widdershins @widdershinswombat - Tumblr Blog

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current state of the internet is a FUCKING EMBARASSMENT. was chatting with my grandma bout the history of crochet and knitting (and the comparative ages of those respective technologies) and i was like "oh YEAH and also that ancient greek fiber art we partly figured out from chemically testing the scoured bleached pigments of stolen statuary (tumblr knows what im talking about)—gimme 30 seconds to look up the name."

5 minutes and 3 search-engines later i am crying tears of blood screaming spitting blubbering in despair as my grandma attempts to digitally pat me consolingly on the back. the library of alexandria didn't burn it was "restructured" to "increase shareholder profits"

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

and i STILL CANNOT FIND THE TERM.

i am scouring the internet like the victorians scoured and destroyed all trace of joy and color from stolen relics for the LOST NAME OF THE ANCIENT PROCESS of textile-creation akin to knitting/crocheting/nålebinding that at least one academic/crafter used to recreate the leggings on this Glorious Motherfucker:

the google execs erased it. they bleached my bestie AGAIN from history...

lachrymose-lyricist

is this of any use

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

SO IT IS!!!

Archer statue from the Temple of Aphaia (ca. 480 BC) next to a reconstruction of its original paint job:

The leggings and sleeves would have created using a method called SPRANG which predates knitting and is over 3,000 years old. What's even sexier is modern artisans managed to recreate the entire outfit using the original method!

Mmm-HMM, love me a shapely thigh in harlequin hosiery. Put👏men👏in👏clingy-ass👏clothing👏again👏👏👏

Unfortunately english sources are hard to find, partly because Google's a shithole, but also because this textile project comes from a German museum, in Germany, where people tend to speak (and publish) in German. That said, the original link is to a short-but-sweet article I would have had no problem finding in 30 seconds a mere few years ago. fortunately i have clever beautiful insane people following me, but alas not everyone has such luxury. thanks to everyone in the notes who shoved themselves down this rabbithole with me!

in conclusion let us take a moment to sincerely wish Google a very burn in hell🙏

zimvader0017

This person has playlists teaching you how to do sprang from the most basic patterns to more advanced techniques. Most videos are from 2012.

Kristen Hughes. Handspinner, knitter, weaver, natural dyer, and språng fancier. Passionate about helping people get a grasp on the fiber a

his-dark-memerials-deactivated2

He doesn’t even know, and he doesn’t want to.

thatdisasterauthor

I don't go here but I feel like "It's a metaphor. Don't force it to do the work of a fact." is a great statement about literature and fan-content in general.

moon-mason

madamslayyy

Got his ass together in three words

bogleech

Okay but frog genitalia are internal whereas male rats have among the largest proportionate ballsacks of any animal.

callmestannismaybe

eulers-babe

for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!

don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!

libraryogre

Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."

damnfool-of-a-took

Had jury duty, can confirm!

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

Being able to raise reasonable doubt among a jury of one's peers saves lives. If you get the chance, take it.

genderkoolaid

"Jury Room / The Holdout" (1959) by Norman Rockwell. One of my favorites of his. Particularly the gendered dynamic he depicts here.

tallahasseemp3

please read this story of a man accidentally discovering his wife is the world's best Tetris player

lichfucker

[image description: an excerpt of text that says:

“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”

What Flewin said next I will never forget.

“Oh, my!”

/end id]

justahumblememefarmer

TL;DR on the article

The husband was writing an article on classic video game records, was surprised to find out that holding the Tetris record is a bit of a big deal, and mentions how good his wife is at it.

The guy he’s talking to mentions that the record is 327, way lower than his wifes usual scores of 500-600.

They travel to a tournament, and she goes to do her attempt. Just after she beats 327, and is climbing higher, a judge brings up to the husband that the specific version she’s playing actually has a different record of 545.

She overhears that she needs to beat 500-something, and keeps going, setting the record at 841.

weirdoughnut

which, they later find out, is her second-best record

mel-155-a

There was a decent but ultimately forgettable fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had a single moment that stuck with me.

The protagonist has just won the world famous sword fighting competition in the big, rich capital and is talking to his mentor, and says something about being the best swordsman in the world. The mentor frowns and tells him that no, he isn't. He is the best swordsman out of the people that could afford to show up to this tournament. There could be a mercenary way out in the mountains, patrolling a snow encrusted fort's walls that could kick his ass and there was no way to know until he was already losing to the guy.

I think about that a lot, and how for every apparently dominant competitor, there might be a fucking ronin out there somewhere capable of destroying them.

headspace-hotel

Always reblog tetris ronin lady

respectissexy

One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.

(This is obviously a generalization that isn't true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I'm proceeding from there.)

This "top three priorities" framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”

Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”

It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)

respectissexy

I love doing notes for therapist-posting on tumblr because I get tags like this.

shadow-banned-the-hedgehog

mlembug

"the average income in <X> is <Y> of <currency>" cool, what's the median

unyielding-pussy

Average isn't useful here. however, after a little bit of research, apparently the median income in the US is $24,327, which means the reality is actually much worse than this meme makes it seem. yay!

Welcome to the Protestant Work Ethic where if you are not working for 16 hours a day you are a Sinner that will Burn In Hell. Unless of course you are rich in which case you are Blessed by God and can go to Heaven without lifting a finger.

reginaldqueribundus

heard a story on a podcast that some Christian missionaries showed these rural Cambodian farmers how to double their crop yields. the missionaries came back a year later and were surprised the Cambodians had grown basically the same amount of crops but the farmers were like “yeah this is great, we got everything we need for the year and only had to do half as much work”

and if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the current North American work environment I don't know what will

charlesoberonn

moniquill

"Early colonists on Turtle Island were stunned by the plenitude they found here, attributing the richness to the bounty of nature. Settlers in the Great Lakes wrote in their journals about the extraordinary abundance of wild rice harvested by Native peoples; in just a few days, they could fill their canoes with enough rice to last all year. But the settlers were puzzled by the fact that, as one of them wrote, “the savages stopped gathering long before all the rice was harvested.” She observed that “the rice harvest starts with a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayers for good weather for the next four days. They will harvest dawn till dusk for the prescribed four days and then stop, often leaving much rice to stand unreaped. This rice, they say, is not for them but for the Thunders. Nothing will compel them to continue, therefore much goes to waste.” The settlers took this as certain evidence of laziness and lack of industry on the part of the heathens. They did not understand how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered. I once met an engineering student visiting from Europe who told me excitedly about going ricing in Minnesota with his friend’s Ojibwe family. He was eager to experience a bit of Native American culture. They were on the lake by dawn and all day long they poled through the rice beds, knocking the ripe seed into the canoe. “It didn’t take long to collect quite a bit,” he reported, “but it’s not very efficient. At least half of the rice just falls in the water and they didn’t seem to care. It’s wasted.” As a gesture of thanks to his hosts, a traditional ricing family, he offered to design a grain capture system that could be attached to the gunwales of their canoes. He sketched it out for them, showing how his technique could get 85 percent more rice. His hosts listened respectfully, then said, “Yes, we could get more that way. But it’s got to seed itself for next year. And what we leave behind is not wasted. You know, we’re not the only ones who like rice. Do you think the ducks would stop here if we took it all?” Our teachings tell us to never take more than half."

-Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

inkfire-scribe

There are So Many Journals from American colonists that describe the amazing bounty of the land, and then surprise surprise, once they drive away the people who were caring for the land and make the farming "more efficient" and kill all the predators and import domesticated animals and everything, the amazing miraculous bounty starts drying up.

Our grandparents tell us stories about the birds that used to be here and how the seasons were predictable and the weather less extreme.

I WONDER WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED

moniquill

miamaimania

“Untitled” (2014) by Nguyễn Hoàng Nam ☀ Child in purple áo dài claims her persimmon kingdom

spring-or-summer

[image id: a photo of a smiling child standing in a persimmon tree. /end id]

preludeinz

the fact that this is modern but looks like it could be a colourized photo from any place and time occupied by both little girls and persimmon trees is delighting my heart

sol1loqu1st

I feel like all the "they broke weird al" "weird al got serious we're so cooked" comments about the killing in the name cover are missing the point. that is not a broken man. comedy is politics. comedy has always been politics. weird al has been satirizing politics for a long time because he knows the court jester can say to the king what other people can't. by doing a serious cover of an explicitly anti-establishment song that his gen x and millennial audience knows by heart when he's built his career on parody, he's saying this can't be satirized anymore and he's saying it in a very deliberate way that his audience will understand. those aren't the actions of a broken man, they're the actions of a man who is trying to tell you something. are we going to listen?

cuprohastes

About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.

The original story was lost. However, I have started re-writing it. The first part is here - If there's enough interest, I'll keep going.

noodles-07

everything I hate about ai and love about wikipedia on one image

dailyhistorymemes

The Choctaw-Irish Brotherhood(via)

paula-of-christ

im-the-princess-now

I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help

dresshistorynerd

It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

trickstertime

Then in 2020:

Navajo Nation say Irish generosity is the ‘good in all of the bad that is going on’

jennybobenny73

Choctaw Nation has now added a monument of their own:

A sculpture honoring the relationship between the Choctaw Nation and the people of Ireland will soon be erected on the Choctaw Capitol groun

sistertaxon

why are there so many posts about asexuals being immune to sirens. people. sirens don’t lure you in with sex (necessarily). they sing about whatever it is that you want most. they could sing about mothman or cinnamon toast crunch and guess what then your asexual pirate is fucking dead

thesylverlining

this is the only kind of ace discourse i ever want to see on my dash. the only kind. ever again. good job

kittyknowsthings

Do you think the sirens would be grateful that they finally get some variety?

systlin

“Oh my god we can finally just sing about pasta thank the fucking gods.”

totohoy-blog

I’m not asexual but I’m fairly certain sirens would do a far better job luring me into the depths with a song about pasta rather than sex…

systlin

I mean.

“WHAT THE FUCK STAY AWAY FROM THE ROCKS.”

“FUCKER THEY SAID THEY HAVE FETTUCCINE CARBONARA AND HOT GARLIC BREAD OVER THERE HANG ON BITCH.”

musicalhell

This is true; Odysseus heard them promising him knowledge of the future. So the next time you see artwork like this:

Remember those sultry naked chicks are saying “We’ll tell you the winning lotto numbers.”

fuckstaffposts

Them: “We have unlimited wifi at incredible speeds~” Me: *diving headfirst into the water*

rpluvsyj

This post is a blessing

wittyusername97

Congratulations! Odysseus! You’ve been selected as a winner for the free $1000 Amazon Gift Card, Apple iPhone X 256G or Samsung Galaxy S8! Claim your prize now!

kitvalkyrie

Oh my god sirens were literally scam websites

10thingsihateabout-all-yall

Oh my god they were phishing

tuulikki

Finished just in time for the solstice. A little unbalanced in composition because frankly I had just been fucking around and hadn’t planned to turn it into an official project. Oops.

From Susan Cooper’s poem, “The Shortest Day”: