Damn I wanted so badly to try tablet weaving for pride but I have no orange thread.
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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oozey mess
trying on a metaphor
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occasionally subtle

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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
AnasAbdin

#extradirty
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almost home
Acquired Stardust
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

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Mike Driver
art blog(derogatory)
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@behaviornerdwithahat
Damn I wanted so badly to try tablet weaving for pride but I have no orange thread.

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dead serious normalize having an average boring ass life where you have enough to meet your needs we do not need to be remarkable we just need to be alive
Shout out to the autistic who’s abilities have regressed as they’ve gotten older.
“You didn’t used to be like this when you were a kid.” I know please don’t remind me
"This never bothered you when you were a kid."
Yes it did. I just let it slide because I was taught that I'm "too sensitive" anytime something bothered me. But now I'm finally standing up for myself.
"You never struggled with this when you were a kid."
Yes I did. I just burned myself out in order to do it so I wouldn't be punished. But now I'm accepting myself enough to not force myself to do what I was never meant to do.
"You didn't have these problems when you were younger."
Yes, I did. I just spent my child/teen years with structured institutions like school while not having to worry about whether I had a roof over my head or food to eat and spent my early adult years using up every bit of adrenaline I will ever have to ignore the fact that I've been chronically burnt out my whole life.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields
At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely
technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.
Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.
Free courses on Coursera.
Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison
For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.
When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.
@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-
And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.
Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,
Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu
Dame Archer kicks McDougal’s Scots ass there in the rain at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire - August 11, 2018 - Photo by Douglas Herring
Oh NO.
me, a sheltered noblewoman: Pray who is that brave knight? Dame Archer:*turns around* me: gasp! *instantly in love*
Alicia Archer
my bi heart………
I’VE NEVER SEEN THE ADDED PICS
*dies*
Oh shit.
GAY KNIGHTS
Fellas I’m real gay
@0hheytherebigbadwolf HELP!!
Every June this inevitably winds up back on my dash. And I appreciate that. And I will reblog it. Every time.
Hey, it’s @archerinventive, and the Pride Knights!

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THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.
So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
...One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.
People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.
They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.
In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.
And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.
And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--
Like these silly, silly shoes:
(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)
--or going in a different direction entirely.
So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.
Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?
There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)
How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?
So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.
You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.
So the steps to making leather are as follows:
(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)
Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)
The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.
In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.
‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.
It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.
The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)
Don't forget dyeing, which had to be re-done and was itself a whole fucking profession.
Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.
Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.
Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.
Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.
Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the ship, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.
Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.
Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.
Shear
Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.
Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.
Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.
This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!
5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabric in existence:
6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.
7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.
Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.
8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.
Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pines of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!
Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.
Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:
This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:
This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!
Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.
Of course, places outside Europe (which is my speciality and has been my whole life) have their own fabric and decoration techniques, from the wax resist of batik to the special tie-dye from Japan called Shibori, to ikat, to the quilling of many North American Indigenous people (not to mention wampum beads, hand-carved of shells!). Everyone likes to decorate themselves and their clothing!
@elodieunderglass, this seems right up your alley, at least in the latter parts.
Thank you so much!
I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue
everything about this is gold. Er, platinum.
I'm pretty sure that any two sufficiently good-looking gen Z kids could make it on TikTok by making videos that are 100% word-for-word re-enactments of Monty Python skits, and the whole audience who has never heard of the flying circus in their lives would lose it over such fresh and original material.
don't give them any ideas
somebody's gotta
as an example: posting this without context makes it looks like a tiktok already - just really low quality for some reason
So many fiber arts have difficulty levels that are less about your level of skill than your ability to tolerate extreme multi-step processes.
Its also probably one of the reasons why any fiber art is a gateway drug into every other fiber art. I could do [other fiber art], I basically do half of those steps already for [current fiber art]. If I’m already doing 18 steps to make this sweater, is it really that many more steps if I spin my own wool? If I had sheep, I could skip the step of sourcing my material.

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Luke Skywalker put away his targeting computer to destroy the Death Star so I don't need AI to help me write an email.
One thing that is so cool about many fiber arts is how much they stand the test of time. Like a sewing machine when they were first invented were a little over a hundred bucks (aka the equivalent of thousands now) and you can get decent ones now for the same price. And the old one were meant to last. They were meant to be used and made to be repairable. For generations. As long as you have someone who knows how to keep it running, it could last hundreds of years. Many were even built to fold into end tables of cabinets so they were useful even when they weren’t being used.
That goes doubly true for knitting needles, crochet hooks, spinning wheels, etc. You can still use them after generations. To make the same thing. A useable functional thing, like clothing. Or art. Or both in equal measure. I got a tatting shuttle second hand for $2 and enough thread to last me 40 years for another $30. And yet I can make lace so sturdy you can put it in the laundry over and over again. I will do it the same way my great grandmothers did and the same way my great grandchildren will. It makes me feel incredibly connected. And hopeful for what comes next.
Except for spinning wheels. Spinning wheels are very, very simple devices that we’ve been making for close to 1000 years. Simple enough that there is a guy out there making spinning wheels out of scrap lumber and giving the plans away for free but even 2nd hand spinning wheels are like $200 at the cheapest and probably half of those are missing bobbins. But drop spindles are about $10 and you can make them with basic household items if that is too expensive.
Some is better than none. Some is better than none. Some is better than none. Walking for three minutes, is better than nothing. Drinking a glass of water and eating a snack, is better than nothing. Wiping down the counter, is better than nothing. Small things are not nothing. Small things are not nothing. Small things are not nothing. You don’t have to achieve grand things if all you’re capable of right now is the smaller things. They are still achievements. Don’t do nothing just because you don’t think you’re capable of doing bigger things, just do something you’re capable of today. 
Today is the day we never use the Google search engine ever again. Duck Duck Go, Firefox, Ecosia - there are a lot of other choices. Start cutting cords and shift to AskJeeves. What? Ask.com closed up shop on May 1st, 2026? Heresy. Duck Duck Go it is.
People often say LOTR is a story about hope. (I'm reminded of it because someone said it in the notes of my Faramir post.) And that's true, but it's not the whole picture: LOTR is in large part a story about having to go on in the absence of hope.
Frodo has lost hope, as well as the ability to access any positive emotion, by Return. He is already losing it in Towers: he keeps going through duty and determination and of course Sam's constant help.
For most of the story, Sam is fueled by hope, which is why it's such a huge moment when he finally lets go of the hope of surviving and returning home, and focuses on making it to the Mountain. To speed their way and lighten the load, he throws his beloved pots and pans into a pit, accepting that he will never cook, or eat, again.
When Eowyn kills the Witch King, she's beyond hope and seeking for a glorious death in battle. It's possible that in addition to her love and loyalty for Théoden, she's strengthened by her hopelessness, the fear of the Nazgúl cannot touch someone who's already past despair.
Faramir is his father's son, he doesn't have any more hope of Gondor's victory or survival than Denethor does, he says as much to Frodo. What hope have we? It is long since we had any hope. ... We are a failing people, a springless autumn. He knows he's fighting a losing war and it's killing him. When he rejects the ring, he doesn't do it in the hope that his people can survive without it, he has good reason to believe they cannot. He acts correctly in the absence of hope.
Of course LOTR has a (mostly) happy ending, all the unlikely hopes come true, the characters who have lost hope gain what they didn't even hope for, and everyone is rewarded for their bravery and goodness, so on some level the message is that hope was justified. But the book never chastises characters who lost hope, it was completely reasonable of them to do so. Despair pushed Théoden and Denethor into inaction, pushed Saruman into collaboration, but the characters who despaired and held up under the weight of despair are Tolkien's real heroes.
(In an early draft of Return, Frodo and Sam receive honorary titles in Noldorin: Endurance beyond Hope and Hope Unquenchable, respectively. Then he cut it, probably because it was stating the themes of the entire book way too obviously, because this is what Tolkien cared about, really: enduring beyond hope. Without hope.)
Also, people who know more than me about the concept of estel, feel free to @ me.

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for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
I fucking hate it.
Something I have been thinking about a fair bit recently is how important it is to know how to talk to people with dementia, and how so many people don't actually have any real awareness of how to do that, so, off the top of my head, here are a few things that might help:
the way you frame your conversations is important! People with dementia are often, particularly at the earlier stages, very much aware that their memory is getting worse. This can make them very anxious, which isn't fun for anyone, least of all them. One of the most common things that people say to people with dementia is "do you remember ___?" as a way to try and prompt their memory. This feels helpful, but it's not. Because hey, in all likelihood, that person does not remember ___, and being confronted with this fact is not going to make them feel great. Remember that they literally have a degenerative brain disease; they're not going to suddenly regain their memories because you tested them. Instead, try talking about your own memories. Tell them what you remember. Tell it like a story. If they remember, then they can join in. If not, then hey, it's a nice story.
don't correct them if they say something wrong. Their version of reality is not going to be the same as yours. That's just a given. My grandma is often convinced that she's just on a very long holiday in a nice hotel, and that her dad is waiting outside in the car. I'm not going to tell her "uh, actually, you're in a care home and your dad died 50 years ago," because who's that going to help? Quite literally no-one. It'll just confuse her more, and she's already confused enough. Even if the person is saying something that's making them anxious - a common one is believing that people are stealing from them, or that someone is being unkind to them - then it's easier to try and distract them by trying to talk about something that you know makes them happy, rather than to outright tell them that they're wrong. Being consistently told that they're wrong can make them react defensively; they're not children, and they (usually) know it. It's just easier not to get into a confrontation.
get used to repetition. Don't get frustrated when you have the same conversation 25 times in two minutes. It's going to happen. For them, it's the first time you've had that conversation; they won't understand why you're angry at them for asking a question. It's completely normal to feel frustrated, but the onus is on you not to make it their problem. My grandma's short term memory is, charitably, about 3 seconds long. A conversation with her at this point is like rehearsing for a play; I know her lines, and I know mine. That's just how it is. She gets just as much joy out of telling me that she likes my cardigan for the 86th time as she did the first time she said it. People with dementia are not able to retain the information or the memory of that previous conversation; reminding them that you've already answered their question is just going to confuse and upset them.
don't take things personally. They might say things that are unkind. They might say completely inappropriate things. Again: their brain is deteriorating. It is a medical condition. They're not becoming bad people, or showing their 'true selves' to be evil and rage-fuelled. It's a combination of the fact that they're living in a perpetual state of confusion, which can lead to frustration and anger, and the fact that their ability to process and respond to information is affected by the dementia itself. If they say something cruel to you, you just have to take it on the chin and recognise it as a symptom of a disease that they're not able to control. Step out of the room for a moment if it gets too much. I've been fortunate in that my grandma has never experienced this symptom, but it's very common, and it's no reflection of you, or them.
don't treat them like children. My grandmother is 92 years old and she will look at you like you're the bane of her life if you try and tell her what to do, or use baby talk. Keep your sentences short and clear to avoid confusion, but don't ask them if they need you to clean their wittle fingies.
try and avoid open-ended questions, especially ones that involve memory recall, like "what did you do on the weekend?". My grandma was an absolute queen at making shit up when people asked her that, because she couldn't remember a damn thing, and she never liked to admit that she couldn't remember, because it made her stressed and anxious. "I picked up leaves" was her personal favourite, for some reason. I used to just tell her about my weekend instead, and sometimes she would joyfully tell me (completely falsely) that she also went to the shops, and that was much less stressful for her; she wasn't actively trying to come up with an answer to cover for her own lack of memory, and instead felt like she was part of the conversation on her own, equal terms.
most importantly: don't try and pull them back to reality. The best way I've learnt to communicate with anyone with dementia is to enter theirs instead. Sometimes, this is referred to as 'validation therapy'. It's about acknowledging that the reality of someone with dementia is as real to them as your reality is to you, and you're not going to be able to 'reorient' them to your version of reality, because they don't have the short term memory or ability to retain information that would enable that. Put simply: if my grandma asks when my uncle is going to come home, I gain nothing from (correctly) informing her that he's dead. This just upsets her, because every time she hears it, she's receiving the news of his death for the first time. That sends her into a spiral of grief and anxiety that remains even after the memory of his death has vanished again. Instead, I just tell her that he'll be home after lunch. She nods, accepts it, and we're both happy. My uncle is still dead, but in her world, he's going to come home soon. It's a way of having empathy for the person with dementia, and acknowledging that your reality, or objective 'truth', is not more important than their wellbeing.
Godspeed, and best of luck to anyone who needs this advice, because I truly wish that no-one did.
I had a sweet, elder woman at the hospital ER where I volunteer the other day, she had very bad dementia and was a wanderer. I basically took it upon myself to keep her corralled in her room to help out the nurses who were exasperated with keeping an eye on her. All of this advice is very good. I had to re-introduce myself every time I went into her room and explain very clearly that she needed an x-ray and to follow this nice young man who was going to help her.
The main takeaway from this interaction was that she was so happy, very content and willing to do anything I asked of her (for five minutes, which was about the length of her attention span), and so very nice. I never want to be in that situation but at least I know if I am, I won't know about it.