Slight update for folks following me on Ao3:

I’ve updated my username from Raven_Ehtar to just Ehtar. From my understanding this won’t break any direct-to-story links, but obviously any to my old profile won’t work now, and neither will any to my collections (I think.) So head’s up if anyone is hoarding those or something.

funnytwittertweets:

dexmathylphenidate:

annabethisterrified:

lemjpanda13:

acoolguy:

siahatha:

it’s time we start oppressing ppl that use the word “hubby”

sorry but “Hubble Space Telescope” takes too long to say

@annabethisterrified you’re

w h a t

LOL yep that’s the day job! I started last year after graduating, working on the NASA side of things with the mission doing social media/outreach, so I’m going to do my obligatory HUBBY LINK DROP: insta, twitter, fb

everythingfox:

Donut box vs finger

(via)

foxes-in-love:

ALT

My family just lost their “having me in their lives” privileges!

afloweroutofstone:

hrefnatheravenqueen:

Barker then turned his attention to his fellow author J.K. Rowling, who has had her fair share of controversy over the last few years over her opinions on the transgender community. “There’s a lot of pain amongst the transgender people that I know,” Barker stated. “They have a lot of issues in the world as it is, without a famous author opining on the subject. It just seems redundant. It just seems unkind.”

Noting Rowling’s vast financial success, Barker felt that Rowling’s newfound position of fame ought to exclude her from discussing trans rights. He added, “It really just seems redundant for a woman as successful, as validated in the world, as Ms Rowling, to be negative, to be disruptive if you will, to a very beaten up subculture. These are human beings. She has no right to opine, I think, upon the lives of human beings that she does not know.”

“I feel very protective of people who are on the edge of our culture as gay people still are,” Barker continued. “And certainly transgender people are on the edge of our culture. And here you have one of the most successful people in the frigging world – Ms Rowling. Going after a very emotionally vulnerable portion of our culture. It just seems unnecessary and unfair.”

‘Hellraiser’ writer Clive Barker on the publishing industry’s homophobia and J.K. Rowling

Prejudice.

Far Out Magazine

Fun fact: Clive Barker was a gay prostitute before his horror writing career took off

nandomando:

ALT

dduane:

iplaywithstring:

swords-n-spindles:

the-fibre-stuff:

moiraecrochet:

synebluetoo:

costumersupportdept:

butts-for-days:

dollsahoy:

isnerdy:

rolypolywardrobe:

systlin:

darkersolstice:

max-vandenburg:

eldritchscholar:

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.

@we-are-threadmage

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

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.

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).

Now this is a thread and a half.

partywithponies:

Introducing the phrase “found family” to fandom spaces was a mistake. Now half of fandon wants to force their “found families” into neat little boxes like “this is the dad, this is the mum, this is the fun uncle, these ones are siblings”, even though the entire POINT of found family as a concept was to reject traditional family structures as the norm and rigid ideas of what a family even is, and then they get big mad whenever even dares suggest something romantic or sexual could happen between two completely unrelated mature adult characters they’ve arbitrarily decided are “parent/child” or “siblings” based on basically NOTHING in canon and start accusing that potential relationship of being incestuous. That’s not how that works! That’s not how any of this works!!

*squints*

Sometimes I’m too much hermit even in my online spaces. I’m often caught completely unawares by things that seem to have been going on for ages and/or is widespread. I had no idea this was a thing. “Found family” is still an amorphous blob of domesticity in my world and I’m very pleased about that fact.

teashoesandhair:

So, my university does a lot of outreach Classics work, trying to make it less of an elitist subject and more accessible to children, and as part of that, I went to give a talk to a class of 6 and 7 year olds a few months back.

And here’s the thing. Classics is really often portrayed as the last bastion of academic privilege, a subject that is only taught to rich white kids so that they can brag about knowing Latin and get jobs as Tory MPs. But these kids were OBSESSED. They had already done some stuff on myths, and they were so excited to talk about it. They knew all the stories, all the heroes, the gods, the monsters. I have never seen such an excitable group of kids as these 6 year olds shouting about Odysseus.

For the lesson, I asked them to think of their favourite myth and to consider it from the point of view of the monster rather than the hero. The end goal was to show that often the monsters and heroes are quite similar. We decided to do Polyphemus (the Cyclops) in the Odyssey, and so I asked them why they thought Polyphemus might have been so angry at Odysseus that he killed some of his men.

Because he came home and found lots of strange men in his house, eating his food, said the kids.

So, I asked them, do you think that was a good reason to kill people?

No, they said, but he was very cross, and he didn’t do it because it was fun.

And then this KID, this SIX YEAR OLD CHILD, put her hand up and said “well, it was very bad of him, but if we’re cross with him then we have to be cross with Odysseus too, because when he came home from his adventure and found lots of men in his house, trying to marry his wife, he killed them, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

AND LET ME TELL YOU

I am a published Classicist! A PhD student! And I have never made that connection before! Not once! And this child was six years old! And she made the link! By herself!

And so I tried not to show how gobsmacked I was, and we talked more about other monsters, including Medusa, and at the end of the lesson a lot of them said that they thought the monsters were not as evil as we usually think, and then I went home.

But I honestly haven’t got over how excited and engaged those kids were, in a totally regular primary school. Classics, in that classroom, was not elitist or inaccessible. It was something they understood, could really get their teeth into and use to think of new ideas of good and bad, of why we demonise different people for doing the same things. And that’s how I like to think about Classics. Not a series of dry texts in ancient languages, but as living stories that you actually can’t help but love, just a bit.

penflowerink:

ALT

Bena, daughter of Rom and Leeta.

Considering her mother survived a brutal fascist occupation, her father started the first Ferengi workers’ union, and her grandmother championed social revolution on Ferenginar, I figured she’d be an anti-authoritarian activist. She looks up to Kira (even borrowing her wardrobe style), and quotes her dad a lot. Not on speaking terms with uncle Quark.

ALT

Originally posted by instantbee

Commissions Info.

theshadowrealmitself:

Who wants to know what Star Trek thoughts are making me sad this week? That was rhetorical I’m continuing anyways

Just thinking about Spock interacting with full blooded Vulcan children as an adult and seeing them not be as “Vulcan” as they’re supposed to be (like they’re still kids, they’re not gonna have a full handle on how to contain their emotions and stuff) and no one bats an eye at that, because they’re full-blooded, so their status as a Vulcan is never called into question

Anyways just thinking about Spock seeing a Vulcan child get excited and going to their mom to be picked up and how he felt he always had to reject getting picked up by Amanda to conform to a society that was always going to hold him to a higher standard than his peers

soul-links:

Team urameshi

jordanlhawk:

pvrrhadve:

something something people have always been storytellers, storytelling is a load bearing pillar of the human experience, collaborative creation and dispersal of stories is one of the most ancient of all practices. positioning those stories as being in the film medium from the moment of conception is obviously a new one but i do feel our distant ancestors in this chili’s tonight

storytelling is a load bearing pillar of the human experience,

Printing this out and putting it on my wall.

tippenfunkaport:

there is something so darkly comical about tumblr potentially outliving twitter

tumblr, which is held together with duct tape and madness, run by three raccoons in blood stained Yahoo! hats and a handful of crabs, its only discernible source of income the sale of shoelaces from an inside joke so inside no one knows the original source anymore and fake blue checkmarks… that website still lives on

truly the cockroach of social media and I love it for that