it’s fibromyalgia awareness month so I just wanted to say a lil somethin’
ig post here (includes full caption)
Lil' Harvest mouse 🌾 I just posted on my Insta!
If you're in the U.S. and want to support local plants and pollinators, I hope you've heard of the Xerces Society. Weird name, but super cool resource for gardening for insect pollinators (and they work for other invertebrate species, too)
They've got regional native plant lists:
They've also got super helpful things in their resources section, including Washington's plan for helping bumble bees:
Another really cool resource is the National Wildlife Federation's list of key stone plant species by ecoregion:
Ah, just found out the reason behind the name: "Our name (which is pronounced Zer-sees, or /ˈzɚˌsiz/) comes from the now-extinct Xerces blue butterfly (Glaucopsyche xerces), the first butterfly known to go extinct in North America as a result of human activities. The Xerces blue's habitat was destroyed by development in the sand dunes of San Francisco, and the species was declared extinct by the 1940s."
Not so much weird as poignant.
with thread and fabric being very very labour-intensive in pre-industrial times I wonder how much of the cost of a ship was in its rigging. even a small sail is a lot of fabric compared to clothes, and it has to be quite high-quality. and even a small boat needs a decent amount of good rope.
from what little I’ve read, it seems like it, I read an article ages ago estimating the cost of manufacturing textiles (helping a friend write a Viking romance novel) that stated that time spent on sailcloth spinning, weaving and sewing was the primary limit on Viking ship production. Can’t find it now and I was not the most rigorous researcher back then, but I can find this, which estimates a single sail worth of fabric costing 270g of silver before sewing even begins.
Some very good information in there! Here’s a more or less direct answer to my question in the op:
According to Anna Nørgård, from the Viking Ship museum in Roskilde, a wool 61 square metre sail, woven in a twill with 8 threads in warp and 5 threads in weft, would take c. 4,148 hours to spin and weave. The preparation of the yarn, warping, and set-up would add another 830 hours. Altogether, it would take her c. 5,000 hours, or 416 days to make such a sail if she would work twelve hours a day (Nørgård 2016). However, if weaving in a tabby the spinning and weaving would only take c. 3,477 hours, excluding the 830 hours needed for preparation of the fibres, warping and set-up.
But this is only a small fraction of the textiles needed, because the 33 Vikings crewing the ship need clothes, and in the North Sea, quite a lot of them:
Apart from the clothes they wore, it is likely that each crewmember brought at least one extra set of clothes on a journey. Based on archaeological analyses of textiles in combination with experimental archaeology, it has been estimated that each crewmember had a minimum of clothes representing more than 6.5 kg of raw materials, or 30.5 square metres of fabric, which would have taken 3,343 hours to spin and weave (Table 2). Furthermore, well-made nautical clothing, possible of leather, and sleeping covers would have been necessary for survival. If all crewmembers would have brought the same amount of clothes and outfits, this equated to 215 kg of raw material, requiring more than 11,000 [sic] spinning and weaving hours (Table 3).
(There’s a 0 missing in the last sentence of this paragraph, it should be 33*3343 ≈ 110,000 spinning and weaving hours; Table 3 has the correct number.)
This was also striking:
The need for raw material was still substantial; c. 331 kg of raw material equates to wool from 331 sheep. According to modern calculations these sheep would need 33.1 hectares of well-fertilised pasture (10 sheep/hectare (Bender Jørgensen 2012; Fag undated). Even if the Viking Age sheep were half the size of modern sheep, and only used half the pasture, more than 16.5 hectares were needed (20 sheep/hectare).
This fits kinda nicely with one of the conclusions from Bret Devereaux’s series on textiles, which led me to this question. With minimum comfort meaning one new full set of (Roman) clothes per year, Devereaux concludes (emphasis his):
Using the average of Aldrete and Fischer’s figures (erring a little high to account for Fischer’s lack of preparation time) we might figure something like 2,683 hours to produce our 220,000cm² minimum requirements. Our upper ‘comfort’ level might be three times this or 8,049 hours. […] Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). […] 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
Another way to put this, I guess, is that one woman working her hardest can keep herself and one other person comfortably clothed. Or, it takes half a year for one woman to comfortably clothe one person for a whole year. That makes a lot of sense, if you think about it: fibre and textile work is overwhelmingly done by women and overwhelmingly what women do in these societies, and women are half of all people.
With 7.35 hour working days it takes ≈ 680 working days to make the sail from before. So even at half a woman-year of labour per sailor, clothing the crew of 33 is substantially more work than making the sail. But actually these Vikings are bringing ≈ 450 woman-days of clothes each, so it’s an even bigger difference. That’s almost 2.5 times more than the comfortably clothed Roman; Devereaux’s estimate is 66 m² for comfort for a Roman family of six, so 11 m² per person, less than the 30 m² per Viking in Andersson Strand by the same factor.
I mean, obviously the Vikings need to be dressed much more heavily travelling the North Sea than someone farming near the Mediterranean does. But with the estimates in the previous paragraph, if Mediterranean sailors dress roughly like people on land, clothing the crew dominates rigging the ship in terms of textile work.
This does make me wonder what minimum/comfortable standards of clothing looked like in Scandinavia compared to in the Mediterranean… in the colder climate it’s going to take more to stay warm, it’s as simple as that.
I think someone commented on Devereaux series on making iron that behind every Roman legionary there were a dozen woodcutters fuelling the furnaces and forges that make his sword. I guess the upshot of all this is that behind every Viking raider there are three women keeping him warm and dry.
(Hmm. I’d still want to know how much woodworking labour goes into the ship. Andersson Strand doesn’t say anything about ropes for rigging either. But man, pre-industrial textile production SUCKS, the crew’s clothes probably come out the vast majority anyway.)
Ah, this NYT article makes references to the idea I mentioned earlier, that time to make sails is the main limit on manufacturing
In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.
Tracking down that claim leads me to this 2012 article on the introduction of sails to Scandinavia, which I think must be the thing I read way back then (it’s behind a login wall so I’ve rehosted it here)
Their number includes the time spent to weave the cloth as well, they estimate 20 hours to weave one square meter of sailcloth putting the number at 50 000 work years to spin and weave all 1 million square meters of the 11th century fleet.
Experiments indicate that a good spinner can produce 30- 50 m yarn per hour using spindle and distaff. For a wool sail of 90 square metres, that would mean 4.800 hours of spinning – two and a half modern working years.2 As regards weaving on the warp-weighted loom commonly used in the Viking Age, weaver Anna Nørgaard inserts on average 25 wefts per hour. It takes 20 hours to weave one metre of sailcloth, and she estimates that it would take almost 3.200 hours to make the 157 metres needed for such as sail. The total consumption of time for spinning and weaving is 8.000 hours or four and a half modern working years. This does not include the time needed for harvesting the wool, or finishing processes such as fulling (Nørgård 1999, 8). Still, it would make the one million square metres of the Viking fleet represent some 50.000 years of presumably women’s labour.
This one is really good, detailed tables on resource estimates including land usage, time, and materials for sails as well as bedding and clothing.
Feel free to reblog from the source and ignore this addition but I just wanted to add to this for people who truly do not get it:
Society tries to trick fat people into thinking their lives will get better when they’re skinny because “you’ll feel better skinny because your body is healthier” and shit like “you’ll act more confident and people respond better to confidence.”
This is to absolve themselves, on a personal level, of fatphobia. It is to say FAT PEOPLE make their own lives harder and skinny, midsize, even other fat people do not make it worse. The fatphobia is made up, not real. Not systemic. Not a constant in interpersonal relationships.
This is a lie.
I lost about ~40% of my body weight. Some of the kindest, least judgmental, socially aware, anti-discrimination people almost immediately started treating me better. I could even just MENTION that I was trying to lose weight, that I had only lost 1 pound, 5 pounds, 10 pounds (while still being “obese” by arbitrary medical standards) and people would treat me better.
Again, these are people who never, ever used fatphobic language. Who never shamed me out loud for being 214 pounds. Who I thought loved me to the best of their ability.
And it made me realize… everyone is fatphobic until they actively unlearn fatphobia.
If you think you aren’t fatphobic, I assure you, you are. And I think you need to mentally check yourself when you are interacting with fat people.
Are you withholding affection? Are you avoiding touching them when you’d touch someone else? Do you immediately try to avoid certain activities with them? Are you PUSHING activities onto them that you think will make them less fat? Do you avoid clothes shopping with them and going to stores with clothes for fat people? Do you avoid gifting them clothes because you don’t want to ever talk about sizes with them?
What do you avoid talking about with fat friends?
Do you complain about your own weight, “feeling fat?”
Do you push YOUR insecurities onto your fat friends?
Do you avoid being seen with them?
What are you excluding fat people in your life from?
Do you have internalized biases? Do you quietly think to yourself that they’re eating too much, that they’re lazy or selfish? Do you assume they’re unhealthy? Do you blame them for what they’re going through?
Do you make it clear you’re willing to listen when they want to talk about this?
What do you do to make sure the fat people in your life know you love them AS IS?
judygemstone
time for my favorite olympic tradition: mary carillo's on-air breakdown about badminton from 2004
She had no right being this funny
Was it a mental collapse on national TV?
Maybe.
It was also art.
Two things can be true at once.
Matthew Hodson: “ 20 years ago, 2 years after the arrival of combination therapy that effectively treated #HIV, the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s LGBT newspaper ran ‘No Obits’ as its headline. It was the first edition not to report an AIDS death in almost 15 years.”
Y'all need to appreciate that this was practically fucking *yesterday*.
as of today: june 1, 2023, that headline is 2 ½ months shy of being old enough to rent a car
for everyone bad at math, like me lol: the original print date was August 13th, 1998
How wikipedia browsing actually works
This is just what being ADHD is like
(here she is btw)
if you vote please also reblog!
[I.D: A pregnant tabby cat, laying peacefully under some furniture. End I.D]
Okay, this is super preliminary, but since we've been talking about zoo accessibility I wanted to launch a project I've been planning for a couple months.
One of the hardest things about visiting zoological facilities when disabled is the lack of knowledge ahead of time, right? Often the information on the zoo's website about accessibility doesn't contain everything folk need to know to plan a visit. I think we can probably help fix that, even if it's with just crowd-sourced knowledge!
This is a google spreadsheet for recording accessibility information for various zoos. It is super unfinished right now, FYI. That's partially because I need to fill in more of it from my own experiences, and partially because there are things I didn't note or experience - which I'd love for y'all to chime in about.
Categories for the spreadsheet so far include rentable assistance options, service dog information, accessible bathroom locations, mobility, vision, auditory and sensory issues (or accommodations), food allergy options, and general notes. I'm also including the information each zoo website provides, and guest assistance phone numbers, so all the information is in one place.
To add to this crowd-sourced zoo accessibility resource:
- Send an ask to the blog, or comment on the appropriate cel on the spreadsheet (if the facility you want to comment on is already listed).
- Provide the name of the zoo/aquarium/sanctuary and the approximate date you visited.
- Tell me your experiences / information, and what categories they belong in.
- Feel free to submit photos, if that's useful info! I'm going to see if I can find a way to host them and link in the spreadsheet.
I'll take information as it's submitted and integrate it into the sheet. If the zoo you've visited isn't on the list yet, I still want to add it! This resource is going to stay US-based, however. (I just don't have the capacity to manage an international one).
Obviously, I can't personally verify everything people submit, so this is very much a resource and not a definitive guide. Date stamps are crucial important for keeping track of what's recent and what might have been updated since someone visited.
Let's make zoo, aquarium, and sanctuary visits more accessible for everyone!
this is superior humor
I have some to add:
M O R E
I hope you enjoy
Independent bookstores around the country have a particularly clever lifeline, one perfectly suited to the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. The strange part? It came into being just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and before the bookstores started closing up shop wondering if they’d reopen at all.
The lifeline in question is called Bookshop.
In simple terms, it’s a super clean, user-friendly online bookstore whose raison d’être is supporting independent bookstores — not simply with exposure or resources (though that’s certainly a factor), but with cold hard cash…
:0
From their Choose a Bookstore tab
sometimes I randomly think about the time a girl posted in this girls only Facebook group I’m in telling everyone how she broke up with her boyfriend and he lied saying that he lost the spare key she gave him, only to then break into her apartment when she wasn’t home and steal the cat they’d adopted while they were together, but then he denied having done this and she didn’t really have proof that he took the cat since he wouldn’t let her come into his place and look for it. And then another girl saw this post and knew her ex-boyfriend, and she was like “girl. I used to hook up with your mans back in xxxx and I still have his number. If you want, I’ll hit him up and get him to invite me back to his place and see if your cat’s there.” And the OP was like “bet.”
So this woman hit up homie dog, asked him out for drinks, went home with him, slept with him, and then woke up in the middle of the night and TOOK THE CAT. Like she had only said that she would confirm if the cat was there but then she took it upon herself to steal this woman’s cat back. Like she full on Trojan horsed this man and then hit up homegirl like “I got the goods. Where you wanna meet.” And then the two of them posted a photo of them together with the cat to the group.
And I just think women supporting women is so beautiful.
wizard boys and sophie are banned. you are only allowed to have ghibli gender envy from this pre-approved list effective immediately
1. the ohmu
2. magic jumping lamp
3. boar god .
4. dunkleosteus
5. cat bus
6. turnip head (NOT in human form)
Any further additions must be approved by the committee.
why does this have 305 citations? is this normal
the bug’s really good btw
what is going On here.