Die Schere ist kein Scheibenwischer

Acrylics on solid wood board. Roughly 20cm x 60cm, 2cm thick wood. Designed, sawed out and painted by yours truly.

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There are no levels in knitting, there are no exams to pass or goals to achieve before you can continue.

The Handsome Chris is a perfect beginner project. It's all one color, it's knit flat, you get to learn lots of new techniques all at once, but most of all it's engaging and you're working towards a goal you really like.

I would have impaled myself on my needles if I'd been forced to complete a Sophie scarf before I got to advance to something more "challenging" like a washcloth, or God forbid a ribbed hat.

My very first project was a self-drafted 11-strand intarsia double sided cable scarf, because I didn't know I wasn't allowed and that was what I wanted to make.

This attitude of mystifying certain fabrics as advanced really twists my stitches. I cannot do simple stockinette colorwork to save my life, but I can 3-color brioche without looking.

There are no levels in knitting.

like, I know the feeling well, I myself don't think drawing is hard. you put a pencil to paper, and you are doing it. but my experience in teaching drawing does tell me that it's hard for people to get over the learned self-reflection of "am I doing it right?", it's hard to have an idea, put it onto paper and then analyze WHY the drawing on paper isn't the way you envizioned it, and it is hard to then plan accordingly and adjust your drawing based on that knowledge.

The whole problem is that these skils (knitting, crocheting, drawing, etc) have been developped over centuries if not millenia. These skills have width and depth.

it's true that there's no preset levels of "learn this first, and then learn that", but there's definitely skills that are more superficial, and ones that require a deeper settled understanding of the tools you are working with, so that you can actually use the thinking part of your brain to process what you are doing and how that affects the larger craft as a whole.

“At least he died free” apparently also applies to whales that strand now.

These people will tout whales as these incredibly intelligent beings and then think that they’re stupid enough to strand while being healthy.

Sure, some healthy whales and dolphins strand due to storm surges, hunting techniques and misadventure. Or for social reasons, like mass strandings of pilot whales.

But it’s far more likely that a whale that strands is a whale that was either too weak to swim against the currents pushing them ashore or they chose to swim into shallow water. Because it is much safer to be in shallow, calmer waters than in the deep sea.

People have this idea of the deep ocean as this idyllic place. The sun beats down mercilessly out there - if you’re too weak to swim you’re too weak to dive. Depending on the ocean, it can be extremely choppy and hard to keep afloat in if you have no energy.

It’s also a very vulnerable place to be as a sick animal. Easy prey for pelagic sharks and killer whales. They might even start getting picked at by seabirds if they’re logging at the surface.

Not to mention this was a lone juvenile humpback without a social group, competition pod or nursery pod to keep him safe in numbers.

The ocean is beautiful but it is indifferent to you. It doesn’t care if you live or die, it won’t protect you if you’re out there.

Timmy didn’t care about the human concept of “freedom”. We can only assume that he was sick and dying and looking for a peaceful place to die. His vocalisations and rapid rasping exhales showed us he was stressed and sick. But the people who painted themselves as his saviours decided it meant he was happy. Because they were Saving him.

Because apparently he was too stupid to get himself stranded but somehow intelligent enough to be able to know what humans were and that their hands all over him and their loud and noisy barge and their cheers and laughter were good actually!

And I have no doubt that these people will keep telling themselves they did the Right Thing and that the experts and scientists were still wrong.

There’s this bizarre crossover between anti cap speak happening here. This idea that a stranded whale is “captive” and that they must be “freed.”

As if the whale themselves didn’t move to shallow waters to die. Or as if it wasn’t simply the natural ocean currents that pushed the weakened whale ashore.

Timmy had remnants of a gill net in her mouth, which would have made it very difficult for her to feed. The only forces that are to blame here are the dumping of fishing gear in our oceans that entangle and kill marine life.

The same force of nature that killed Timmy is ultimately the same that brought her to that sandbar. Yet these detractors of marine mammal science speak as if she was forced to strand by some intangible means.

That they had to “free” Timmy by dragging her back out into the open ocean, quite literally, because she didn’t know what was best for her. And the heroic humans saved her from what she had likely chosen to do.

Tavernkeepers, Tavern Talk Stories: Dreamwalker is now out on all platforms! ✨