The Fake Dana

itsscarab:

Fae, right? What does anybody sensible tell you about them?

- They’re beautiful in so many ways -  but also just look innately WEIRD from your perspective, and also they will happily wear the skins of your fellows because they think they’re beautiful.

- They love you, but sometimes they do terrible, terrible things to you. Some are hideously cruel for seemingly no reason, punishing their “property” for the smallest insult. But others are incredibly kind and would never dream of doing such things. 

- It depends on the Fae. Some of them will be endlessly kind and gentle, but even many of them feel a sense that you Belong to them. When they praise your cleverness, deep down they’ll never really believe you’re all that smart, because you can’t do all the things they can do. 

- They are long lived. Like, crazy long lived. They seem immortal by comparison to us - perhaps they are, but since most of your species die before them, it’ s impossible for you to know for sure.

- They live in lavish homes, with lavish food that never seems to end. They have this thing about making everything beautiful. Their senses are different to yours, which is the only way you can explain their obsession with certain things that they consider beautiful (I refer you to the aforementioned “skins of your fellows” comment. But since most of them love you and you love them back, you will tolerate such idiosyncrasies. 

So what I’m saying is…

Are we absolutely CERTAIN that we aren’t just Fae from the perspective of pets? 

I love my husband but he needs to figure out how his feet work

This is the fifth toe he’s broken in four years, he needs to never take off his protective slippers while he’s at home

florenceofalabia:

deafchildcrossing:

theopinionatedartist:

skeletree:

hungrylikethewolfie:

inkdot:

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

This post is one of those things that I will reblog every time it appears on my dash.  This is so important, and no one ever tells you about it.

I almost didn’t read this but then I did and I’m really glad that I did.

Super important

Tldr: The reason clothes never “looked right on you” is because models and celebrities always had their clothes tailored to fit them perfectly.

Being able to make my own clothes did wonders for my body image. It feels like a superpower.

srslyimwriting:

jocarthage:

howllor:

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)

@kingvoracious

Adding to this, the first industry to use computer programs was the textile industry, with women designing, running, testing, and iterating on programs. Women were the first professional programmers.

STEM history is fascinating and wonderful but I’m also just trying to decide which obnoxious escort mission from Assassin’s Creed I want to curl up under on a cold winter’s night.

rosalarian:

kateordie:

kingsmanlock:

Concept: a website like Netflix but for professionally filmed broadway/west end musicals

I would pay ANYTHING

I have literally spent my whole life wanting this.

stonebutchsnooze:

Does nobody see the irony in automatically being suspicious of Jewish people for being ~connected to Israel~ (and therefore supposedly for the oppression of Palestinians… a lot of jumping there lol) as someone from the United States, arguably the most violent country in the world, both against populations elsewhere and to the indigenous populations here? Not that the ppl who do this don’t care about the actions of the US, but I mean, it’s not like you fucking ban the rainbow US flag at Chicago dyke march, you ban the rainbow Star of David. It’s anti Semitic. There’s no way around it. You see someone from a marginalized population and ascribe tons and tons of negativity to them without any other info than their identity, you’re a bigot.

jewish-privilege:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

jewish-mccoy:

1. The Chicago Dyke March included everyone–except Jews
   
2. This was because they made people feel “unsafe”
3. People were claiming “pinkwashing”
4. THEY USED THE STAR OF DAVID AS A COMPARISON TO THE SWASTIKA 
5. “Well done Israel–Hitler would be proud” 
   

I hope you all are really proud of yourselves.

I’m so mad, I can’t even fully put it into words. One of the marchers they ejected was a Queer Iranian Jewish women:

“I was here as a proud Jew in all of my identities,” [Eleanor] Shoshany-Anderson asserted. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional. I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I fell that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

The Magen David on a pride flag isn’t anymore triggering than any other religious symbol on a pride flag.

I used to live in Chicago and I know for a fact that the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ has not only participated in Dyke March in the past, but that their Pastor has done events on their behalf at the Broadway Youth Center, as one of my former colleagues was in the congregation. Lots of people from all walks of life have been persecuted under Christianity—is that not triggering?

I’ve seen the Crescent on pride flags before for LGBTQ Muslims. Why isn’t that considered triggering to Kurds because it’s on the Turkish flag? Or triggering to Jews whose families were expelled from places like Algeria and Tunisia, which also have the Crescent on their national flags?

Maybe—just maybe—it’s nothing to do with protecting people and everything to do with hating Jews.

Update from Chicagoist:

Update: Iliana Figueroa, a Dyke March Collective member, spoke to Chicagoist Sunday afternoon about the mounting criticisms on social media that Dyke March is facing in the wake of the march for the decision to ask the three people to leave. She says the Dyke March Collective is not anti-Semitic, and the decision reflected the members’ desire to support pro-Palestinian participants who believed the flags symbolized Zionism.

“Yesterday during the rally we saw three individuals carrying Israeli flags super imposed on rainbow flags. Some folks say they are Jewish Pride flags. But as a Collective we are very much pro-Palestine, and when we see these flags we know a lot of folks who are under attack by Israel see the visuals of the flag as a threat, so we don’t want anything in the [Dyke March] space that can inadvertently or advertently express Zionism,” she said. “So we asked the folks to please leave. We told them people in the space were feeling threatened.”

Figueroa also said she gave the people her cell phone number and offered to discuss the decision with them more later. She added that they didn’t leave immediately, but stayed at the Dyke March rally for “a few hours.”

Figueroa added that the collective will release a statement on the incident after it finishes crafting one, and that members have asked pro-Palestinian organizations and others to release statements of solidarity with Dyke March as well. In the meantime, the collective is facing accusations of anti-semitism on social media.

Okay what I’m getting here is that some non-Jewish, non-Palestinians saw a Star of David and immediately thought “ISRAEL,” decided that the best thing to do was kick them out of the parade preemptively because a religious symbol on a pride rainbow may trigger Palestinians, but they didn’t care at all how kicking out LGBT Jewish people out of a pride parade would trigger Jewish people. Oh but they aren’t antisemitic. Oh and also they’re asking for pro-Palestinian organizations to release statements of solidarity, but not Jewish organizations (whether pro-Palestine or not).

So in other words, you can be Jewish and LGBT, but only if you aren’t outwardly and publicly Jewish because you might “inadvertently…express Zionism.” (Dollars to donuts they wouldn’t be able to accurately express what Zionism is or would be befuddled that you can be a Zionist and also pro-Palestinian.)

Got it. They don’t care about Jewish people. Cool.