Keep Calm and Groove

A toast with dandelion wine!🥂

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:

Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.

Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?

every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.

terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.

 [Because we know more than you think.]

Here is the funny thing: At this point we have more information about Toya’s entire childhood, than we have about Hawks’. So let’s be faster than Horikoshi thinks is good for us, and reconstruct it accuratly.

There are three big things to “assume” before I start. First: Dabi is not a Nomu. Second: Dabi is not an undercover hero. (I saw “theories” about this and I won’t waste time by listing up all the reasons this is impossible.)

Third: The “Hawks’s parent was a thief”-theory is true. (Their names are written in the same kanji; There was no need for Ending to mention this name in ch. 250, other than plot-setup; It fits chronologically in both Hawks’ and Endeavor’s history etc.)

So, Let’s tell the story of Todoroki Toya. - For this I elaborated an extreme professional graph:

Looking at the dates and following the canon rhythm of all Todoroki siblings being around 3 years apart, Dabi is currently 26.

In the picture of his shrine, he wears a traditional middle-school uniform, which means he “died” between age 14 and 16. This perfectly fits in line with the information we got from Fuyumi, which told us that Toya died, shortly after Rei left the house respectively after Shoto got his scar. (Meaning, we talk about a time-frame in which the Todoroki-children were left ‘alone’ with Endeavor.)

His scars are neat and symmetrical, which means Dabi’s scars are self-inflicted. The placing of Dabi’s facial scars perfectly matches the locations of Endeavors flame-beard, which means he tried to copy Endeavor’s looks.

We know that Endeavor stopped training Toya to focus on Shoto. (Because Toya was allowed to play with his siblings, while Shoto was dragged away. Toya had to be 12 - 14 when we saw him playing soccer with them in ch. 39.) So Toya lived at home before he died.

[We know the hard trainings-program of the HPSC would not allow many breaks to play with siblings at home. We know from Natsuo (in ch. 250) that Toya often (!) played with him. The HPSC would also have informations about a unforgettable quirk like his, if they had any conection with his “death”.]

This hilariously sad, because it means: Toyas death was not a trainings-incident inflicted by Endeavor nor was it inflicted by the HPSC!

Toya Todoroki died because of something he did himself. (Every clue points towards this and I can’t believe how many people get this wrong when theorizing.)

But this is where the thrill starts: Because we also know that Toya cared for his siblings…

And to tell you my own bloody theory: Toya wanted to proof that he wasn’t a “failure” and he wanted to protect tiny Shoto from the painful training. So he tried to impress Endeavor by teaching himself how to use fire like him - and he forced himself to handle the pain. But the flames where too hot and Toya set a huge fire. Seriously injured, in fear, shame and rage he run away from home. Since the fire had destroyed the surroundings, his family thought his body got incinerated within and declared him dead.

And Dabi was born.

…So is there anything more to think ab-

“Yeah Sherlock- How the fuck does Dabi know Hawks’ real name?”, a rhetorical (and a little rude) reader might ask.

Great question! To be honest, I’m just as confused as Hawks. (But before you throw your tomatoes, let’s see if we can change that:)

First of all, I’ll assume Dabi didn’t pay black hats to hack into the database of the Hero Public Safety Commision, because firstly, this would make his persona completly non-essential to this knowledge - and secondly, they litterally have “Safety” in their name - So I’ll fucking hope their firewalls are…  hot.

From a writing point of view it makes way more sense that Hawks shared his name with Toya Todoroki in person.

So let’s look at Hawks’ life in the graph. Hawks was born in Fukuoka, which is a five-hour-ride away from the Todoroki’s mansion in Mustafu. Tiny Hawks spent his first years of life in a dumpster. (”Ah, pardon, Sir. My bad, I failed to see the floor, because of the trash piles NEXT TO YOUR FUCKING CHIL-!”)

However there are two possibilitys:

1.: Keigo and Toya met in the HPSC in Mustafu.

If this is true, it probably happened in the (2 - 4 year) timeframe after Hawks got scouted and before Shoto got his “perfect” quirk, where Endeavor found himself still enraged about Toya’s “wasted-potential”. So forced Toya to train with the “government-kid” (…which was a prodigy in contrast to his own “failure of a son”.)

In this scenario, Hawks broke the rule of “never using his real name again” and told Toya during the match. Back then Hawks was only around 6 - 8 years old, so its plausible for him not to remember Toya’s face well. … But on the other Hand: If Toya had ever participated in the HPSC-training, the Comission would have informations about him and his unforgetable quirk. Its unlikely that they wouldn’t recognize Dabi’s describtion in their data base.]

2.: Keigo and Toya met in Kyushu in autumn.

We know Endeavor captured “Takami”, before Keigo was recruited and forbidden to use his name.

We know it happened in autumn and we can assume Keigo was younger than seven years. There are many possibilitys- Maybe the thief Takami exploited Keigo’s quirk for criminal activitys and that is the reason Keigo was so skilled at a young age. Maybe Toya was with his father that day…

- But at this point it feels like throwing stones in the dark: Eventually we will hit something, but it might be fucking bruised.

Or what do you think? Did I make a horrible mistake somewhere up there?

“Say cheeeese”

No art this week. 

Been a while since I done a Dabi edit, so here’s some more, hope you like it!

First it should be noted, you will almost definitely need to have terraforming unlocked to be able to do this, since I don’t think there’s a high probability of finding this layout naturally occurring on the map!

If you have any questions feel free to send an ask! 

I made Shimeji Hawks ! You can get him from https://gumroad.com/l/IkIGX

 He runs only on Windows btw