“My name is Eslam from Gaza, I’m 29 years old, and I’m a children teacher from Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip. a mother of two daughters, Hanaa 5 years old, and Alma, 10 months old. My husband Rasmi is the director of 3 language and training centers. In this war, our house was completely destroyed and razed to the ground, and my husband’s centers were blown up. He lost his job, and we were completely displaced, and we are now homeless and jobless, My two young daughters constantly suffer from diseases due to malnutrition and water pollution.
Danger and death surround us all day and all night. We have lost everything and depend on donations to survive and, most of all, to have any hope of escaping this genocide and evacuating to safety in Egypt. The cost of daily living continues to rise significantly in Gaza - imagine that we cannot find the type of milk for our daughter because of its high price. There is no kind of detergent and this is the cause of skin diseases for my two little girls. We bought a piece of soap for $30! ، and detergent is 100$.
Attached for you are pictures of how our lives have changed since October 7th.
Please help. Any funds raised will be used in daily survival and if enough is raised, to be able to evacuate Gaza.
Yknow what I LOVE about the Star Trek fandom? It’s ANCIENT. I had a talk with a nice old lady at the old persons home that my great grandma is in and she noticed my Spock shirt and was like “oh I love that show I thought the premise was lovely” and you all know THE PREMISE is trekspeak for spirk and I was like “do you accept the premise because I do” and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who is reliving their otp moments and she said “the premise is all I wrote about, dear” and we just talked about spirk for a hella long time and I just love how age doesn’t matter in this fandom you can be ninety and still be the biggest spirk bitch ever how rad is that
I was today years old when I learned that particular euphemism
I was also today years old. Fandom codes man
Reblogging to spread knowledge about the Premise, because I absolutely love that bit of fandom, and I want to make sure that it survives. (and yay to everyone who is part of today’s 10,000!)
Fanfic culture as we know it today owes so much to older fans, especially older women, who were obsessed with The Premise.
This was a world before widespread internet, before sites like fanfiction dot net let alone anything like AO3, and long before queer media became more widely acceptable. The Hays Code, which forbade Hollywood from depicting “sexual perversion” which gay representation was considered, was only repealed in 1968, and many still unofficially stuck to it and that part especially for longer. Original Star Trek was canceled in 1969, the same year as Stonewall. But in the early 70s, fans were collaborating and making fan zines containing writings about The Premise, distributing physical copies at conventions and creating mailing lists. Later came private email chains.
In a world with so many factors working against it, large groups of fans decided they were so invested in the idea of these two men together that they would MAKE ways to share their work and acquire new content from others.
Transformative fiction existed in ways before. Adaptations of other stories have existed about as long as stories have, and I’m sure people had written their own little reimaginings and “headcanon” side stories for themselves and friends before. But the culture of spreading it far and wide, of collaborating to do so… If it hadn’t been Spirk, maybe it still would have developed similarly later/slower, but we can’t be sure. In the world we have, though, we owe old ladies who loved The Premise everything. 🙏
Readers: *get incredibly sad and start grieving for characters and fearing for their safety and getting angry at the injustices they face*
Me: What the… oh, right. Humans have empathy and compassion.
It always takes me by surprise when people react to my characters the same way I react to characters in other media. I’m like, no you guys don’t understand. They’re not like Riz Gukgak or Mark Scout or Lyra Silvertongue. They’re just guys I made up. It’s different.
No he’s a fictional character, my guys are made up guys, it’s different
Derin you wanna know a secret
brian murphy made up riz gukgak. he’s just a made up guy.
No it’s different. He’s a special little guy who must be protected from the evils of the world and he’s been through so much that is so hard and he deserved better :( .
companies are delusional if they think consumers don’t notice shrinkflation. less food in the package, less medicine in the jar, less whatever in the wherever, it doesn’t matter where and it’s almost always noticeable. like i just finished one box of medicine and we opened another allegedly identical one that we just bought and lo and behold, the four middle medicine segments were gone from the package. they took out four pills from the same sized box and sold it at the same price without any indication on the box other than the small number in the corner. ridiculous
I bought a carton of my favorite tomato soup last week and noticed that the nutrition facts looked weird. So I compared the new one to the mostly empty carton already in my fridge.
The serving size was the same, but the calories per serving had gone down by like 15. Odd. The ingredients list previously listed tomato as the first ingredient, and then water. Now water is first. They’re watering down the fucking soup and charging the same for it. I’m so fucking done.
This sort of thing is also really infuriating when you work in a kitchen or make bulk food for serving- in my field, everything is done by weight and calculated to the calorie (public school cafeteria) and all recipes need to be approved by a board before we can make them. They’re standardized, by fucking law.
So we should know how many boxes of product it should take to make x amount of servings, right?
Tell me why for the last two years, every time we make mashed potatoes with the supposedly same dehydrated mix, we need more and more mix to reach our numbers? Supposedly, one carton should make 77 servings- it’s made 77 servings for the last five years.
So why are we suddenly only getting 70 out of the box on average now? We’re making it the exact same way every time. We make this recipe every other week. Why is it noticeably different.
We have to weigh everything to get accurate serving counts for governmental records and reimbursement from the government.
Why are the bags of frozen berries that say five pounds on every packags only weighing out to 4.3 pounds at best? We aren’t draining them, they should weigh at least 4.9 because that’s normal in the margin of error and the bags weigh nowhere near the difference to make it up. Now we won’t have enough to make our target serving count bc we only ordered enough for about fifty extra servings like we always do.
Why is the chicken nugget brand we’ve been buying for years from the same brand suddenly way fucking smaller? The serving we use is 6 pieces bc legally we have to offer two grams of protein for a menued meal at the highschool level- so has our serving size changed without them telling us? The box doesn’t say it’s changed but we notice this sort of thing because we do the same menu every couple of weeks.
It’s infuriating to have to make up the work because companies are trying to be fucking sneaky about this shit.
Also maddening as hell if you’re on or know anyone who’s on the WIC program in the US, because things like baby cereal are on vouchers specifically by weight, not price. So if that cereal you got last month was, say, 32.5 ounces, and the company decided to pull some shrinkflation bullshit and change it to 28.2 ounces for the same price or whatever without telling the WIC offices, you can’t get it with the voucher this month, even though it’s the same cereal with the same label and the same price. It’s not the right weight anymore. Tough shit. Maybe it’ll get fixed next month, only for the company to screw everyone over by changing the weight again.
They cut corners and cut corners and cut corners and cut corners
And now they have a perfect sphere/circle
So now they’re straight up making it smaller cause that’s the only way to cut even more
This is not sustainable
They will be left with a literal nothing if they continue
companies are delusional if they think consumers don’t notice shrinkflation. less food in the package, less medicine in the jar, less whatever in the wherever, it doesn’t matter where and it’s almost always noticeable. like i just finished one box of medicine and we opened another allegedly identical one that we just bought and lo and behold, the four middle medicine segments were gone from the package. they took out four pills from the same sized box and sold it at the same price without any indication on the box other than the small number in the corner. ridiculous
I bought a carton of my favorite tomato soup last week and noticed that the nutrition facts looked weird. So I compared the new one to the mostly empty carton already in my fridge.
The serving size was the same, but the calories per serving had gone down by like 15. Odd. The ingredients list previously listed tomato as the first ingredient, and then water. Now water is first. They’re watering down the fucking soup and charging the same for it. I’m so fucking done.
This sort of thing is also really infuriating when you work in a kitchen or make bulk food for serving- in my field, everything is done by weight and calculated to the calorie (public school cafeteria) and all recipes need to be approved by a board before we can make them. They’re standardized, by fucking law.
So we should know how many boxes of product it should take to make x amount of servings, right?
Tell me why for the last two years, every time we make mashed potatoes with the supposedly same dehydrated mix, we need more and more mix to reach our numbers? Supposedly, one carton should make 77 servings- it’s made 77 servings for the last five years.
So why are we suddenly only getting 70 out of the box on average now? We’re making it the exact same way every time. We make this recipe every other week. Why is it noticeably different.
We have to weigh everything to get accurate serving counts for governmental records and reimbursement from the government.
Why are the bags of frozen berries that say five pounds on every packags only weighing out to 4.3 pounds at best? We aren’t draining them, they should weigh at least 4.9 because that’s normal in the margin of error and the bags weigh nowhere near the difference to make it up. Now we won’t have enough to make our target serving count bc we only ordered enough for about fifty extra servings like we always do.
Why is the chicken nugget brand we’ve been buying for years from the same brand suddenly way fucking smaller? The serving we use is 6 pieces bc legally we have to offer two grams of protein for a menued meal at the highschool level- so has our serving size changed without them telling us? The box doesn’t say it’s changed but we notice this sort of thing because we do the same menu every couple of weeks.
It’s infuriating to have to make up the work because companies are trying to be fucking sneaky about this shit.
Also maddening as hell if you’re on or know anyone who’s on the WIC program in the US, because things like baby cereal are on vouchers specifically by weight, not price. So if that cereal you got last month was, say, 32.5 ounces, and the company decided to pull some shrinkflation bullshit and change it to 28.2 ounces for the same price or whatever without telling the WIC offices, you can’t get it with the voucher this month, even though it’s the same cereal with the same label and the same price. It’s not the right weight anymore. Tough shit. Maybe it’ll get fixed next month, only for the company to screw everyone over by changing the weight again.
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.
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.
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.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
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)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory.
Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet.
Here are the looms:
Here are the punch cards:
Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.
Here are some patterns:
How many punchcards per pattern?
This many:
Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.
I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.
dont care if i sound corny or cliche but to love and be loved back and not having to second guess where u stand in someones heart is such a warm and safe feeling & everyone should have the luxury and pleasure of having it always
I’m freely self projecting my neck and upper back pain onto the Lamb (and Narinder) because c'mon there’s no way they’re not constantly stressed out and muscle tense
Made an art thumbnail for The Rehabilitation of Death Au playlist on Spotify. Songs arent in any specific order or anything and I’m still adding some as I go along but it’s about 2 hours of vibes so far
this is the funniest tweet i’ve seen in months bye
these are all the geek equivalents of Lovecraft’s Cat’s Name
his cats name couldn’t be that bad!!!! it’s a cat, what’s the worst name?
i am wrong, what the fuck
Me every time this post comes back
go Google why chainsaws were invented, it’s really fun :)
why.
I’ve seen everything at this point, so why were chain saws in-
oh what the FUCK WHY
Thanks I hate it.
I could have gone my whole life without knowing it, thank you motherfucker
To be fair, its not AS bad when you read into detail. But ya. Still like getting slapped in the face with a cold fish.
i’m boutta google why chainsaws were invented now. feel like i’m going on an adventure.
really speaks to how i’ve been around the internet, that that wasn’t what i was expecting it to be, but it was also really close to what i expected it to be.
Every time I see this post it’s gone in a completely different direction and every time it’s cursed as fuck
This post is the feeling of opening what looks like a present, but all you get is punched in the face by a boxing glove on a spring
In moments like this I always fall back on the fact that they also aren’t speaking English because they don’t have England or the many languages and conquering peoples that contributed to the creation of the English language and therefore the work musr be a translation into recognizable terms in our world’s terms. Call that Tolkien Brainrot.
Definitely funnier if you make fantasy explanations though,
Champagne is a wizard who sells bubbly alcohol.
It’s called English because of the original Lish people, all languages start with En here.
French fries are not potatoes they’re roots of the french plant.
Goodbye is now short for ‘good be your eye’ wishing you luck seeing the path ahead.
Jesus Christ is a long dead lich who used to cause everyone problems and we haven’t stopped saying her name when things go wrong.
had a dream that started out kind of sexy and for a number of irrelevant dream-state reasons involved my having to explain to a partner that i didn’t want to suck on his titties. i think it was supposed to turn into an anxiety dream about having to negotiate sexual boundaries but instead he smiled and, very sympathetic, told me “of course - i know you’re a freudian, i’m sorry that didn’t occur to me,” sort of saying he should have remembered how i felt about oral fixations, and then the rest of the dream was me trying with increasing desperation to convince him that i was not a freudian and he just laughed and laughed, like i was being sort of foolish and silly, and said he knew how i really felt, and didn’t my unconscious mind reveal the truth about me, and so on. and by then i was so distressed that i was yelling at him in the dream - not that i actually fully realized i was dreaming - and shouted “dream interpretation is a crock of shit!” with such force that it woke me up.
now that this post has largely stopped circulating i feel that i can safely reveal what set this off. my dream partner was. well okay he was lestat iwTV. and the reason i would not suck on his titties is that, well, in the dream, i was deeply and passionately concerned about the possibility that this would cause me to be exposed to some substance called. well.
btw if i haven’t replied to your messages and you see me posting on here that’s just cause i’m a bad person and a terrible friend. hope that clears things up.
ALT
