BAMF Books

Heres a not so friendly reminder, as an lgbt metis person, i dont give a single fuck what your blog is themed or if this is too painful for you to look at. Reblog this post. Reblog this post with the sources of the 751 children who were found.

Your compliance and silence as well as the compliance and silence of your ancestors is what allowed these schools to open and kill first nations children. The children of MY people.

Dont follow me if you cant reblog this post or the one with sources to your political blog or your most popular blog. Add trigger warnings if you must but if your political blog is only focused on the harms you personally face like being lgbt then you need to see some bigger pictures and stop being afraid of angering your racist mutural or actually saying some shit about racism. If you can reblog some antifa graphics or add blm to your bio to be a surface level ally, you can reblog some sources on the genocide first nations people faced and still face today.

They were CHILDREN.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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:

vegans:

Commercial agriculture: *develops certain GMOs and pesticides that kill keystone bug species, which disrupts the environment and kills many different animals up the food chain as a result*

Vegans:

Commercial agriculture: *destroys local ecosystems by ripping out native species and replacing them with massive farms of exotic monocultures, resulting in the deaths and endangerment of millions of species*

Vegans:

Inuit people: *live in an environment where growing plant based food is extremely difficult, and where grocery prices are inflated past affordability so they hunt a few large animals every year which feed their entire community*

Orange juice in my home town is 25$ minimum! We buy bread for special occasions! Something Southern people have on their dinner table 24/7 is something I would see only a few times a year!

Not to mention, we use AS MUCH OF THE ANIMAL AS POSSIBLE! Bones become plates, and silverware (or in some cases jewlery), fur and blubber becomes homes and clothing and beds. Teeth become combs. And we eat EVERYTHING! I've had brains, and eyeballs, and intestines. Anything that can be eaten, will be eaten. We DONT throw ANYTHING away. And if we have too much (which is rare but has happened before) we leave it for the suffering wild life!

Polar bears will come and gouge themselves on a whale we don't finish, wolves will feast on some left over seal tails, foxes will devour caribou carcases!

Even now, we are curbing our hunting ideas. We DONT hunt as many whales as we used too, we used to hunt maybe five a year, but now we hunt one to three! Seals are also taken care of but use only hunting males, and older males at that! Caribou was my family's main meal, and lemmings when they would come around.

If you are vegan, cool! More power too you! But you probably live in a place that can grow more than lichen, and grass. You live in an industrialized place, where everyone has a car, and house.

So they took the 10 pounds of explosives and their toy truck to a poor Black neighborhood, got reporters there, stuck the explosives inside, and set them off intentionally instead of just defusing them like they did with the other 4,990 pounds of fireworks.

For some reason, likely because something went wrong with their truck which I bet cost the city a shit ton of money, the containment completely failed and the explosion destroyed cars, homes, and injured 17-19 people (I’ve seen different reports with different numbers), a couple of whom were in critical condition but it sounds like everyone survived.

The LAPD then had the audacity to tweet that they didn’t know what caused the explosion when it was them who caused the explosion, intentionally, and we know because they called the media so that everybody could see them do it.

okay, do you have a friend who:

has green eyes (2% of the world’s population)

has red hair (1-2% of the world’s population)

regularly watches anime (~3.5% of the world’s population)

is vegan (.5-3% of the world’s population)

has a phd (1.1% of the world’s population that has been to university)

knows how to code (.5% of the world’s population)

can dunk a basketball on a regulation sized hoop (1% of the world population)

lives in california (.5% of the world’s population)

the chances are pretty damn good you know someone in an above group. i’ll admit, the numbers aren’t perfect. but just think about it. what are the odds you know someone who is ace?

cross posted from my insta but here i am ranting about the tuskens again

(tags via @withdrawnheart)

ok yes, this is such an important point???

like, these people literally invited the them onto their lands, let them stay in and film inside their family homes, and lost business and were economically impacted due to filming, but still extended the most gracious hospitality imaginable - only to be treated like trash and depicted in such a disgusting way

adding this too because it’s another good point

every single time i see jokes or memes making fun of the Tuskens or making jokes that rely on portraying them as savages or barbarians, it just feels like another slap to the face.

like that type of casual humor, when it’s at the expense of an entire cultural group, just isn’t funny and feeds in to a very long history of oppression, racism, and colonialism

Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.

Free music that you can KEEP on FREEGAL

I work in the largest library system in my state (17 branches in total).

I use it not only for ebooks, but movies as well.

Other FREE resources to check with your library for are:

Freegal Music (download and keep music, including current music)

Hoopla Digital (borrow ebooks, e-audiobooks, e-graphic novels, stream movies)

Kanopy (stream movies; also available on Roku!)

Axis360 (usually hot or just released ebooks)

If you don’t have a library card…

GET ONE!

If someone says libraries are a thing of the past…

BOOP THEM IN THE NOSE WITH YOUR KINDLE!

Don’t discount libraries as “quiet” places. 

THEY ARE ALIVE!!!

THEY ARE LOUD!!!

The article is ‘A Defense of Abortion’ by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Essential reading!

I married a dude who threatened to sink the houseboat of a person who was DDoSing his server. My spouse first asked me out after watching me get in a fight with a meth dealer.

There’s a reason I call us “bastards.”

“I’m bored, let’s figure out a prank,” and

“I’m bored, let’s go trespassing,” and

“I’m bored, let’s go blow something up,” and

“I’m bored, let’s freak out hotel security,” and

You know what’s fun to do at a con? See who can get kicked out of the Catholic Singles meet-up the fastest.

You know what’s fun to do at a con? Change the hotel ATM greeting message to “Welcome to the Danger Zone.”

You know what’s fun to do at a con? Snooping traffic from attendees and projecting their info onto the Wall of Sheep.

ATMs that you see at hotels and convenience stores and so on that aren’t, like, specifically affiliated with a bank - well those are typically set up along the same lines as vending machines. A company places the ATM and splits the fee with the store/hotel or pays rent to put the ATM there and collects all the fees.

About 30% of these ATMs use the factory default password, which will not get you access to customer information or money inside the machine, but which WILL allow you to access the settings for things like the home screen or the info screen that describes the fee cost of the machine. You can change these settings from the terminal and if you have a USB drive with some small, 2-color PNGs on them you may even be able to add some images from that folder.

Well, I managed to talk my way into the prom with no ticket or student ID but the rest of the plan was thwarted by the fact that it’s hard to hijack a live mariachi band.

In some ways that was fine, because we’re assholes too, and at the bars and whatever it was fun to roughhouse and yell with them.

But then I get into an elevator with these drunk dart throwers and one of them is REALLY aggro and talking about how he hates these fucking nerds, let’s go scare the shit out of them, pencilneck blah blah blah and he hits the button for my floor and I’m like OKAY well so this is probably not great but then the elevator doors open and Large Bastard is there in the middle of the hallway with a bunch of hackers who are all comparing the highcap mags they picked up from the gun store while Large Bastard is shouting “Does this grenade make my ass look fat?” while wearing like. Probably nine or so grenades on a belt and the drunk dart dude is just STARING and another guy hits “close doors” and they ride back down to the lobby and I get out with them and take the stairs back up and now “does this grenade make my ass look fat” is one of the things Large Bastard and I say to each other when we’re planning on doing something that is probably stupid but also probably funny.

Also don’t use the internet provided by the hotel or the conference at a hacker con; the best advice is to actually not use the internet, your cellphone, any bluetooth devices, or tech in general at a hacker con unless it’s something you’re using for a contest that you don’t mind seeing destroyed.