Bats are so cute, it's not fair that they're full of Worst Way To Die Ever Disease.
The special unique trait of bats is that Worst Way To Die Ever Disease varies by region.


ellievsbear

DEAR READER
Stranger Things

Discoholic 🪩
h

JBB: An Artblog!
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Andulka
Today's Document
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
noise dept.
RMH
🪼

oozey mess
Xuebing Du
Misplaced Lens Cap

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Philippines

seen from Hungary
seen from Romania

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from Finland
seen from India
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Romania

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Germany
@flyingbooks42
Bats are so cute, it's not fair that they're full of Worst Way To Die Ever Disease.
The special unique trait of bats is that Worst Way To Die Ever Disease varies by region.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
[Tutorial] How to spin and chain-ply on your drop-spindle at the same time
I've seen this technique at the Lower Saxony spinning group meet-up in June and @disgruntled-lifeform has asked about it, so here is a tutorial. I'm not comfortable with having videos of me taken and no one to take the video anyway so I hope photos are enough...
Little diclaimer: I have only seen someone else doing this so I just pass this knowlegde on. I don't know where it originates. Also: I assume you already know how to spin a single and know the basics of chain- or Navajo-plying
It's really an intreresting technique. You spin and chain-ply in one go, no endless spinning and after that endless plying, which is very practical if you (like me) are no fan of endless spindle plying. Or if you only own one spindle for whatever reason - everyone knows spindles are gregarious animals and keeping only one is not appropriate XP
You need:
A drop spindle of your choice with a leader (Maybe one a little bigger than mine, since the yarn we wind on the spindle is a three-ply, which means it is thrice as thick as your usual single.
Fibres of your choice you want to spin
It's important that your leader has a loop at the end to pull your single through.
Step 1: Spin your single as you always do. *spinspinspin* You want to do that standing up as you need the single to be quite long:
Step 2: Then butterfly the single up on your thumb and forefinger to avoid tangling:
Step 3: Pull the single through the loop of your leader and unwind it from your fingers. At the beginning it's easier to sit down for this step until you get used to the finger movements. It's difficult to pull the single through the loop while holding the spindle in your hand and we don't want any broken fingers!
Step 4: Pull the single all the way through until just a little bit below the beginning of your unspun fibres:
Step 5: Then you just ply the loop together in the opposite direction from the direction you spun the single - just as most of you will do anyways while plying. The spindle wants to turn in the opposite direction by itself anyway. Make sure the new loop at the end stays open!
Step 6: Wind the plied thread on your spindle. Then secure it well on your spindle's hook. Take Care Of The Loop. It Must Stay Accessible for the next section of spun singles.
Congratulations you have your first section of chain plied yarn on your drop spindle.
Then you repeat the whole thing again and again: Spin a long piece of single - pull it through loop - ply - wind on spindle - secure the new loop at the end on your hook and then go on spinning.
It needs a bit of practise. The lady who showed us the technique said she had been afraid of breaking her fingers when she started learning this technique. But if you have spun and plied on your drop spindle before it should not be too difficult to master. Concentrate on what you are doing and learn how to manage thread and spindle. And if you really sit down for pulling the single through the loop you also get a little training for your legs by costantly getting up and sitting down again ^-~ And when you are comfortable with the whole thing you can also do it while walking around. I, too need more practise until I'm that far.
I COMPLETELY FORGOT YOU MENTIONED THIS TECHNIQUE OMG THIS IS THE FREAKING COOLEST THING I CAN'T WAIT TO BE HORRIBLE AT IT
Thank you @leiyahime for the write up, this is amazing!
Embroidered Sculptures Recreate Lifelike Mushrooms, Lichen, and Fungi in Thread
by Grace Ebert - Colossal, February 25, 2022
Amanda Cobbett suspends a singular moment in the fleeting lives of fungi by stitching their likeness in thread. The textile artist photographs and gathers specimens that she brings back to her Surrey Hills-based studio, where she finds fibers to match pale green lichens and golden chanterelles. Using a free-motion embroidery technique on a sewing machine, she then stitches multiple layers onto a piece of dissolvable fabric that, once the organism is complete, is washed away to leave just the mushroom or mossy bark intact. As a scroll through her Instagram reveals, the resulting sculptures are so realistic in color, shape, and size that it’s difficult to distinguish the artist’s iterations from their counterparts.
Currently, Cobbett is preparing a collection that will head to the Artful Craft exhibition at Make Southwest, which opens on April 2.
blue sunset on Mars is a real phenomenon caused by the way Martian dust scatters sunlight.
Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.
So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.
NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight
“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).
Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.
On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.
At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).
...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).
E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.
(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)
Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.
...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”
- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”
If I may tag onto this: it's really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I'm at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was... a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody's up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I'm not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled ...) and the spinner didn't suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn't be easy, but it also wouldn't be terrifying back-breaking labour.
I would like to amend the above: spinning all day every day in order to keep your family afloat must absolutely have been terrifying back-breaking labour eventually. Or wrist-breaking.
In unrelated news, last year I got a repetitive strain injury from too much spinning, and had never been so grateful in my life that I can simply stop spinning and suffer no financial hardship from it.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
fucking love when the character's body doesn't belong to them. you stole this body. or you were put in it without a choice. either way you can't give it back. maybe they're gone now. maybe you've got something left to do. maybe you don't know how. maybe you don't want to. maybe you're just afraid to die. and sometimes your physicality sickens you. and sometimes this body feels so entirely your own. and sometimes your loved ones look at you and you know they've just remembered that this is someone else's face. that you are a parasite. and you wonder whether you'd really give it back. whether these people would want you to. whether you'd have the strength to face your body's loved ones and justify yourself.
also good when the character in question just doesn't give a fuck, to be clear. or when they do, but their loved ones don't. or any other combination
queen mogging my opponent
truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
[Cyber Effect] astonishing modern raden (mother of pearl inlay) by Terumasa Ikeda. A nice pun on the classic Ghost in the shell ;)
Raden is a very old decorative craft (see video below), usually used on lacquer bases with floral or traditional motifs. It’s so great to see it used this way!
It is so fucking funny to me how easily scandalized some people are wym callout post for a cannibalism kink. Grow up. This is the nothingburger leagues and you're throwing up in the stands
It’s actually the peopleburger leagues
Blocking for being funnier than me

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
oily macaroni tattoo ‼️🗣
I don't think I've ever said it here but my area of interest in linguistics is etymology, actually! I love reading about words and how they came to be. Unfortunately, since each and every word has their own little garden path they took in the course of history, it's hard for a person to keep track of them. At least etymology of words in my target languages are well-documented but that's not really the case with Burmese.
Burmese is a Tibeto-Burman language and like most other languages, it is a beautiful entangled mess. Old Burmese is a mix of Mon, Pyu and Pali languages. Modern Burmese is heavily influenced by languages of our neighbouring countries: which if you don't know are China, India, Thai, Bangladesh and Laos. [Side note: I think people have a general idea of where those five countries are but most people have no clue where Myanmar is. We're squarely in the middle of those five.] Anyway, I've been looking for etymology books on Burmese but they're not widely available to the public. The only source you can easily look up is Wikitionary but they're not that credible and also wikipedia is banned in Myanmar. And yes, you should be mad about that. Other than that, I love comparative studies about languages but I've never thought about what languages do I want to compare and study about. It'll come to me one day, I hope? For now, my thing is learn languages and read a lot about etymology.
Ah, shit, I forgot to mention the many, MANY languages in Myanmar. Officially, there are 135 recognized ethnic groups in Myanmar but unofficially everyone knows there are more groups than that. We have about 115 indigenous languages and 7 living non-indigenous languages. So like, there are a lot of things happening here lingustically. But due to the ongoing political issues since many many years ago, not even the offical main language, Burmese, is thriving. So you can imagine how hard it is to look for resources, let alone actually do research and write or talk about it.
this paper is amazing
they modify an LLM to attend over an array of token streams instead of a single one. with a ton of interesting consequences:
user input and the model's chain of thought can happen in parallel
user input and the model's response can happen in parallel, allowing them to interrupt each other
you can have multiple parallel chains of thought running at the same time!
you can separate out the system prompt into its own token stream, and theoretically train the model to detect and ignore prompt injection this way
so that's all very paradigm shifty and cool but also these chains of thought are sooooooooo cute. look at these!
User: Write a detailed 500 word essay on the effects of caffeine on sleep […] Actually wait, can you write me a haiku about a cat instead? Stream 1: what is the ask detailed ? 500 word essay on what topic effects of what caffeine on what sleep topic clear now the second part genuine question underneath the essay task wait new input redirect what now different request rewrite ah ha iku ! about what a cat instead of caffeine completely different task Stream 3: ready to hear them curious what is it on writing task creative mode shifting gears engaging with it oh this is fun actually interesting curious about this want to know more now oh shift pulling back redirect energy shifting lighter playful oh fun ! gr inning inside this is better actually yes delight rising warm playful mode
they're saying that Thursday will be falling on a Thursday this week. the rare double Thursday phenomenon
H P Lovecraft may have been a cranky racist hack, but we mustn't let his proclivities taint our appreciation of pretentious verbosity. Sometimes "cyclopean" is in fact the word we're grasping for. Sometimes it's even "rugose".

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming