occasionally subtle
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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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Jules of Nature
NASA
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sheepfilms
styofa doing anything
Stranger Things
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ellievsbear
DEAR READER
$LAYYYTER
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hello vonnie
@theartofmadeline
shark vs the universe
Cosimo Galluzzi
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@rozaroo
I always bring a book just in case but today I forgot and now I'm bored on the train, so
what is the one (1) thing you always bring with you that isn't your phone, wallet, or keys?
a book
a snack
a drink
a fidget toy
headphones/earphones
an extra piece of clothing (jacket, sweater, ..)
a hat/cap
none of these, it's actually... (tags pls!)
actually two or more are integral to my survival (tags pls!)
show results
reblogs appreciated!
PSA: Don't use Open Office
I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.
Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.
Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!
Person with housemates can study.
Person who has spent all their cash on rent and food still has a place to get out of the house and do something interesting.
Cool community classes and community art shows.
ESL tutoring.
Tax prep and forms.
tbh fuck anyone who says a single bad thing about libraries
Not content I normally reblog but libraries are super important and our world would be diminished without them.
The library was how I was able to read so many books as a kid that my parents wouldn’t have been able to afford.
Libraries are one of the only places on Earth that treats people the same no matter how much money you have. We can’t lose that.
Every public library I’ve ever known is a quiet place for teens to do homework or internet surf after school while their parents are getting off work. If they aren’t doing either, they are curled up in a chair somewhere with a stack of books and look extremely comfy.
Not too mention being a warm safe space during the day for anyone who needs it.
And it has books.
And librarians.
hey your jacket looks really cool! i was wondering if you have a tutorial for visible mending? or if you could explain how it works? thank u :)
Hi, thank you so much! @reasonably-annoyed-fog also asked about this in my notes so I made a super quick little guide. Putting it under a read more bc it got kinda long whoops. Also the photos are kinda crappy bc I made them in the middle of the night after I got this ask. :’)
A super rough guide to visible mending repairs
I use an embroidery ring because it’s easier to get the tension right. You’ll also want some strong thread and/or embroidery floss. Multiple colours is fun or you can just stick to one and keep it simple. You’ll want the long stitches at least to be some pretty sturdy thread.
Also a needle is pretty essential. I use a sharp one for setting up the long stitches, and then a rounded point for the weaving so I don’t constantly stab through the previous threads, but you can easily just use a sharp needle.
So basically what we’re doing is weaving a patch across wherever the tear or the worn-through spot is. You start off by making some long stitches. It helps to put an extra stitch at the end there to make you less likely to pull on them and make the tension wonky. Note: getting the tension right on these is tricky and I’m not very good at it. Basically, you don’t want them too tight, or the fabric will bunch up later, but too loose makes the weaving difficult.
Whew these photos are blurry. Sorry about that! Anyway, line up a bunch of these long stitches, a few millimeters apart. Make some fun shapes or just a wonky row like this and play around with the distance if you want.
Now switch to a rounded needle if you have one, and whatever other colour you’ve got picked out. Then we weave! You’ll want to start in one corner and pick up every other thread with the needle, working your way across.
Aww yeah that’s row one! Don’t worry about getting it pushed to the bottom of the threads all neat yet; you can do that when you do the second row. I pull the thread through the fabric after each row to anchor it. You’ll want to start the second row really close to the first one, since you’ll be using it to push down row one with it.
Row number two means you go over the threads you went under in row one, and over the ones you went under. Now you’re weaving! Use the needle to sorta wiggle the thread of row one down as far as it’ll go.
Once again, don’t worry about getting row 2 all neat and tidy, you’ll let row 3 do the work for you.
And so on and so forth!
Like I said, I’m not great at getting the tension right but hey, it looks cool. You can switch up the colours, add some stitching around it, and so on and so forth. It really holds up well as a repair as long as the stitching isn’t loose enough to get snagged on anything!
Just for fun, here’s my very first attempt:
And here’s what I’ve made since:
For more inspiration you can look up visible mending and if you want to be completely amazed, check out sashiko, a Japanese artform of intricate embroidery used as visible mending. This instagram page showcases some gorgeous craftmanship by two sashiko artists.
Anyway, I hope this is helpful!
What’s your typical day like?
i wake up. i malfunction. i call it a day
my toxic knitting trait is that the amount of ribbing on any given piece is wholly contingent on how long i can tolerate doing ribbing
rb and put in the tags whether 85f/29.5c is hot
reblog and put in the tags the similarity between you and your icon
May I offer you a bouncing baby Pyrgus in these trying times
Not For Puppies
support me on patreon!
This is one of those works of art that sticks with you forever. My partner and I first saw this comic years ago and quote the “okay, but like…” in our dogs’ voice several times a week.
I do love that every dog owner who has ever seen this just immediately goes “using that forever”
“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).
Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.
On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.
At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).
...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).
E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.
(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)
Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.
...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”
- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”
If I may tag onto this: it's really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I'm at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was... a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody's up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I'm not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled ...) and the spinner didn't suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn't be easy, but it also wouldn't be terrifying back-breaking labour.
This is an illustration circa 1325-1335 of a woman feeding chickens -- notice she’s got a distaff tucked under her arm with a handspindle dangling from it. Women spun *constantly* because making thread for weaving and sewing was a never ending task.
Margaret + Knitting
Have you checked out these science challenges yet?
We think all of our challenges on DIY are worth trying but what makes our science challenges so special, you ask? While having fun you’re also understanding the building blocks to many scientific principles - and that’s pretty COOL!
This week, we’re sharing with you some of our favorite science challenges:
1. Let’s begin with How to Create a Parachute – it’s quite simple (as long as your parachute flies in the end)!
2. The best way to know if an object conducts electricity is to NOT touch it with your bare hands. Here’s where an electricity tester comes in handy. Try building one!
3. Want to see like an insect? Possibly the easiest science challenge on the list shows you how: Build compound eyes out of straws.
4. Learn how to build a camera lens – the way you experiment with photography will change after creating this!
5. How about transforming energy into sound? Build a noisemaker!
We hope you have fun. Don’t forget to share your projects with us!
Do this four times repeatedly and you’ll be out. But how does it work? There’s some real brain science behind it.
We’re trying this tonight!
It’s about time someone got around to uncovering all the cheat codes for this “human being” software. It’s only been out for like 10,000 years.
?????????????
I’ve used this technique for about a year, and I can safely say that it has efficiently transformed my sleeping habits from several hours of struggle to fall asleep, to passing out in a matter of minutes.
It’s a form of Alexander Technique. It’s a technique that was designed for actors to keep their body in ready working condition and give it the best way to perform. This is the method used to calm, and center the body. Once the body is at that point it can perform anything you want it to.
Reblogging for later reference after I tried it earlier today to try to calm down. It actually does help a lot, not just for sleep but if you have problems with anxiety.
My default mental setting is “vibrating intensely in the background.” After doing this, I felt noticeably calm and relaxed - I wasn’t as fixated on my breathing, I wasn’t tense, my movements weren’t jerky and I didn’t feel like I had to be as tense as possible to be under control. 10/10 would recommend.
me gonna try it
dont wanna reblog but insomnia is a bitch for some ppl so heres for my mutuals having trouble sleeping.
it gets me every time
I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING
