Heya
tags list
rat ramblings - my random thoughts & highlighted posts
reblogged - self explanatory
No NSFW

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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

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Sweet Seals For You, Always
d e v o n
dirt enthusiast
Mike Driver

Janaina Medeiros
Xuebing Du

titsay
AnasAbdin
Cosmic Funnies

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Acquired Stardust
almost home
RMH
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Peter Solarz
🪼
seen from United States

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@overcaffeinated-lab-rat
Heya
tags list
rat ramblings - my random thoughts & highlighted posts
reblogged - self explanatory
No NSFW
even with those four numbers there are countless possible combinations good luck with figuring out which one is the right one you punk
*straightens calculator*
It’s pretty likely that it’s a four digit number, and as there are four digits chosen there, that means that there cannot be any repetition. This mean that there are:
n!/(n-4)! possible orders. As ‘n’ is 4 (number of digits available). 4!/0! which becomes 4x3x2x1/1 which simplifies to 24. That means that there are 24 possible combinations of codes. This would take you about two or three minutes to input all possible codes.
Unless an alarm goes off if you don’t get it right in 3 tries
*straightens calculator again*
Kick the fucking door in
well ‘technically’ the code is most likley 1970. statistically, a majority of people, when told to choose a 4 digit code will choose their birth year. and this key pad is obviously a few years old to put it nicely, thats most likley it.
some sherlock holmes shit just went down over here
No, no, no. Don’t base your deductions of psychology. Let’s talk chemistry. When you first press a button, there’s more of the natural oils on your skin, and therefore it wears down the numbers on the keys faster. Obviously 0 is the first one, then. Try 0791 first.
Sherlock out.
it got better
and this is why the sherlock fandom could either rule the world or end it….
Close, but not quite, I think. People will almost always choose a number they can remember. What’s memorable about 0791? Try 0719 - a birthday, 19th of July. That is more likely.
Those deductions are great and all, but unnecessary.
The light is green.
The door is already open.
And that’s why we have a John Watson.
This is “top 10 favorite posts” level.
Omg, it’s actually on my dash! This post is like a fossil!
@hellsite-hall-of-fame
me when my disabilities disable me:
herpetological guide
Masking about hantavirus is a very "what if we accidentally make the world better for no reason?" situation. Even if the there's never a single hantavirus case in humans ever again, wearing a mask in public is good because of COVID.
It's like when everyone got really freaked out about monkeypox and people suddenly remembered that PPE is a good thing.
Who am I to stand in the way of a little public hysteria?
Come to the Human Cuisine Restaurant, we have:
Boiled grain
Flatbread with various toppings
Flatbread wrapped around filling
Fried lean meat
Stew of fatty meat and starch
Fermented vegetable
Oily sauce
Aromatic herbs
Stimulant alkaloids
Alcoholic beverage
Sometimes I overheat and die for a little bit but then I get better
Thats called a fever
it's definitely my predisposition to extreme frugality+redneck engineering, but i'm now obsessed with creating things literally without buying Anything. no supplies no tools no nothing, only the stuff you can just find outside, like Plants, Sticks, and Rocks.
I'm making textiles with nothing but foraged plant materials using no tools except sticks. Nature allows you to do this! There's no rules! I mean okay well maybe there might be some rules sometimes but they're just weak human rules! The plants themselves? They're like "Why sure! You can make yarn with nothing but fibers from the dead stem I don't need anymore, a couple sticks from that tree over there, and your own body and mind! Why not?"
Plants like to give us gifts! And nobody has the power to stop them!
Once you know the ways of the plants, the ways of our capitalist society become silly and hard to understand, sometimes even instilling you with a sense of dread.
I was looking at the textile books in the library to try to learn about plants you can make textiles from. I was shocked to discover how incurious most books are about the origin of the very matter from which textiles are made!
For one thing, there were whole shelves of books on how to weave, how to knit, and how to quilt, but barely a single complete volume on how to create yarn or thread to begin with.
Of the books that did cover how the yarn is created, many of them discussed only wool, and those books didn't concern themselves with how to get the wool off the sheep, or how to find such an organism and enter a mutualistic partnership with it in the first place...
If you know the ways of the plants, you will be almost offended when a book about how to make a thing, starting from the beginning of that thing, tells you immediately to buy something. You don't mean "one or two steps further back in the process of a thing being assembled"—you mean the BEGINNING beginning. You seek to learn how the thing is born from the living Earth, not where to buy a Product in a less assembled form.
Where do Products come from...?...According to the capitalist, consumerist way, they come from other, simpler Products of course, which ultimately are born from Industries. I found a book or two which made some attempt to give a more exhaustive list of possible textile materials, with sub-section for plants, which included: Flax, Cotton, Hemp, Jute, Ramie, and some allusion to other possibilities such as Nettle. This of course is a list of plant fibers for which a Huge Industry exists. Regarding plant fibers for which there is no huge industry, the books either said nothing or said something like "...but sadly, there is no huge industry based upon these plants (so they are not worth talking about any more)"
I found a few cryptic statements saying that the range of plants that could be used for textile purposes is theoretically limitless...but none of the books were interested at all in those theoretically limitless plants.
It's not that only those few plants are really good for textiles and the other ones are inferior, either. I have learned from my delves into the Internet, that many plants now considered totally useless to humans and not investigated for their potential applications at all...have actually been used by some human culture on Earth for thousands of years as a fundamental part of everyday life.
Native Americans for thousands of years utilized plants native to this region for textiles. These ones are among the plants I have been gathering; they are plants that naturally grow here and can be harvested sustainably, in fact in many cases they benefit from being harvested.
Apocyonum cannabinum, also known as Dogbane, is essentially a North American analog to hemp or flax; you extract the bast fiber from the stem by beating it until the woody part breaks into pieces and falls out and the outer bark flakes off. This plant is native to all U.S. states except Alaska and Hawaii and I reckon that's because of its importance as a textile plant.
I've collected big bundles of the stuff by picking over fields that have been mowed already by a brush cutter; it's so easy, because the fibers are so strong that they are not broken by the brush cutter. Instead, I find mats and bundles of fiber 1-2 feet long stretched out over the ground or trailing from the stubs of stems, often with the woody parts and outer bark already beaten out by the mowing. Simply mowing a field where dogbane grows essentially pre-processes the fiber so your work is half done for you.
It is amazing to me that a person can see how the fibers do that if you mow the plants in the fall, and not immediately think, "We should be making string or rope out of that." Early colonial texts call this plant "Indian hemp" and say it is superior to actual hemp. Likewise what few resources I can find on Native American textile plants, list dogbane as one of the main ones.
So I gather the dogbane. It is astonishingly strong, fragrant when you handle it, and beating the fibers is loads of fun, just a great way to blow off steam. The fibers range in color from almost pearly white to cream to peach to beautiful shades of orange and copper, and have a lovely sheen to them.
After I've beaten the fibers and gotten them to mostly separate I tease them out with my fingers and scrape out all the remaining little bits of bark, and pull them through a plastic comb until the soft and lustrous fibers are separated and all that's left is some nubby bits of lint.
The last picture is what it looks like after combing and cleaning. The color looks more washed-out than it is for real because of my white lamp.
These fibers weren't quite as well-processed so the end result was kind of rough and scraggly, but I experimented by making some string:
All I used to spin it was a stick with a notch in the top so I could twist with my fingers, holding the other end of the stick steady and pulling the strand back towards myself. Whenever I finished a little more I would just loop it over the bend in the top of the stick and keep going.
The other fiber I've been experimenting with is milkweed seed fluff. This one is an interesting one because it was the first material I became interested in spinning, and the first I experimented with to the point of making a yarn. It took a long time to figure it out, I have quite a bit of single-strand seed fluff yarn now, and intend to spin this into a three-ply yarn to make it strong.
I was so happy! My first yarn! Spun with nothing but a stick. It's delicate but it holds together and handles being unwound and rewound just fine, and I think making a 2 or 3 ply yarn would make it pretty workable.
So imagine my surprise when I begin reading about textile arts and the possible uses of the plants i'm working with, and learn that spinning milkweed seed fluff is impossible?
Milkweed bast fiber has been used, like the dogbane bast fiber, but according to the internet, spinning the seed fluffs into yarn is something that cannot be done, because they are too short, smooth, and fragile. Many have tried! It doesn't work!
That was news to me.
As I read more about spinning the more conventional plant fibers, though, I consider what a deep knowledge humankind has cultivated of the ways of wool and flax and cotton, and think...is my total lack of knowledge about spinning yarn, the reason I was able to spin the milkweed fluffs?
Normal people would have armed themselves with the proper tools for undertaking a new activity, but I didn't even bother to look up what I was doing, because MacGyvering cool stuff out of materials from nature you can find anywhere outside is basically half my personality at this point, and makes me feel unreasonably powerful. As a result, I made a technological approach to spinning yarn that was designed specially for the challenges of spinning milkweed seed fluffs, and only later realized that 1) this is not a normal way to spin yarn and 2) i'm not supposed to be able to spin this stuff at all.
And it's because I came at it backwards. Instead of trying to use existing technology to spin milkweed fluffs, I became determined to spin milkweed fluffs and developed my technique based on what would work to do that, without any knowledge of what I was "supposed" to be doing.
If I had been normal about it and thought "Hmm, I should buy the right tools to do this" or even thought "Hmm, I should start with fibers that are usually used to make clothes" this would not have happened.
I'm coming at everything backwards: instead of "Where can I purchase Thing I Want To Work With?" it's "What does Nature provide, and what cool stuff can I do with it?"
I didn't even set out to work with textile materials. It's just that the plants kept giving me textile materials. This hobby absolutely snuck up on me out of nowhere this was not my idea
People have had success blending milkweed fluffs with other stuff, so I'm going to try to blend it with the dogbane next! I am fully going to go all the way and make like clothes or bags or blankets out of this stuff. There is no turning back for me, the euphoria of creation and the profound wisdom of the plants have inflicted a fascination with my task.
What's the staple length of that milkweed please? I am fascinated by it.
You mean like the length of the individual fibers? They're like an inch on average, the biggest seed pods have fluffs a little longer.
Basically the reason it works, I think, is that I'm twisting the strand with my fingers, pulling back toward my body and using the other end of the stick as an anchor point/leverage. There is something about the warmth and moisture of touching the fibers so much that makes them want to bind together more.
There is a lot of twist to the yarn, but it's not a problem, in fact if you twist until it kinks up, you can just...mash the kinked part between your fingers really hard and it'll flatten out and you can keep going. The fiber is springy and pliable in a way that lets you do things like that with it.
Where a lot of people messed up was they tried to card it. All you need to do is spend some time gently pulling the fibers between your fingers to separate the individual fibers in each "tuft" that attaches to a single seed. If you're too rough with it, the fibers will just break and that's not good. But you do kinda have to play with it in your hands? I don't know if it's the oils in your hands or what, but touching it a lot makes them want to mold together to each other more.
I can really see how this material is totally different than anything else you could spin in many ways.
Top: Dogbane bast fiber
Bottom: Dogbane bast/Milkweed floss blend
On a different note I went thru mom and dads closet to find really old clothes to practice sewing and embroidery on, and I am so mad!!!!! at how much more sturdy and robust clothes from the 1990's are compared to today.
I am just staring in fascination at these clothes from a few decades ago like "Wow they are so strong and sturdy...the fabric is such high quality...." What HAPPENED?
If you live in the US SE, try kudzu. It works like flaz & dogbane.
....Holy fuck this is awesome to read about and if OP has any resources on learning about how to spin your own thread (hell I'd take youtube videos if there arent books)
I love sustainable crafting and avoiding the capitalist system. Clothes nowadays are made so flimsy and its often joked that once you get into textile arts of any kind (especially sewing/making your own clothes) you end up wanting to learn and find more and more until you're spinning your own thread.
Honestly if I found books or classes or had friends irl that knew this stuff I'd definitely have gotten into making your own yarn/thread.
Curious how thin you could make it? Looks like what OP has made is good for crochet/knitting, but less so for sewing. (I could be wrong feel free to correct me).
......Dammit now I wanna look into natural dyes and shit too (most of those came out pale as hell, and I bet you could get some really neat colors to bind to it easily)
Dedicated to my cat, who is very vocal about my bed time.
PATREON
Two Truths and a Lie challenge!
I'm gonna start randomly dropping bits of my lore, and two will be truths, and the other a lie. Guess which is which below, then I'll do another post revealing the truth!
-I once got stuck on a Ferris wheel for three hours while they had to repair it and was stuck in it with my class bully
-I've been face to face with a bear on the road while driving TWICE
-Once had a lowkey prophetic dream about my cat, dreaming about the exact kitten, then finding it a few days later
Ferris wheel is the lie
You chose that compared to me having a prophetic dream??? :0
Hey thats just the cat distribution system,
also the ferris wheel one sounds too much like a writing prompt
Two Truths and a Lie challenge!
I'm gonna start randomly dropping bits of my lore, and two will be truths, and the other a lie. Guess which is which below, then I'll do another post revealing the truth!
-I once got stuck on a Ferris wheel for three hours while they had to repair it and was stuck in it with my class bully
-I've been face to face with a bear on the road while driving TWICE
-Once had a lowkey prophetic dream about my cat, dreaming about the exact kitten, then finding it a few days later
Ferris wheel is the lie
Got my hands on an old camera, I feel so powerful. (featuring highlights from my bedroom :3 )
"Charity shop" - 2007
@silly-signs
I feel like a lot of people misunderstand the reports about Hantavirus and Ebola.
So I have heard multiple people talking about thinking they might have either Ebola or Hantavirus because they are displaying cold symptoms or feel nauseous. And with the amount of reporting in the news about both of these viruses and its outbreaks, I completely understand why people become a bit paranoid. But it's important to understand that news reporting of these viruses severely outweighs the actual outbreaks. And besides that, both of these viruses are both: 1. hard to catch unless you have been in active contact with an infected person's bodily fluids. 2. quite deadly. And if you do think you have either of these illnesses, please think critically about your symptoms and if you have been in contact with a sick person's bodily fluids (sweat, saliva, urine, stool, etc.). And for hantavirus, there is a small chance you get it through contact with wild rodent feces. If you haven't been exposed to either, you are likely just experiencing a flu. The reporting on these viruses is a good thing to inform people to be vigilant. But overreporting causes more uninformed people to panic and misunderstand the details of the actual disease and how wide-spread it actually is. So don't worry yourself overly about any common symptoms you might be feeling. If you do have doubts, consult your doctor while quarantining yourself away from others. Especially if you live in a country where cases of these diseases are rare.