Poopy pee fart pants

Laura, 24, waiting for the programmers to reveal us for the giant game of Sims that we are

[chandelyer-deactivated20241003]

Hassidriss “Ashes” spring 2019 collection

[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. 

[hozieredits]

Hozier - The Humours of Whiskey (Traditional, a cappella)

[fobhd]

#he makes everythibg sound like a fae is singing it in a forest in the moonlight - @snakekarina

[the-cheshire-cat-grin]

if i heard this song carried faintly by the wind, leading me into the deepest darkest part of an ancient forest i literally would not hesitate

[somechick-somewhere]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[secondclassvines]

“Slippers tries”

[afeelgoodblog]

[blobdylan]

[star-anise]

LOCAL MAN MAKES THE WORLD’S STUPIDEST HAT MAKE SENSE

[sophia-sol]

OH MY GOSH.

for the first few minutes of the video I was like, oh, very nice, that hood looks super cozy and I want one

but then 4:14 was a GAME-CHANGER and I actually gasped out loud

I LEARNED SOMETHING HERE TODAY

[mxnrique]

SNL - Cut for Time: My Little Step Children

WHY WOULD THEY CUT THIS?????

[proto-homo]

This is legiterally the funniest thing snl has done in decades

[laughconfetti]

they cut it because of the ONE gay reference

[eschaton-the-imminent]

Same energy

[nikadd]

both of these sketches were written by julio torres - here’s his twitter

[somewhereinthedetails217]

Omg 😂

[pseudo-seraphim]

I just want you all to know that my dramatic 6 year old ass would have loved all of this shit.

[baker-p-i]

I’m the dramatique™ hand to face moment in the broken mirror.

[dormouseking]

“YOU HAVE EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING IS FOR YOU. AND THIS ONE THING IS FOR HIM.” I don’t know Julio Torres nor his sexual orientation but no matter what it is he has lived The Queer Experience™ .

[millennial-review-deactivated20]

[trainedchimpanzee]

omg why do white ppl love cheese so mu-

[100-manslayer]

I actually didnt know that

[grifalinas]

The answer is apparently “because we’re actually able to eat it”

[bemusedlybespectacled]

Fun fact: white people (specifically Northern European white people) have a genetic mutation that allows them to digest lactose even after weaning, which is abnormal for all mammals and also most humans. It’s theorized that because Northern Europe doesn’t get a lot of sun, an alternative source of vitamin D (like milk) would be a useful trait. It’s a very recent mutation that would only have happened after humans started domesticating animals like cows and goats.

[kanirou-crosshack]

oh no, my bizarre moment has come, cause lactose tolerance is actually A Thing I Know About because it’s played a fascinating role in human evolution for thousands of years. This chart displays some of the broad trends, but it’s giving near continental averages, which doesn’t showcase how this kind of thing really breaks down and some of the surprising exceptions. 

Lactose tolerance is the majority trait for only a very few population groups: North Europeans (and therefore populations that draw heavily from that stock, such as America,) nomadic central Eurasians, and sub-Saharan pastoralist Africans, but that latter group is often overlooked. The vast majority of Africans cannot process lactose, but certain people groups whose lifestyles have revolved around cattle for thousands of years will have 80% and even approaching 100% lactose tolerance rates. They’d be spots of dark green amidst a sea of orange and burgundy on the above chart. 

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were almost entirely lactose intolerant, that is definitely the biological norm (and people groups who maintained that lifestyle, such as Native Americans, remained as such – along with groups who transitioned to sedentary agricultural lifestyles, but I’ll get into that). As such, lactose tolerance is an adaptive trait that only became prevalent in environments that exerted strong selective pressure for it. So, cows were domesticated some 10,000 odd years ago in the Middle East (and some have contended for an independent domestication event in Africa as well). In either case, cattle quickly spread across the continent and we know there was milking and cheese production at least 6,000 years ago in both the Nile and Mesopotamia. While cow meat would have been enjoyed by all, in agricultural societies milk and cheese would have been options, but hardly staples as there were plenty of other things to eat as well, and therefore there would have been no selective pressure for processing lactose. Also, sedentary societies had ways of processing milk and cheese that allowed lactose intolerant people to drink/eat dairy products. Fermenting milk or aging cheese breaks down lactose, making it a non issue once ingested. This is why fermented milk may seem utterly foul to many Westerners, but is extremely common in other parts of the world. But, fermentation and aging requires time, and the ability to store things in a single location for weeks or even months. Sedentary societies adapted the milk to fit their biology, but nomadic societies did the reverse.

There are still mobile pastoralist societies in Africa today, and there have been for thousands and thousands of years. For many of them, cows are not one of many dietary options, they are the single dietary staple around which their lifestyle revolves. Biologically, this means you gotta get with the program if you wanna survive. For most mobile tribes, fermentation and aging weren’t options, so there would have been strong selective pressure favoring those who could drink milk straight outta the cow, as they would have had an additional, highly nutritious food source available to them. Milk also allowed for a marked shortening of the weaning process, transitioning children from breastmilk to cow’s milk, which would again be advantageous for groups where both the men and women work and are always on the move. Over generations these populations specialized into essentially cow-based lifestyles, creating a survival niche highly advantageous to them, and fast forward thousands of years and there are groups in Africa with near ubiquitous lactose tolerance, while the rest of the continent (and the world really) is nearly entirely intolerant. 

Many of these same factors would have influenced the central Eurasian populations, which is why Mongolians and other descendants of nomadic steppe peoples are largely lactose tolerant, as mare’s milk would have been a dietary staple (though they also developed efficient ways to ferment it). 

North Europeans developed lactose tolerance in response to deficiencies in certain nutrients. The northern climate limited Vitamin D production, and the agricultural products available to them were often low on calcium and protein, and so dairy farming developed alongside agriculture to create a more rounded diet (and this was limited to Northern Europeans, as Mediterranean peoples such as the Romans wrote about their great confusion at the northern barbarians’ ability to drink fresh milk)

And I promise all of this is fascinating because the ability to process lactose evolved independently in several different population groups and in response to different factors: lifestyles revolving around cows, lifestyles revolving around horses, deficiencies in climate and agriculture. Besides providing insight into human history and biology, lactose tolerance is also a great example of convergent evolution, where different genetic populations in different environments produce similar results. 

And uh, that’s my rant about the role of milk and lactose tolerance in human evolution. 

[rob-pattinson]

KEIYNAN LONSDALE, EZRA MILLER for Vogue US (2019), ph. Ethan James Green

[handshake]

skin care is basically the new makeup industry and y’all are gonna fall for it all over again. stop wasting ur money on over priced products and treatments, everyones skin is different do your research and tailor your skincare to yourself and not to a certain brand. if you’re buying all your skincare from one brand you’re doing it wrong 

[deathcomes4u]

also please note that there has been testing done before that basically came to the conclusion that fancy expensive skin creams were not more effective than straight up sorbolene and vitamin e cream. So if you want a good moisturiser then plain old sorbolene with vit e is all you need, but stuff with SPF protection of some level is usually very good too because sunscreen. And please note most toners are useless and you only really need them if you’re treating a specific skin issue. They’re made up to cost you more money, I only use a toner because it has tea tree in it and helps control my adult acne in conjunction with medication. Fancy cleansers are also crap a gentle soap or plain make-up wipes will do the same thing generally. And for the love of god please don’t fall for ‘activated charcoal’ gimmicks. They usually don’t have enough charcoal to be effective anyway and if they do it just dries your skin out. Which if you have oily skin may cause it to get OILIER in response. Do your testing guys and know that most expensive options have a cheap alternative.

[awed-frog]

I’ve seen a couple of explanations about why GoT changed so much and why the finale disappointed so many people, and I think they’re good ones. It’s true, for instance, that while GRR Martin worked forwards, building convincing characters and then letting them do whatever (which is going to be a problem for him, btw), the showrunners worked backwards (and did it very badly). But something that’s bothered me a lot and haven’t seen anyone mention so far is the narrative dissonance of The Iron Throne. 

Basically, what this finale attempted was circular storytelling, which can be a beautiful thing when done right; what it ended up doing, however, was making it clear to us that in the end, you can’t escape your upbringing; who you were 100% determines who you’ll be. 

(That’s hugely different from well-made circular storytelling.)

That’s why the characters who escape (narratively) unscathed are people like Sansa, who grew up adored in a loving household and becomes a version of what she’s been taught to be her entire childhood: the lady of the mansion. 

Meanwhile, Jon never fully got over his ‘bastard’ upbringing: military success, camaraderie, the love of two remarkable women and the respect of entire armies – none of that could fundamentally change who Jon was on the inside: the bastard, the brushed aside orphan always on the margins of things. Arguably, that’s why he kept taking so many risks, and that’s why he always felt it was on him to fix whatever was fixable: because his life didn’t, in the end, truly matter to anyone. As a bastard, he had no true family, no name and no inheritance; and as a member of the Night Watch, of course, he had no future, in the sense that he could take no wife and father no children. Thus, Jon rejoining the Watch (what Watch, by the way? unclear) and disappearing beyond the Wall places him back where he was at the beginning: among the unseen, the unwanted and the unknown. 

The same goes for Daenerys, who, despite atrocious sufferings and an iron-will determination, saw her entire character arc collapse back into the person she was apparently destined to be: the daughter of a madman, the fire and blood princess, the destroyer, the abused child who claws back and hurts everyone else because ‘they don’t love me, so they might as well fear me’. Because that’s what you learn from a life of abuse, isnt’ it? That it’s either love or fear that will keep you safe. And all along, GoT teased an end to that destructive cycle so many people are trapped into IRL – through her kindness, empathy, profound sense of self-worth (problematic in some ways, but also a miracle in itself for someone who was raised to be sacrificial cattle) and her courage, it seemed that Daenerys would learn that you can trust yourself to love others and be loved in return, even if you’re not sure what the feeling is; that you can choose to do the right thing even if it’s risky; that you can survive without turning into your abusers. But - lol, jk. All of that was undone, as it was undone for so many other characters: Sandor, who died in that fire he feared so much to kill a brother that should have meant nothing to him; Jaime, who was so close to letting himself become a better person; Bran, whose profoundly spiritual path was apparently preparation for the very mundane game of politics; Missandei, who died in chains; and Westeros itself, which is returned to its Baratheon state (a king who’s got no real right to the throne, a council that represents almost nobody, lords chosen for their loyalty to powerful friends, and all those brothels in King’s Landing which will soon reopen - and quickly be filled, no doubt, with poor, vulnerable women who’ve got no other choice). 

Now, I mentioned narrative dissonance because – in themselves – the collapse of a character’s arc exactly back to the beginning and a complete inability to escape destiny are not bad writing. 

What they are, though, is the very definition of tragedy. 

(Laius is told his son will kill him – casts the baby aside, and still dies. Priam dreams his youngest son will doom Troy – casts the baby aside, and the city still burns. In the TV version, Arthur chooses to spare Mordred out of kindness - Mordred still kills him.)

Entire societies are or were shaped by the idea that you can’t, in the end, defeat fate and defy your heritage. It may be a gloomy worldview, but it’s a fascinating one, especially on a stage. We’ve all cried for Romeo and Juliet; we’ve all cried for Achilles. Sometimes, people fail; sometimes there’s no way out, and that’s the terrible beauty and fascination of the story. 

The thing is, though: GoT is not a tragedy. It’s got a very clear happy ending: the two main villains of the season (the Night King and Cersei) get their comeuppance, and that is a direct message to the back of our brains - a very loud siren - signaling that all is now well. The quietly hopeful music and the cheerful group portrait of a bunch of rational and beloved characters working on further fixing the kingdom cement that subconscious feeling. 

But this is where the narrative dissonance comes in. Characters like Daenerys, Jon and Jaime were a central part of the main cast: we rooted for them to make it, to survive, to succeed. In order to deny them a happy ending while not turning the entire thing into a tragedy, the show needed to change their status mid-story, and this is what it did. Jaime chooses to die for his horrible sister; Jon kills the woman he loves in the most treacherous, underhanded way possible; and Daenerys, of course (and most visibly, because women) becomes this unredeemable butcher of children.

So here is the distortion, and here is the dissonance. It’s cheap, and it’s worse than cheap: it’s badly made. 

(There is not even shock value here - we’ve all seen this coming for a while now.) 

No, this is just a story that can’t decide what it is, and unfortunately knowing what story you’re writing is the main rule for producing (good) fiction. GoT ends well, but it ends well by turning half its main characters into villains and thus implying they deserved what they got. This is why - on top of everything else, like the more and more overt racism - many of us are so frustrated and let down by the ending of a story they loved for years and years and years. Seriously, what a waste. Let’s hope someone up high learns from this, and decides to spend some of that lavish CGI funding they’re so generous with on a decent screenwriter instead.

[styleskilt-deactivated20220705]

this is sending me

[quantum-dragon]

[glittergradient]

SO,

- jon being revealed as a targaryen? POINTLESS

- the night king being hyped up as the biggest threat for 8 seasons? POINTLESS

- cersei being the original mad queen and being hyped up as the biggest human threat? POINTLESS

- jaime’s character development and 8-year long redemption arc? POINTLESS

- bran becoming the three-eyed raven? POINTLESS

- jon being brought back from the dead for a higher purpose? POINTLESS

- arya leaving braavos and instead choosing her family and home? POINTLESS

- the starks going through hell for years and years waiting to be reunited? POINTLESS because they were reunited for like 5 minutes before being separated again

- daenerys overcoming all the terrible things that happened to her, bringing magic back to the world, going from nothing to becoming one of the most powerful people on earth, pledging to break the wheel, learning the moral difficulties of ruling, trying hard not to be like her father? POINTLESS

BUT HEY AT LEAST BRONN GOT HIS CASTLE SO IT’S ALL GOOD

[gnarly]

when the red light just turns green and somebody is already beepin at you