Eey's Tumblr Thing

a good mango smoothie can save your life a little

Negative, ghost rider. A good mango smoothie will make my throat close a little (a lot, akshully).

i love small joys so much!!!! yes i love my coffee in my favorite mug!!! i love the sun spilling in the window!!! i love the wind on my face!!! i love my blanket over my lap!!! i love the clouds in the sky!!!! i am seeking joy in every moment!!!!

Around here (and maybe where you are too) when someone does or says something super fucking dumb, the common saying is, "Well at least they're pretty."

My family has whittled that down to, "Aww, you're so pretty!" (But said in a totally sarcastically sympathetic way, so the person is AWARE of their Stupid Moment TM.)

We live east of Dallas in Northeast Texas and are currently on Day 2 of being iced in. Schools and businesses are closed and hockey players from like... Canada and Nebraska are looking at newscasts of our roads the same way I assume Tony Hawk looks at empty swimming pools.

Ice. Ice everywhere.

We're doing stuff around the house with the TV on in the background and suddenly Lucifer shouts across the house, "Uh, HEY. Apparently we're under a winter storm watch! Did we know this?"

Y'all, when I tell you this boy is pretty, I mean I'm currently looking up the entry forms for the Mr. Universe pageant.

So. Fucking. PRETTY.

Sorry to all the morosexuals on my list. My little himbo is currently taken.

Oh my lordT. This boy. SO FUCKING PRETTY!

We're watching Discovery Channel or HGTV or whatever and there's a preview for an upcoming show (Naked and Afraid type) and the voice over is talking about this country where the indigenous people "recently practiced cannibalism."

I hear Lucifer stumble to a stop on his way through the house and then, "Why the hell are they practicing that??"

Me: *dies*

why does this have 32k notes? it’s just a picture of a knife in a ranch bottle, is there some unspoken joke that 32 thousand people share? what is going on here, i dont get it. it’s just a fucking picture of a knife in a ranch bottle. is there some spiritual connection people have to this picture? is there some ominous and mystical reasoning that this has 32 thousand notes? do people reblog this because it makes them look like some indie blogger? or is there just something funny to this? someone please explain

no one tell him

Scheduling this to post on March 15 because it needs to happen.

The ides of March have come

Beware the ides of March.

If you can’t find a place on your blog for Patrick Stewart in a bathtub dressed like a lobster, then your blog probably doesn’t deserve such majesty anyway.

It has returned to my dash and I cannot fight the compulsion to reblog…

the patrick lobster appears only once in a thousand years, reblog for good luck

…Luck is one thing. But just getting to look at this lovely man is another. :)

What does 007’s doorbell sounds like?

Dong. Ding Dong

jeff i will rip you apart with my teeth.

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.

I'm gonna keep reblogging this until it works

bro oh my god … vanilla extract

vanilla extract smells wonderful but tastes horrific on its own. but mixed with sugar and flour and cream it tastes just like it smells. we need the support of others to reach our full potential

no man is an island everyone is vanilla extract

A lot of adulthood is shouting “AUGH MY LAUNDRY” hours after you put it in the washer/dryer and running to go fetch it

oh shit my laundry

reblog to save someone’s laundry

For some reason Tumblr always errors out when I try to comment on a post.

Hey, Wolfie, we need to talk... *ominous*

(No, for real, we haven't talked in a million internet years! Your kids are probably driving by now.)

It's still so strange to me how apparently taboo it is to like a post on someone's Instagram from a month ago when there are posts still circulating on Tumblr from 1550 BCE

If he didn't want it circulating in 2022 he should have sold better copper

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.

listen. aging into your thirties rocks. yes your joints get a little creaky. yes you can’t sleep in a pretzel on the floor anymore after a concert or a convention. and you lose some friends. but the thing is that you sort out who your real friends are and you sort out who you really are. and you get to see your friends settling into careers they like, and adopt new dogs and cats, and you find a job you can stand, and get really good at arts and crafts, and maybe that book you loved as a kid gets a movie deal and it doesn’t suck, and you learn to like new food and bake your own bread, and you realize that the great portfolio of self harm scars you all used to curate are going white with age and not updated, and half your friends are a different gender now and so much happier and maybe you are too, and you know who you are, and that it’s a journey and not a revelation. it’s a direction you’re headed, and you’re enjoying the trip.

reaching your 30′s rocks. and i’m hearing good things about what comes next, too.

i am looking into your eyes, i am holding your hand. i absolutely promise.

if you can just live long enough, your soul will build your body into a home. you will live there and you will find a way to be at peace. it’s worth the time and it’s worth the work. i promise.

love the "oh. oh." moment in fics as much as the next person but can i also advocate for "stay?" reaching out to grasp for their wrist. the surprise, the anticipation, the acceptance... a confession disguised as a request.

so fucking good