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slobbering

Christmas with the Addams Family by Charles Addams

improfem

Oh man, I love that show

Where heaven and hell turn out to both be corrupt bureaucracies?

And only one human prophecy turns out to have been right all along?

The one with the unlikely group of friends who band together in the face of bigger forces trying to destroy them?

With the slutty and the neurotic soulmate?

Who find each other in a hundred different lifetimes and always bring out the best in each other?

Yeah, that one.

theacademicfan

Also…

Doug Forcett

And Shadwell

Are the same person.

neil-gaiman

I started watching The Good Place while we were shooting Good Omens, and loved feeling that there were other people who were out there making something that was the same sort of thing that we were.

miss-vortex

Here are some interesting facts about the raven:

• They are one of the most intelligent birds on the planet - they can solve tasks, play tricks on other animals and can count

• Ravens can imitate human speech just like parrots

• They can reach 2 feet in size from head to tail - bigger than some cats

• Ravens do things just for fun, such as sliding down snowy hills, swooping when flying, and they even build their own toys out of sticks and rocks

• People who have owned ravens have said they are cat-like in nature and can be very cuddly and affectionate, but can throw a strop when they don't get their way

• Science has found that ravens can communicate by "gesturing", and point their beak in certain directions to tell other ravens where to go

• When they reach adolescence, ravens leave their parents to find other teenage ravens and join "teenage gangs"

• Ravens are monogamous and mate for life

• Although they have been seen for centuries to represent death and sadness, ravens are compassionate, loving animals and will console their raven friends if they have been injured

All in all, ravens are amazing and beautiful animals!

thegirlwiththebuffytattoo

Welcome to the trip!

While quarantine has forced us all down the rabbit hole, CloneClub decided to have a little fun to celebrate the series finale of @orphanblack three years ago today! We make a family, yes?

While we hope you enjoy our #PasstheBrushChallenge, we also want to call attention to two charities that the cast promoted during their table read and that Clones, all over the world, supported to help raise several thousands of dollars for the LGBTQ community, and at-risk women and trans women. If you can, please check out Centrelink and Sistering at the following addresses and consider donating to help two great causes:

Centrelink: bit.ly/CenterLinkOB

Sistering: https://sistering.org/financial-donations/

fannishknits

Give me your spiciest knitting takes

ladytemeraire

Cables aren’t actually that hard. Neither is lace. Neither is colorwork, stranded or otherwise. (Nupps, however, can die in a fire. They’re not hard, just fiddly little bastards.)

Scarves are the worst possible beginner project, why do people still do this. No. Pick something smaller that isn’t a marathon for a newbie.

The straight needle vs dpn vs circular debate is frankly ridiculous. Use the needle that you like best and that work for your project. (This applies to most knitting debates tbh. Toe-up vs top-down socks, continental vs English vs combined tension, metal vs bamboo vs wood vs plastic needles, whatever. If it makes you happy and your knitting doesn’t unravel, you’re fine.)

Gauge swatches are actually worth the effort, don’t @ me.

95% of novelty yarn is a waste of fiber and should be turned into stuffing.

A lot of wool actually isn’t that scratchy, especially if you give it a quick swish with some wool wash when you’re done.

Speaking of which, most projects could stand to be blocked when they’re done. Yes, even the acrylic ones.

Seed stitch is [k1, p1] staggered by one stitch every row so the knit and purl columns don’t line up, don’t @ me.

approximatelyhere

Yes! Scarves are a terrible beginner project.

Also most beginner knitting tutorials are dogmatic and hard to follow.

rocktheholygrail

The Good Place was the _______ we made along the way.

Kristen Bell: Smiles

Ted Danson: Babies

William Jackson Harper: Hummus

D’Arcy Carden: Sandwiches/Friendships

Manny Jacinto: Family

Jameela Jamil: Farts

Marc Evan Jackson: Shawn

horrorandhalloween

by bucketmouse

epiphanies

That’s one conception of death, for a Buddhist. The wave…returns to the ocean. Where it came from. Where it’s supposed to be.

Not bad, Buddhists.

thatbeluga

Jason got into the Bad Place for his impulsiveness, and he left through the final door after learning how to be calm and reflect.

Tahani got into the Bad Place because she only ever helped people was to gain the attention of her parents, and she became an architect so she could selflessly help people for real.

Chidi got into the Bad Place because of his indecisiveness, and he left through the final door by making an ultimate decision.

Eleanor got into the Bad Place because she was selfish and never helped others, and she went through the final door after she helped her friends.

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)