Words and Needles

I live in Block Two of the Haldimand Tract in Canada, on the traditional territy of the Haudenosaunee, Ashinaabe and Attawanderon nations. I try, with limited success, to keep most of the knitting content sequestered to @the-fibre-stuff

[batbetbitbotbut]

Mooooooood

Someone in a weaving discord I'm in saw this much-jpg'd image on Facebook. They enjoyed it and crossposted it. I enjoyed it and asked if there was a source. Alas, unattributed. We would never know.

Not so! By their magical librarianship and citation-hunting powers, @ginneke tracked the image first to Pinterest, then a long-defunct blog, then a connection with the 1960s fairytale retellings of Amadel Williams-Ellis illustrated by one William Stobbs. He had the correct whimsical art style - a hit! Another server member suggested a likely candidate tale of Baba Yaga involving a cat and a loom.

Unfortunately, these books have never been digitised, not even the tables of contents, so there was no way to know whether they might be correct. And my various libraries had never heard of the books. However, for about £7 each on ebay they were within my shenanigans budget - I was invested now.

I ordered two, mostly at random. Leafed all the way through both of them, got nearly to the end with some delightful other creatures but not yet the Loom Cat...

..... and then all of a sudden there it was! In a Baba Yaga story in Round a the World Fairy Tales exactly as predicted! Success in tracking down an 80-year-old untitled children's book illustration via several people and much joy. I'm very satisfied and will put the full Baba Yaga tale in a reblog.

[wheelie-sick]

"oh, I live in a desert and-"

"wow that must be so terrible" "deserts are so ugly" "I would never want to live in a wasteland like that" "it's just empty nothingness"

wishing 10,000 exploding hammers upon you

behold New Mexico

[ID 1: tall, snowcapped rocky mountains rising above a plain filled with desert scrub

ID 2: brightly colored banded cliff walls of several mesas climbing their way into mountains

ID 3: a desert prairie

ID 4: colorful hoodoos against a twilight sky

ID 5: white sand dunes as far as the eye can see

ID 6: a collection of hoodoos against a stormy sky at sunset

ID 7: a juniper tree standing with a cliff wall in the background

ID 8: several juniper trees on a rocky landscape]

[wheelie-sick]

this post and all its wonderful additions (look in the notes) is circulating again. these photos and many of the ones added in the notes come from the US Southwest.

right now the trump administration is attacking the public lands in the Southwestern US. most recently (July 2026), in Utah the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments have been cut by over 90% to allow for mining. these lands are sacred to multiple Native nations in the area and contain irreplaceable archeological sites. additionally, the commission of Native representatives who aided in management of these lands has been dissolved leaving Native people without a voice in caring for the remaining land. (read more here)

here in New Mexico, the 10 mile buffer zone surrounding Chaco Canyon preventing oil and gas drilling is under attack. Chaco Canyon contains incredibly old and incredibly fragile archeological sites sacred to Pueblo people. these sites are threatened by mining and drilling. (read more here)

The attack on the Chaco buffer zone is currently in a public comment period open until July 29. PLEASE leave a public comment to save these irreplaceable places.

[pangur-and-grim]

I’m in london england, seeing things no one has ever seen before

[pangur-and-grim]

ACTUALLY though, I have been observing the england pigeons and I’m ready to make a statement

their ceres (the white part of their beak) are larger than Canadian pigeons. not sure why. also, their bodies are sleeker and longer. this is probably because pigeons back home have to survive -35C winters, so only the hefty round ones survive.

I wonder if the smaller ceres in Canadian pigeons are also a cold adaptation? because it’s an exposed fleshy bit with lots of nerve ending for sensory purposes, so I can see frostbite being a problem. or maybe it’s just that different escaped breeds contributed to the population.

I’m also noticing a colour I haven’t seen back home! VERY dark black (like the left hand pigeon in the photo above). looks like they rolled around in soot. definitely worth the 7 hour plane ride to see these special guys

[pangur-and-grim]

my humble Canadian pigeons for comparison. they look so orb-like. you could go bowling with a Canadian pigeon, and you could play darts with an English pigeon

[pangur-and-grim]

hey now.

[cherryhatter-deactivated2015072]

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

[visibun]

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

[drtanner]

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

[bogleech]

The christian family in these memes (which are absolutely all over facebook these days) genuinely do always look miserable. Who the fuck is relating to these stock mormon farm cultists. That is a couple who made love only once in pitch darkness with bags on their heads then celebrated the pregnancy with a feast of uncooked potatoes and warm tapwater. The baby seems intrigued though. Maybe only by the bottle of pills??

[sunshine-tattoo]

Could not leave this in the tags <3

[archatlas]

Really Big Coin Skrekkøgle

This is our Really Big Coin. It is big because it makes other things look small when photographed next to it. Actually, it is a 20:1 replica of the EUR 50-cent, you see it being milled out here. We needed to do quite a bit of sanding, lacquering and smudging to obtain the desired look and some climbing to get into required shooting position (you need to get up real high to take good pictures). The result is a short series of photographs, attempting to visually scale down real-sized objects.

Images and text via

[aberrantkenosis]

what the fuck

[historicity-was-already-taken]

(hey fam, no one is comparing you to henry ford, adolf hitler, or the last handful of tsars because you support palestine. those comparisons exist because you insist in using a lot of very vintage and powerful anti-semitic tropes in your activism.)

[historicity-was-already-taken]

It’s breached containment!

[clockworkrobotic]

when i was a teenager i used to catch myself thinking "i'm really glad i'm alive right now because of all the cool personal technologies that exist" and when i did i'd think it through and reckon that well, its not like teenagers in the 70s and 80s knew they didnt have ipods or facebook or whatever. they were also happy with the tech they had. and i'd reason that in the future there would be more fun technologies that i dont know i'm missing out on right now and the future will be an even cooler time to exist

anyway i was dead fucking wrong about that last part. i hate personal technologies now. i miss having an ipod that doesnt advertise shit to me and i miss when my htc wildfire didnt harass me 45 times a day to install an ai assistant and then install it anyway when i say no and i miss when the internet wasnt 5 websites all of which i have to log into and i miss when i didnt need an app to talk to my landlord. sorry past me you were actually right about 2009

[sixth-light]

Do you know what an iced chocolate is?

Yes and I’ve had one

Yes but I’ve never had one

No but I have a confident guess (in tags please)

No and I have no idea

Clicky button

Remaining time: 5 days 2 hours

A friend was describing introducing cafe workers in the UK to the concept of the iced chocolate and then I found out Wikipedia doesn’t know what they are and then I thought: is this another lemon lime and bitters situation? So…Tumblr poll time!

[jerreeeeeee]

i was just thinking about that like murderbot introduces itself and the concept of secunits to an unfamiliar audience by insisting that it is designed to murder and its day job is all about murder but the more you read the more that is just not true. its all about protecting people, sometimes murdering doesnt even happen. murder isnt its designed purpose murder is just a particularly convenient means to an end

[yarnings]

Oh, my kid and I were talking about this. (Just read Platform Decay). Why is Murderbot so scared of other secunits? It should know that they're not the threat that they're painted as. And taking a step back, why would people be so scared of rogue secunits to begin with? I'm assuming that the general population and Murderbot got this from the same place - the media shows. Is it just corporate propaganda then? Has there actually been a deadly rogue secunit, or has it always been cover for secunits that massacred a bunch of people for reasons other than going rogue?

[jerreeeeeee]

i don’t think murderbot’s fear comes from the media, it hates the media’s portrayal of secunits specifically because its inaccurate and avoids watching those types of shows. i think murderbot is so afraid of other secunits because it knows itself. it knows what it’s capable of, and considers itself a particularly soft, particularly compromised, particularly out-of-its-depth secunit. so if it’s capable of hacking entire transit rings and getting passage anywhere it wants and pretending to be human, what the hell is a secunit with its shit together and with a goal to hurt people capable of?

of course, secunits aren’t all waiting to go on a murder spree, and murderbot is definitely aware of that, but they are people (extremely traumatized people), and people act in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons. murderbot distrusts strange humans probably the same amount, but strange humans are just not as dangerous as strange secunits because secunits have more powerful abilities, which murderbot itself is all too aware of. i think it just knows that it can handle humans, it gets shot by them all the time, but fighting other secunits, if it came to that for whatever reason, would be a much closer match for it

[yarnings]

Oh, I do like the idea (and there's definite textual support) that it is aware that secunits aren't any more likely to be a danger, just that if they are they're more dangerous. And because it's used to being the dangerous thing, it doesn't have an appropriate sense of scale for how worried to be about a fair fight, and worries more than a human might.

[jerreeeeeee]

i was just thinking about that like murderbot introduces itself and the concept of secunits to an unfamiliar audience by insisting that it is designed to murder and its day job is all about murder but the more you read the more that is just not true. its all about protecting people, sometimes murdering doesnt even happen. murder isnt its designed purpose murder is just a particularly convenient means to an end

[yarnings]

Oh, my kid and I were talking about this. (Just read Platform Decay). Why is Murderbot so scared of other secunits? It should know that they're not the threat that they're painted as. And taking a step back, why would people be so scared of rogue secunits to begin with? I'm assuming that the general population and Murderbot got this from the same place - the media shows. Is it just corporate propaganda then? Has there actually been a deadly rogue secunit, or has it always been cover for secunits that massacred a bunch of people for reasons other than going rogue?

[sqrt-73]

screw ray bradburys 6 word poem. here’s my 2 word one:

Keep reading

[jewish-joy]

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

[nudityandnerdery]

Just off the top of your head, don't need to try and look it up to check out anything:

Can you name a web search engine that you used before Google?

Yes

No

Don't know/just want to see the results

Remaining time: 2 days 1 hour

The book I'm reading suggests that Google became so market dominant that most people couldn't name a search engine that came before it, so I'm curious.

[alex51324]

HotBot.

[akinmytua2]

Askjeeves

[whatbigotspost]

I primarily used AltaVista and Yahoo before my 10th grade English teacher told me about Google in 2000. I have such a vivid memory of being like, "oh shit this IS a great tool..." which is hilarious to recall 26 years later.

[traegorn]

Altavista was the big one.

I also used Search Directories (which are different) like Yahoo! too.

[finnglas]

Okay but who remembers AskJeeves!?

[yarnings]

I can name some, but I didn't really use them. AskJeeves of course, but I don't really remember using others, because I'm a bit young for that. I remember a school trip to the Science Centre (RIP) in elementary school, and one of the websites we checked out was Google. (My computer partner had ZERO interest in the boolean search capabilities so I didn't get to play with it much.)

I don't actually remember whether this fancy search engine was something that they'd presented to us, or if I'd read about it in the newspaper.

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

Hello. Since I've seen people submit finished wheels, I thought I'd submit a wheel I came up with. In this case, it's a wheel to tell you something that you can't do for a week.

https://wheelofnames.com/kch-gkt

this is a really really cool idea! Thanks!!!

You can't do this for a week!

How bad is this for you?

Its great! I can live with this

I already don't do this

It'll be annoying but I'll be fine

VERY BAD.

results/other

Remaining time: 2 days 6 hours

thanks inkarchivist for the submission!!

[haveyouever-polls]

Have you ever smoked a cigarette?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 3 days 18 hours

[copperbadge]

So the Shedd Aquarium here in Chicago just took a delivery of four beluga whales rescued from a shuttered zoo in Ontario. The trade in "show" marine mammals is pretty barbaric generally and hopefully is on the way out but in the meantime we have to look after the ones that are already here, and there are many charming aspects to this story. These include:

One: the four Belugas we just got were chosen to travel together because of their deep bond, like Hobbits in Lord of the Rings or something

Two: "I believe I Can Fly" playing gently in the background