't get translated at all.

Second, the "new jobs" are often proofreading machine translation, commonly called post-editing. This ranges from genuinely helping translators deal with masses of text and making reasonable money, to causing a giant headache for shit pay.

IMO translation really shows the strengths and failure points of large language models (LLM) commonly known as "AI"; to wit, they're really, really good at predicting the most likely outcome based on known data, with occasional randomness that sometimes produces a genuinely great solution, and they're absolute crap at maintaining a consistent terminology and cohesion within a text, they can't know specialised terminology if it hasn't been scraped, and they just cannot deal with cross-references to other documents (because they often treat them as text strings, so instead of copying the translated name of an EU Directive or its common abbreviated name, available online in all of the languages of the Member States, the machine makes up a new translation which may or may not lead the reader to the correct document...)

The worst part is when the machine is good enough to sound confident but keeps generating errors in meaning or references or consistency, because then you need to read things through more carefully than when proofreading the work of a competent human, so that in the absolute worst case you spend as much time checking as you would've spent on translating from scratch - for half the pay. In the absolute best case? You can do a quick read-through, make a few corrections and you're done.

Note that specially-built translation engines can be made to work with glossaries and specific references, but 1. those only make sense for things that already generate massive amounts of text, like the EU, and 2. they're harder to retrofit to generic translators like DeepL at least without specialised translation software, which is another beast entirely.

Also... the gig economy has been present in the translation industry since at least the 2000s, or from what I've heard, maybe 1990s; most of it is outsourcing. You either learn to be a business or don't make a living wage. Entry level has always been full of random people who get a decent grade in high school or study literature in university and think: how hard can it be? And then end up reinventing the wheel. (I did an MA in translation studies and have found it useful, though I already started working after the BA like many others.)

Uhhhh... where was I?

Right! Go ahead and use Google Translate or DeepL to understand what a foreign website etc. is talking about, or turn on the automatically generated and machine translated subtitles on YouTube. No human would be paid to translate those anyway, so why not use the service? Just keep in mind that they are based on probability calculations, and nobody has checked that the text makes sense and uses accurate specialist terminology, or tried their best to make it understandable to you (because ultimately, the translator's job is communication).

Eta: though the impact of AI on the next generation of translation students will be interesting. Any teacher worth their salt will hammer the need for a sanity check through their skulls, but will the political climate mean that funding for translation studies will dry up because "we have AI for that"? And what about the random people who enter the field with zero clue because it sounds easy, if they've grown up blindly trusting that ChatGPT doesn't lie? Now that will be interesting.

Eta2: important to note, I'm a technical translator, not a translator of literature, and also opinions on machine translation vary wildly in the field! Personally I think some texts are more suitable for machine translation than others, and it's not always the ones you'd expect that are a problem. Well, anyone would probably excpect poems being an issue - and translating those is more co-creation than anything anyway.

[sarcasticsargassum]

Do you have a gender? Do you like to rotate various shapes in your head (OR NOT)? Do you have 10-15 free minutes? Then you may be interested in...

Spatial Ability Survey

Thank you so much for taking part in this study! The experiment I'm running hopes to reexamine several studies from the 70's and 80's which

...participating in my final!!! I'm re-examining several studies from the 70s and 80s that claimed a link between hormones and the way our brains process spatial data. The survey includes a brief questionnaire about your gender and any experiences with HRT (due to the whole looking at studies about hormones thing), as well as a series of multiple-choice questions meant to assess spatial processing. It takes about 10-15 minutes total.

For the purposes of actually doing a vaguely reliable scientific study or at least getting a good grade for looking like i'm doing one, I'm hoping to get as many responses as possible, so even if you can't/don't want to take this please reblog it! It's completely anonymous and any questions you don't want to answer can be skipped. Thank you for your time :]

[iokheaira]

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?

[horse-reviews]

Miles Vorkosigan (in the Vorkosiverse books) has a horse named Fat Ninny. I think he's mostly described in the novella 'the Mountains of Mourning' but he shows up in a couple of later books too

Vorkosigan horse Ninny

Rating: ƱƱƱƱƱ (perfect)

in the absence of a picture of this beautiful horse i make do with this description from the knowledge repository online

this horse sounds like a most excellent animal and it is clear that the author has the appropriate amount of love and respect for the humble horse. all good books should feature a horse like this

[redneckromancy]

horses have been my ASD special interest since i was a little kid. i've mostly been harassed and bullied out of not talking about it in public, but this is a fun tool you guys might like.

Horse Coat Color Simulator

Experiment with horse genetics and see how horse coat color genes interact with one another! Press the buttons to see how the horse coat col

show me the cute horses you make?

[redneckromancy]

Klonopin kicking in because my life sucks rn but I made a pretty pony :3

Ee (black)

A+At (which comes out to wild bay, which wouldn't normally express on black. wild bay is bay but with only black fetlocks and below)

with cream (dilution gene) which makes smoky black, which expressed as black but with less red tones upon sunfading, and sometimes reddish inner ears or a slightly hmm" tone to the coat

heterozygous splash (expressed here as some back socks and a nose / lip snip). heterozygous splash can be louder but homozygous splash usually is!

leopard complex (causes leopard spotting and significant color shifting over time, turning black into red and so forth, as well as some rusty roany spots, as well as striped hooves and visible white sclera and mottled skin)

and sooty progression (coat goes sooty over time)

[meangirlnurse]

this was fun! here is my horsey ☺️ thank you for sharing!

[iokheaira]

Reblogging to delight fellow horse nerds! (I would've gotten such a kick out of this as a kid, back then we had just a few books and they didn't even know all the genetics. OP, there are so many new studies and more coming!)

[prideknights]

In honour of disability pride month, we made a disability Pride Knight! Stay proud! ⚔️🌈

[leiyahime]

[Tutorial] How to spin and chain-ply on your drop-spindle at the same time

I've seen this technique at the Lower Saxony spinning group meet-up in June and @disgruntled-lifeform has asked about it, so here is a tutorial. I'm not comfortable with having videos of me taken and no one to take the video anyway so I hope photos are enough...

Little diclaimer: I have only seen someone else doing this so I just pass this knowlegde on. I don't know where it originates. Also: I assume you already know how to spin a single and know the basics of chain- or Navajo-plying

It's really an intreresting technique. You spin and chain-ply in one go, no endless spinning and after that endless plying, which is very practical if you (like me) are no fan of endless spindle plying. Or if you only own one spindle for whatever reason - everyone knows spindles are gregarious animals and keeping only one is not appropriate XP

You need:

A drop spindle of your choice with a leader (Maybe one a little bigger than mine, since the yarn we wind on the spindle is a three-ply, which means it is thrice as thick as your usual single.

Fibres of your choice you want to spin

It's important that your leader has a loop at the end to pull your single through.

Step 1: Spin your single as you always do. *spinspinspin* You want to do that standing up as you need the single to be quite long:

Step 2: Then butterfly the single up on your thumb and forefinger to avoid tangling:

Step 3: Pull the single through the loop of your leader and unwind it from your fingers. At the beginning it's easier to sit down for this step until you get used to the finger movements. It's difficult to pull the single through the loop while holding the spindle in your hand and we don't want any broken fingers!

Step 4: Pull the single all the way through until just a little bit below the beginning of your unspun fibres:

Step 5: Then you just ply the loop together in the opposite direction from the direction you spun the single - just as most of you will do anyways while plying. The spindle wants to turn in the opposite direction by itself anyway. Make sure the new loop at the end stays open!

Step 6: Wind the plied thread on your spindle. Then secure it well on your spindle's hook. Take Care Of The Loop. It Must Stay Accessible for the next section of spun singles.

Congratulations you have your first section of chain plied yarn on your drop spindle.

Then you repeat the whole thing again and again: Spin a long piece of single - pull it through loop - ply - wind on spindle - secure the new loop at the end on your hook and then go on spinning.

It needs a bit of practise. The lady who showed us the technique said she had been afraid of breaking her fingers when she started learning this technique. But if you have spun and plied on your drop spindle before it should not be too difficult to master. Concentrate on what you are doing and learn how to manage thread and spindle. And if you really sit down for pulling the single through the loop you also get a little training for your legs by costantly getting up and sitting down again ^-~ And when you are comfortable with the whole thing you can also do it while walking around. I, too need more practise until I'm that far.

[iokheaira]

This is a fun party trick!

I personally don't find it super useful for making lots of yarn because it interrupts the flow, but the OP likes it for just that reason :D And it is useful if you need a length of finished yarn quick.

(For spindles, I'd personally rather wind an n-stranded plying ball, where n=the number of strands I want to ply, and then do the palm roll and toss manoeuvre to add Danger and Excitement, or thigh roll for less excitement. For chain plying, you can also pre-chain the yarn when you're winding it on the plying ball (finger crochet!!!), so you don't need to worry about yarn management and you can just add twist, although if you're like OP this may not be a positive thing for you so choose accordingly ;) ).

ALSO, in my highly personal and extremely opinionated opinion (YMMV), I think this works a lot better on a top whorl but that's because I LOATHE AND DETEST metal hooks on low whorls. Anyway, for this purpose a hook is easier for yarn management than the half hitch I'd use on a low whorl, therefore, top whorl.

If you want to do this but only have a hookless low whorl, it *is* possible, just a bit fiddlier to arrange the loop with the half hitch so you can open it back up for the next chain.

(The reason I hate hooks on low whorls is because it gets in the way of flicking the low whorl with your fingers at the top of the shaft, unlike a half hitch or two, which can feel fiddly in the beginning, but you learn to do and undo them without even thinking about it once you've been spinning long enough. A thigh roll is always an option if you do have a spindle with a hook (low or high whorl) or finger dexterity issues.)

(Also also, the term chain plying is preferable because not only is it descriptive, the Diné mostly do "regular" plying and only use this type of plying for very specific purposes (IIRC as cord in certain structural parts of rug weaving), and the word "Navajo" is actually what a neighbouring tribe told Spaniards they were called. While the meaning (from Tewa-Puebloan "nava hu", or "the place of large planted fields") isn't offensive as such unlike some common names of other Indigenous peoples, and the name "Navajo" has been retained officially so as not to lose the brand recognition (so to speak), it's still not the name of the people in their own language. Additionally, chain plying is also done in other parts of the world; it's not exclusive to the Diné.)

[lazulisong]

thank you for answering the poll but now i wanna see everybody's projects 🥺

i personally am learning thread crochet! i had to rip back two or three times but today i think i'll be ready to start the edging

(i'd be madder but my technique improved every time i swore and ripped out)

[iokheaira]

Current spinning (it'll be 2 ply yarn plied with extra high twist for Andean weaving), Andean backstrap weaving homework (traditional pattern variation, no charts allowed 😎) and 2nd sock for scale. Uhhhh... that's not all of them but it's what I should be working on.

Thread crochet is fun (well. IME there's always ripping and redoing involved but that's universal) and I wish I had one underway because it's getting warmer and wool is miserable during a heatwave.

[hollowboobtheory]

I know it feels like an understatement but you sometimes make more progress by pointing out that conservatives are fucking rude. going out of your way to call someone the wrong name because you don't like them? rude. childish. this isn't fucking kindergarten, Carl. she said her name is Jennifer. Everybody knows her as Jennifer. You are the one making things confusing. Grow up.

"misgendering is violence": invites discourse over the TraNs DeBatE, puts people on the defensive, opens you up to accusations of liberal snowflakery, comes off as a hypothetical thought exercise

"Who the fuck is Jason? I don't know a Jason. Oh her? You mean Jen? You mean fucking Jen? That's Jen, dipshit." : crystal clear. you're making shit more difficult for everyone because you're a rude manchild.

[iokheaira]

So the politeness thing in general is a whole other can of worms, but.

Thing is.

Conservatives like to *pretend* they are nice, polite, decent persons. If they're churchy, at least some varieties may still subscribe to the Little Women type 19th century politeness where you aren't supposed to speak ill of others or make fun or be rude, because that's not how a good Christian should behave.

And the OTHER thing is that accosting people in public toilets, calling them by wrong name or gender, pointing at people you think dress "funny", touching people's hair without being invited or asking someone about their sex organs?

Unspeakably, horrifically Rude.

So when you call them on it, they don't have a defence. They're in the wrong *by their own rules*, and sometimes pointing that out works.

Of course, it's not an universal fix, but that's because the other person is acting like a fucking dipshit who never learned their goddamn manners.

[iokheaira]

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?

[ayeforscotland]

Hi!

What do you think of the Outlander series?

Have a great day!

It is definitely book and tv series. That is for sure. I'm not a huge fan, protagonist is a cringe self-insert and the whole thing comes across as pretty fetishising. Tune into @theayesphere on Sundays and you can ask @thebibliosphere how she feels about it. She absolutely *adores* Outlander and could excitedly talk about it for hours.

[thebibliosphere]

Lmao, lies and slander.

[iokheaira]

Hey, there are *two* self-inserts in that thing and the other one is the main bad guy, because he can do all the nasty things to the poor, pretty male sub that Claire, as a Good Girl, can't, except that one time when she literally role-played the bad guy. For Reasons.

Eh, at least it's more clearly marked as a fantasy than 50 Shades 🤣

(And the scenery is beautiful. Although I don't want to misrepresent things - in the books, the sex scene ratio is at about 90s bodice ripper level, and there's a lot of rape/menace/revenge fantasy going on too, so anyone looking for the elusive Domme romance will be disappointed. Once again.)

[ilikecarsandlike4people]

I can't believe it. They passed the new trans law in Finland, allowing adult trans people to change their legal gender without having to provide lengthy documentation from doctors. It passed. I am so fucking happy. I know people who've been waiting for years to get their gender recognized by a doctor to get treatments. I can't believe it. Really can't.

We won❤️