puuu

there was some fuckwad 15 year old at my high school that thought it would be a smart idea to show up with a nazi armband. my father defended him to me, saying, i might not agree with your ideas, but i'll defend to to the death your right to express them. many years later i would quote this to him featuring a pride parade, and he'd say it's different. years after that, he'd come back to this quote, telling me that proud boys deserve their chance to march. that if i wanted a safe pride parade, the proud boys deserve a safe (white) pride parade too.

he of course believes in the second amendment, despite the fact two of his children worked in colleges and both of us have had to go through the trauma of a gunman on campus. he says it's worth every dead grade school kid, you know, because if the democrats take away his right to a gun, they're fascists. he doesn't even own a gun, which is a fact that has probably saved my life.

he has been moving further right-wing the older he gets. i don't know why, all of his children are very left-wing. i think he spends too much time on youtube. he is a catholic deacon, by the way. technically i think he's supposed to abhor all violence.

ice has killed another human person. alex pretti was a human person.

there's video evidence of one of their "officers" clapping after. of one saying "this is just like call of duty, man. it's cool."

there's two things that are true at once right now. i firmly believe that the government is putting substantial, intentional pressure on our cities in order to incite violence from us - that doing so will allow the insurrection act, and will allow more government overreach. i believe this because they literally fucking wrote it down and said specifically they want it to happen. i also think i am about to sign up to learn how to use a fucking gun.

they wanted to find anything on him, but of course there was nothing. the immediate character assassination speaks volumes. there was never going to be an excuse, so an excuse needs to be fabricated. but you don't need to spin a narrative if you're innocent. as the cops have said to us: you have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide.

it is chilling. the things my father are seeing and the things that i am seeing - it is two different worlds. my father sees the government tell him alex brandished a gun! and that is enough evidence, despite the videos. i tell him: i watched a man die while eight men held him down and beat him. my father's response - the response of the government, of trump's allies, of all of them - amounts to "no you didn't. and if you did, he deserved it." the narcissist's prayer again.

a human person died, and what matters most to this government is denying accountability, shoring up their defenses, and further dehumanizing the "left". over and over i hear my father's voice, the same one that was so "anti government": if you comply, you won't be injured by us. i do not have to comply, though. i am a united states citizen. they do not have jurisdiction over me. (not that it matters. they've been given "absolute immunity.")

Despite this, however, Light novels with overly long titles have very rarely topped in the best sellers, as the books that sell still tend to sell the best are ones with more traditional short titles.

So of course this trend has no bled over into manga as well because if something bullshit insane marketing scheme is proven to have no real effect other than to confuse and frustrate its consumer you gotta spread that shit to EVERYTHING.

This Light novel is 196 pages long except it's literally just the title.

This is modern art.

fresh, clean no-terf version for reblogs!

out of the depths below

the Divine

God-Beasts

come right up to YOU

capable of crushing you without even noticing you

and ever so gently

so gently

roll back and forth around the dried leaf you're sitting on

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: