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Here and Queer

@janoha

Beyond pathetic.

This is just the world's most expensive midlife crisis.

And no one will see a problem when, by the end of it, Musk still has more money than 50% of the US population combined. Nothing will be done. Hell just to back to making explosive cars, explosive rockets and to fighting laws that would save lives among that 50% mentioned above.

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flashback to when MLK Jr said the worst group in the US for black rights wasn't the lawmakers passing Jim Crow laws or the KKK but the white moderate. That it was the white moderate who was forcing the country to find a middle ground between civil rights and genocide which allowed the continued systematic mistreatment of the African American community

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So apparently another whole ass animated scooby doo movie was canceled, this time featuring Krypto the Superdog, but it leaked onto 4chan and was uploaded onto the internet archive

And you didn't even mention the name of it, let alone link to it? Scooby Doo and Krypto, too! For shame!

If you ever want to see some of the stupidest opinions imaginable, just look at the supporters to herbivorize or eliminate predators

I firmly believe this is an offshoot of Revelations-based Christianity: The Lion shall lie down with the Lamb and if they don’t we’ll rip their goddamned teeth out.

I don’t get it, either. Let animals animal.

I don't think Reddit gets enough credit for how hilariously buckwild the subreddit system is.

Like it makes sense on the surface. The subreddits are all topic-focused independent message boards, each with their own moderator teams, and you can curate which ones show up on your feed. Subscribe to the ones that suit your interests and bam you're good.

Except the question of WHO is in charge of every subreddit is an objectively hilarious system. Anyone can create a subreddit. Under any name. Who holds the keys to the kingdom is strictly determined by whoever managed to camp the name first. It's like tumblr URL wars except if whoever managed to grab the URL "homestuck" got to be defacto in charge of the entire homestuck fandom.

Or at least they get to be in charge until they anger the populace and get ousted, Julius Caesar style, by the team of fellow moderators they brought aboard, or until they voluntarily sign the deed over because they don't want to deal with 600,000 angry homestuck fans every single day, or they get mutinied against and all the REAL homestuck fans flock over to "curatedhomestuck" or "homestuckcirclejerk" or "homestuckcirclejerkcirclejerk".

You get seemingly benign subreddits about things like baking or kittens that have absolutely batshit rules because the whole thing is being run by a paranoid and power-hungry 23-year-old from Arkansas. You get inter-subreddit beef where the mods of r/cutekittensdoingcutethings will ban you from their subreddit because you have a history of posting in r/genshinimpact. You get subreddits that fall to ruin and spam because the moderators in charge vanished into the night without passing power along to anyone else.

Redditors love to complain about Reddit moderators and this surprises me not at all because there is simply no possible way that the Reddit moderation system could be a smooth-running machine when its defining underlying mechanic is First Come First Serve. And that's hilarious to me. That's hilarious. Political system where the King is chosen from among the populace of people who comment "first" on Youtube videos. You can't beat that.

So the James Webb telescope took a picture of a infant star!!

The small glowing blob is protostar L1527! Caught in the glow of its sunrise-like creation the baby is only 100,00 years old! It can take up to 50 million years for a star to reach the size of our sun. This infant has a long time to go.

Located 460 light years away this is one hell of a childhood photo!

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I hate the trope of "I refuse to hit women!! [Gets decked]" cause it's boring but I do like the trope of someone in an RPG going "hey I don't wanna hit a kid that's kinda fucked up" and the kid just obliterates them

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"i refuse to hit a woman!" = Sexist, overdone, does nothing to actually empower the woman or make the guy seem nice

"I refuse to hit a kid" = valid, even funnier when the kid whips absolutely ass in one go

The ONLY exception to this is Mob Psycho where it's a kid vs woman fight, in which the kid doesn't want to hit a woman because he has been told that only scumbags hit women. And then the lady pauses the fight to explain this is a different situation and he's not bad for defending himself.

Then he proceeds to whip ass in one go.

Just the other day I was chatting with an older woman about this exact thing. She's retired so she enjoys going on almost-daily walks around her neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods. Well she told me that it was really weird that in the newer constructions where the younger families live, EVERYONE has their blinds closed all the time. In fact she can tell a younger family lives in a house based on the simple fact of whether or not their blinds are closed in the middle of a sunny day. It's to the point where she can't even tell if they're even HOME and available for a visit to welcome them to the neighborhood!

When she said that, I realized that I do that too when I live in a more publicly visible apartment. I told her that I think it's because of the internet. Younger people feel like we're constantly being watched, observed, and JUDGED for merely existing. So when we're home, we just want to be alone, unbothered, and unobserved because it's the one place we can control that. She was very surprised to hear that I felt like that and she was VERY concerned for us young folk (and to be honest after talking with her I became pretty concerned too...)

People from her generation will have their blinds open all day, hang out on their front porch, and randomly visit/enjoy random visits from neighbors and strangers. If a stranger knocks on my door it's scary and if they want to stay and chat? It's a huge inconvenience and it feels super awkward and weird and I'm stuck wondering why exactly they're talking to me, when just a few decades ago welcoming someone new to the neighborhood was just what you did! In fact to not do so was rude!

It made me really worried that as the Panopticon sinks its teeth deeper into our psyches, we are losing the very essence of what makes us human and got us this far as a species: community. I find that being on the internet for hours a day tends to almost trick my brain into thinking "I've been social all day, my social need is full" when in reality I've only talked to one, maybe two people I know from my real life all day, and only for short bursts, not REAL conversation.

I find it hard to have the energy to invite friends to hang out, and when I want to I feel like I'm a big inconvenience for asking them to take a break from their busy lives for me (not that they would ever say that's the case, but it's this nagging feeling internally). I feel like while we used to be a series of large islands of local community, our islands splintered apart and started drifting away from each other. Now your island is just you, your immediate family, and maybe a couple close friends. Those living physically closest to you feel like they're miles away and unreachable, to the point where you might as well not even bother.

I guess I just have one question for you: Do you know the names of your next door neighbors?

That makes me think about how the rate of paranoia of being watched must be so much higher now than it used to be and must only be increasing, which is very concerning,,

Did you guys know the “Sickos” artist made a Sicko thats a WGA screenwriter on strike (said comic artist is a The Onion satirist comic artist and his name is Stan Kelly)

And honestly? What a mood. Haha YES indeed.

me when i meet the person who created webp files

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It was google by the way, they thought it would be such a good file type it would replace the need for all other image files, that's why anything they own or partner with tries to force it on us though no art programs can even work with it.

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Transcript:

I’m about to expose the men. Whenever you ask a man’s height, he’ll add an inch. So if he’s 6 foot, he’ll say he’s 6’1 and if he’s 6’2, he’ll say he’s 6’3.

Not me though. I subtract 4. I say I’m 5’9. Especially when there’s other men in the room. And then I just watch them panic. Not only have you exposed his lie, but now he thinks he’s 5’3.

What I do is not a crime, but it should be.

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:

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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,

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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.

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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.

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(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).