the knitting will continue until morale improves

Two fishermen knit their winter woolies in Ramsgate, Kent, England, 1940s - Visual Studies Workshop/Getty Images

It is my birthday 🥰🥰🥰 Here are pics of a little bat I crocheted for my partner

just saw a fanfic on ao3 have a dedication for chatgpt... that section is meant for your horny perverted mutual who proofread your work, you violated sacred law and you will be torn apart and laid bare btw

anyways, if you feel the need to use ai to do your work for you, consider this: get a new hobby because this one isn't for you

Consider this. Not everyone has that time, or energy. Again, I just don’t understand this whole thing of “effort is important”

if it were, capitalism wouldn’t work.

not to point out the obvious but capitalism doesn’t work or people would have the time and energy to sit down and put effort and even enjoy their hobbies?

ai gets trained on real people’s effort and most of these companies are stealing content that was posted online, for you to just sit there enter a shitty prompt and bam, you get a picture of a big titty girl with 8 fingers or a story that is made up of cliches and patterns.

answer me this what do you get out of doing nothing to achieve a mediocre result from ai when the joy of creating comes from the act of figuring it out and doing it yourself, honing your skills?

“Not everyone has the time or energy to” ok that’s a you problem my favorite author posted a 30k word chapter after their house burned down and then got the bubonic plague. ur just not built for it

the joy of fanfic is squirreling time on the commute or in the office or in meetings or in the back of the shop when no one is looking. If you haven't had to frantically lob your work out of sight of a colleague or stranger, you haven't lived.

i'm going to repeat something from a tweet i saw on twitter:

if you couldn't be bothered to write, i can't be bothered to read it.

The joy is in the effort! The pleasure is in watching your tinkering and hammering slowly become a shape! That's why games get boring quickly when you cheat your way through them!

If you don't have the time/energy/skill to write fanfic yourself, then you find a friend who does have those things and you get them so infected with your ideas that they write it for you the way god intended

knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

two things i’m noticing in the notes:

1. every artist/crafter/cook agreeing that influencers in their communities also pull shit like this

2. ppl shouting out their fav old lady tutorials and being like “i would die for u diane”

everyone in the notes was being super lovely and dropping their fav tutorials/crafters, so i made a list of some of them (sorry if i missed any!):

Joanne’s web (knitting and crochet)

Knitting with Suzanne Bryan (knitting)

EliZZa (German knitting community)

Jane Loures (cooking)

Happy Berry Crochet (crochet)

Sue Ripsch (chainmaille jewelry)

SeaLemonDIY (book binding)

FourKeysBookArts (book binding)

sheilasknittingtipsandtricks

VeryPinkKnits (several recs for this!)

Mick Grewcock (bow making)

Mrs Nadelspiel (knitting)

Winwick Mums Knit n Natter (knitting Facebook group)

Cutsey Crafts (embroidery)

Twinsday (sewing)

Creative Grandma (crochet)

Das Bookbinding (bookbinding)

Yoyomax12 (baking)

Sharon B (doll repainting)

Nimbleneedles (knitting)

Chasing Sunraee (crochet)

Heindselman’s Knit & Chasing Sunraee (crochet)

Heindselman’s Knit & Gifts (America’s oldest knitshop)

Ivor Sorefingers (guitar)

Elly Everyday (overnight sourdough recipe)

K3n Slowstitch (stitching)

Miss Nancy/Nancy Zieman (PBS knitting episodes for free on youtube)

Roxanne Richardson (knitting)

Imamu Room Husbento (bento box making)

Nerdforge (bookbinding)

Jess Huff (amigurumi)

Nerdy Knitting (knitting)

Gayle Francis (crochet)

Bag-o-day Crochet (crochet)

Sewing with Nancy (sewing)

Felts by Philippa (felting)

Sowoolly (knitting)

Nadelspiel (knitting)

Lacefromireland (lace)

Bill Souza (yarn crafts for left handed folks)

and my personal fav that I just had to look up:

Glendalf, who made a tutorial for fixing a prius battery.

@basaltbutch

Don't mind if I save a couple of these

For those that are going to miss the eclipse on Monday, I have created a simulation of what the eclipse will look like along the path of totality

How wikipedia browsing actually works

This is just what being ADHD is like

Anyway that’s why you wear wool and a life jacket babeeeyyyy

The important thing about wool is that it continues to keep you warm even when it’s soaking wet.

Other natural fibers don’t do this. In fact, quite the opposite. Campers and boaters are usually familiar with the phrase, “cotton kills.” If you’re wet in cotton or linen, your clothes actually sap heat from your body.

If you sink in a lake in late October like I did today, staying warm is important. I was rescued long before I would’ve actually died, but cold makes your muscles seize up, which isn’t good if you have to swim to land.

Which brings me around to life jackets. If the water’s cold enough, you may only have five-ten minutes until your muscles seize (today I probably had 40-60, more than enough time to get to land if I hadn’t been picked up), and you’ll drown.

In a life jacket, even in extremely cold water, you can float semi-conscious for perhaps another 30 minutes or so before you actually freeze to death, which is usually when someone rescues you.

What’s more, you probably know that moving around on land warms you up. Jumping jacks, jogging in place, etc.

In water, moving actually makes you colder. You need to stay still curled up in a ball, which you can only do in a life jacket.

In wool AND life jacket, you’re warm, and your head’s above water, which is pretty much your only and entire goal.

If you’re allergic to wool, synthetics are available specifically for this purpose. I know I always say natural fibers are the way to go, but when it comes to safety, wear what protects you!

Yep! A really simple “experiment” I learned as a kid and now use in my own courses is sticking your hand in ice water. Compare moving it around in the water to curling it up in a fist. The contrast is stark!

To increase your survival time in on cold water, you want to curl up! If you’re with others, you want to huddle!

Again, both are only possible when wearing a life jacket!

I know a lot of people are reblogging this for writing reference, but I like to believe that 7,000 people on this site were actually continually living in fear about this specific situation and that when the time comes, I’ve prepared them with what they need to know to survive.

Writing reference for me, but hopefully helps others.

this headline is so fucking horrible why is it whenever indigenous people are murdered everyone avoids saying they were murdered

it’s so important to show solidarity with indigenous people right now and remember that this was a hate crime. rising hearts is an indigenous run organization and they’re asking everyone who can to braid their hair on monday regardless of if you’re native american or not

“A young scientist who worked in the jungles of Thailand has been awarded a national prize for his invention of a $2 paper microscope that can be taken on field expeditions.

If a scientist wants to study something at the microscopic level, they need a microscope, which if they are deep in the Amazon Rainforest presents a serious problem.

Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash saw in his team’s $50,000 microscope a serious contradiction. As well as being bulky and ridiculously challenging to transport to remote locations, it needed training from skilled technicians to know how to use it. It also had to stay well out of the weather and other environmental impacts.

So he invented a portable one. Costing $1.75, the Foldscope has a 140x zoom, which is a small enough field to see a malaria parasite inside a cell…

“I want to bring science into everyone’s hands, make it more personal,” Prakash told CNN. “We have decoupled everyday life from the process of science.”

The ultimate in schoolhouse science, Prakash’s invention has sold 1.6 million units, mostly to schools in America, but serious scientists are also using it—like Dr. Kirti Nitnaware in India who works on the isolation and characterization of bioactive metabolites in cyanobacteria.

She used the Foldscope last year to isolate a new species of cyanobacteria. For this and other reasons, Prakash received the 2022 Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), parent company of the scientific journal, Science.

“The Golden Goose Award reminds us that potential discoveries could be hidden in every corner and illustrates the benefits of investing in basic research to propel innovation,” said Sudip S. Parikh, chief executive officer at AAAS.” -via Good News Network, 9/20/22

“Costing $1.75, the Foldscope has a 140x zoom, which is a small enough field to see a malaria parasite inside a cell.” The implications of this sentence alone are huge.

This news is a bit older, but it’s still super relevant for the ways that it will massively expand science and research capabilities around the world - especially for citizen science and in developing countries.

And this guy has also gone on to design another revolutionary kind of microscope that could change how we detect disease:

Paywall-free link

“Rapid diagnostic tests can quickly check whether someone has malaria, but they don’t count the number of parasites. That figure is important: It reveals the severity of an infection and informs treatment choices. To count parasites, you need trained technicians and good microscopes. “There’s incredible talent, but it’s limited by their tools,” Prakash says. “I would meet health-care workers who would save their salary for a year to buy a fancier microscope.”

So Prakash and his colleague Hongquan Li built a fancier microscope—a high-speed, malaria-detecting device that they’ve called Octopi. It can automatically scan entire blood-smeared slides for malaria parasites, using a neural network trained on more than 20,000 existing images. Octopi works off a phone charger. It analyzes slides at speeds that are 120 times faster than traditional microscopy. Weighing fewer than seven pounds, it’s portable. And at a do-it-yourself cost of $250 to $500, it’s cheaper than many basic microscopes or other automated slide-analyzing devices.

Prakash has spent his career building extremely cheap medical devices that can be used in some of the poorest parts of the world. Besides the Foldscope, he developed a $10 skin patch that can detect parasitic worms. And he developed a 20-cent, hand-powered centrifuge that can spin medical samples at up to 125,000 revolutions per minute, achieving what costly, bulky, and expensive machines can do using little more than paper, string, and tape.”

-via The Atlantic, August 22, 2019

Baybayin: The Lost Filipino Script (Part 1)

The Baybayin as we know it today is an ancient Philippine system of writing, a set of 17 characters or letters that had spread throughout the Philippine archipelago in the sixteenth century. The graphic contours of the Baybayin are distinguished by smoothly flowing curvilinear strokes that convey both suppleness and strength.

Take this to heart: never ever ever ever call Baybayin “Alibata”. This name was invented by Paul Versoza who erroneously thought that Baybayin came from Arabic and thus named it Alibata from ‘Alif-bata,’ the first letters of the Arabic script. Recent studies strongly suggests that Baybayin may have come from Sanskrit, the ancient Indian script, brought to the Philippine shores by Indian traders.

Where did the name Baybayin come from? The word ‘baybay’ in ancient Tagalog means ‘to spell’ or in modern Filipino, ‘syllable.’ As early as 900 AD, there are tidbits of evidences that the ancients in our islands had a sophisticated way of writing. As to why it quickly disappeared comes from the fact that we were never a print culture like China and Korea, that used paper and built large libraries of scrolls to preserve their history, their memory. Another factor is the effective colonization of Spain by the forcing of the houses of ‘natives’ to be gathered around a town-square called ‘reducciones’ close to the church and the alcaldes for the close supervision of the Spanish authorities.

Baybayin as a Syllabary

Baybayin is a syllabary, meaning unlike commonly used scripts today like the Roman Alphabet, each letter represents a complete syllable, not a phoneme which is a sound that a single letter possesses. The Roman alphabet (the one we use today) is a phonetic alphabet, with each letter having its own phoneme like the letter ‘k’ which has the sound ‘ck’. The sounds of each letter of Baybayin are just V (Vowel), and CV (Consonant and Vowel) with with our unique CV letter ‘nga’. The dilemma lies with the current Filipino language we use which has V, VC, and CVC, that is why these variations cannot be represented in the original Baybayin in the strictest sense.

Babayin’s Disappearing Consonants

A weird practice in Baybayin which completely eludes linguistic historians till today was the fact that whenever the sequence CVC occurs in one syllable, the last C (consonant) would be dropped. However, if the document is read, ancient Filipinos would seem to know the consonant that was dropped and would suddenly reappear in their reading. Imagine reading the Filipino word “bignay” (an endemic Filipino cherry). In Baybayin it would be written as “bi-na”. But when a precolonial Filipino reads it, the ‘g’ and the ‘y’ mysteriously reappears. It may have been no different from the Chinese script which entails understanding the context-clues of the whole sentence to guess the missing consonants. This is harder than doing the ‘txt msg’ which we frequently do by dropping all the vowels to save space for our text.

Certain Spaniards like Fray Francisco Lopez saw this as a ‘deficiency’ and suggested an additional kudlit or diacritic “+” to be written below the Baybayin letters to make it phonemic. These diacritic makes Baybayin usable in Modern Filipino language today. But what happened to this innovation when it was first introduced?

This is where we see the pride of the ancient Filipinos in their own way of writing:

“The experts of the time were consulted, we read in the Tagalog orthography, about this new invention with the request that they adopt and use it in writing for the convenience of everybody. But after highly praising it and expressing their thanks, they decided that it cannot be introduced into their writing system because it was against the intrinsic nature and character given the Tagalog language by God and it would be equivalent to destroying in one stroke the whole syntax, prosody and orthography of their language.” (Pedro Andres de Castro, 1776).

Baybayin through the Eyes of the Conquistadors

When the Spaniards arrived, they were shocked to find that almost all Filipinos could read and write in their own way. Ancient Philippines, to be frank, had a high sense of literacy. Read as Spanish chroniclers give us a rare glimpse of Baybayin through the people:

“So accustomed are all these islanders to writing and reading that there is scarcely a man, and much less a woman, who cannot read and write in the letters proper to the island of Manila.” – Pedro Chirino (1604)

“Throughout the islands the natives write very well using [their letters]… All the natives, women as well as men, write in this language, and there are very few who do not write well and correctly.” –Antonio de Morga (1609)

“They [the Visayans] have their letters and characters like those of the Malays, from whom they learned them.” – Miguel Lopez de Legazpi (1567)

“We will end this chapter with the characters of these natives, or, better said, those that have been in use for a few years in these parts, an art which was communicated to them from the Tagalogs, and the latter learned it from the Borneans who came from the great island of Borneo to Manila, with whom they have considerable traffic… . From these Borneans the Tagalogs learned their characters, and from them the Visayans, so they call them Moro characters or letters because the Moros taught them … they learned their letters, which many use today, and the women much more than the men, which they write and read more readily than the latter.” – Francisco Ignacio Alcina (1668)

“They have certain characters which serve them as letters with which they write whatever they wish. They are of a very different shape from any others we have known until now. The women commonly know how to write with them, and when they write, it is on some tablets made of the bamboos which they have in those islands, on the bark. In using such tablet, which is four fingers wide, they do not write with ink, but with some scribers with which they cut the surface and bark of the bamboo, and make the letters.” – Boxer Codex (1590)

An even more surprising discovery was made by William Henry Scott: “A few years later [after the Spaniards sent a Baybayin letter to Borneo] Tagalog conspirators hoping to expel their Spanish invaders communicated among themselves and their Bornean allies in [Baybayin] writing, and even sent a letter to Japan. Naturally none of this correspondence has survived, but the Spanish translation of a Bikolano letter En Letras Tagala, which contains a scathing condemnation of Spanish misconduct, is preserved in Franciscan archives in Madrid.”

Baybayin’s End

What happened to our script?

Paul Morrow, a Canadian Baybayin expert, wrote this painful fact: “The sad fact is that most forms of indigenous art in the Philippines were abandoned wherever the Spanish influence was strong and only exist today in the regions that were out of reach of the Spanish empire.” Another Baybayin expert, Hector Santos, would say that our illiteracy was caused by the growing demands of our conquerors when it came to taxes, rendering us with no time to pass our way of life to our children. He noted: “Could it be that the disappearance of the Tagalog script marked that point in history when the Filipinos’ cultural will was finally broken? Are we now forever fragmented as a nation grasping for empty symbols when there are so many real things that we should be proud of?”

Indeed it is a sad plight, a historical circumstance that we are now realizing. Baybayin is a lost script, preserved to us thanks to a lot of Spanish documents and 16th-17th century dictionaries. But Baybayin is making a comeback.

With the resurgence of Baybayin in the 21st century, I will leave that to my next post. :)

Baybayin Part 2

still thinking about "decolonising" missionary work.

the way you decolonise missionary work is by not doing missionary work

the way you decolonise missionaries is like this:

"but it's part of my religion to evangelise"

🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆 infinite jaguar attack

"but we need to go to Ethiopia (one of the oldest christian countries in the world) to make them the right kind of christian!"

🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆

jaguars

"but..."

🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆 jaguars

"but missionaries bring schools and hospitals to poor countries" that's called humanitarian aid and trying to use humanitarian aid to get religious converts is actually SUPER fucked! hope this helps 🐆🐆🐆