Scribbles & Drabbles

It also has a lot of different kinds of stitches you can do that make different densities of fabric.

I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.

It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.

The downside as a beginner is that undoing mistakes is more time consuming than with knitting or crochet. You’ve gotta like sew your mistakes out backwards. Disadvantages of making a really sturdy fabric I guess.

I like the feel of this bone needle though and don’t think I’ll be trying the wooden or metal ones.

Also I think I’m gonna have to get good at doing Russian joining if I decide to get good at nalbinding because I don’t have wool yarn and the ends won’t felt together if it’s not at least 50% wool. A small price to pay for using big bone needle though.

The owner of this particular plantation had it built by slaves for 3 years. Every brick was handmade. Over 120,000 bricks on 2,000+ acres of land (this place was huge.) The clay used for the bricks came from the Mississippi River. The majority of the slaves are buried under the Levees and water. Some are buried with their Masters. Not allowed to live with them but could be dead with them.

Before you enter the house, there’s a list of slaves who lived here including their age and how much they were purchased for. 124 total. Some slaves were worth as little as $25. As young as 5 years old.

On this particular plantation, the owner was big on punishment…he used noise making neck restraints. Imagine three 4lb balls around your neck with bells inside. Children were restrained by ankle locks that connected between their ankles.

This was a sugar cane plantation, one the worst practices to involve slaves because of its danger. A lot of slaves were decapitated, amputees and killed from the fields and machinery. A lot of kids lost their lives creating sugar. Speaking of children, a child stood in the living room and operated the fan with a string while guests ate dinner. As young as 3 years old.

Here’s what shook me even further: Before the Civil War, a lot of slave owners were going in debt and could not afford their properties and were not producing enough cotton and sugar to maintain their lifestyles. Slaves were used as HUMAN CREDIT CARDS. Slaves were a guaranteed line of credit. You could get HALF of your property’s value depending on how many healthy and able slaves you owned.

My people were human credit cards and lines of credit to BANKS. We were property. We were labeled as equipment and nothing more.

There is no such thing as a good slave owner. They owned my PEOPLE and used them as checks and balances. This cycle continues with prison and brutality. I do not want to hear shit about “Why can only Black people say this or that?” I don’t want to hear shit about “we’re all human.”

SOME of the enslaved names, ages, race and purchase price.

The living room.

Interior.

The dining room. That piece hanging above the table is ORIGINAL to the house. That’s the fan that a slave as young as 3 years old had to operate manually with a string.

The view from the balcony in the main hallway. This is how they looked over the slaves while they worked in the yard.

*sigh* Names of the enslaved that occupied the shacks. Children included. Their names are written inside one of the shacks. I’m not sure if there are other names inside other shacks because I could only handle 2. After I saw the punishment equipment, I left.

Slave Shacks. These are NOT the original shacks. These were built to imitate them.

Slaves for Sale Ads.

The landscape of Slavery throughout the United States in 1860. JUST 1860. Let that sink in.

Note: The last time the home was OWNED by a Louisiana citizen was 1972. This is her original bedroom, her lipstick is STILL on the dresser. This is why the house has been updated since slavery times because it was occupied up until 1972. Regardless, this used to be where house slaves slept.

#nothing is above critique but also so many ppl are dogshit at criticism so here we are

#nothing is above critique and that includes your critiques

Theoretically I was just supposed to list off the numbers.  Except. Very early I started parsing the figures and give my own analysis.  Apparently engineers and geophysicists got a bit freaked out by a ten year old going ‘It’s not that good, the flow’s really slow compared to last week, and there’s gas pockets really screwing up the flow in the east pipe judging by the pressure report.’

Dad still got that yelled at him at conferences: ‘This is the fucker who used child labour to do well analysis!’

‘Was it wrong?’

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

On 23 October last year (2024) the New York Times published an interview with former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji who worked on organising and gathering data for OpenAI until 2022 when he begun thinking about the morality of it. He eventually came to the conclusion that what OpenAI is doing blatantly violates copyright law and decided to leave the company altogether in August 2024.

After he came out with this accusation he was set to appear in court to testify against OpenAI’s data-gathering practices, something which had the potential of being a complete disaster for the company and the generative AI industry as a whole.

That was until 26 November, just days before he was due to appear in court, when he suddenly and mysteriously was found dead inside his own apartment. Investigators concluded that the death was self-inflicted, something which his family has disputed.

There was also “sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like someone hit him in the bathroom based on blood spots”, and his apartment showed signs of having been ransacked for evidence: “The pin drive is missing. His computer was messed up.”.

Overall it feels pretty clear-cut what happened, that is to say that OpenAI had him killed because he was a legitimate threat to their business, indicating that they are fully aware that the way they’re gathering data is completely illegal.

Sources:

Alys Davies, 14.12.2024, OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment. BBC News

Barney Davis, 16.1.2025, Suchir Balaji’s family demand outside investigation into OpenAI whistleblower’s death. The Independent