Explicitly technical, but not technically "Explicit"

the martian is the story of one man stranded on mars with barely enough food and supplies to last him a calendar month, let alone the 14 that it inevitably takes to bring him home.

mark watney's rescue means millions of dollars in unplanned expenditures, cooperation between multiple nations that frankly have no stake in the life of one american astronaut, and risking the lives of 5 of his crew members. it is a story that makes you tackle the fundamental question of: "how much is one human life worth?"

the answer, the book (and its equally well-executed movie adaptation) offers, is everything.

they could have simply called it a day and told him that it was untenable, that they cannot possibly be asked to risk the lives of the rest of the ares iii crew. but they did not. they did not, because they deemed that no cost was too high if it meant that there was even a snowball's chance in hell that they could bring that one man home.

project hail mary, on the other hand, is a complete 180.

here, the fate of an entire planet's survival rests upon the shoulders of one rather unremarkable man. ryland grace is a middle school science teacher, whose only claim to fame is a controversial research paper. it is a story that forces you to confront the question: "how much do you personally owe humanity when its fate hangs in the balance?"

once again, the answer is everything.

ryland is not the brightest person on the planet, nor is he the bravest. he doesn't choose to be involved in saving earth, and he certainly doesn't choose to be sent on a suicide mission away from it. in project hail mary, one man has no choice but to shoulder this burden for the sake of humanity. and, it turns out, he's not the only one carrying this responsibility.

somehow, both books provide the same answer and message, only in somewhat different ways. they both serve to convey that life, no matter the scale, is worth preserving.

that when it comes to one man stranded 140 million miles away, no cost is too high, no risk too big, because his life matters. he matters. and he matters not just because he volunteered to go up there, or because it wasn't his fault, or because they know he's out there. he matters because he exists, and that is more than enough to do everything possible to bring him back.

or that no personal cost is too high to pay if you are the one person that can actually save humanity. the people may be faceless, nameless crowds to you, but their lives are worth saving simply because they exist. they exist, and that is plenty reason to doom yourself to certain death if it means that there is even a single chance in hell that you will save them. you don't have to be talented, or remarkable, or necessary to matter.

Could it be the most famous cardigan since Mr. Rogers’s? The hit Ryan Gosling movie “Project Hail Mary” has fans craving the cozy zip-up emblazoned with foxes that his science-teacher hero wears on a mission to save Earth.

But there’s a snag to obtaining this sweater. Gosling’s costume was handmade, customized from a mail-order pattern from the 1950s. If you want one, you have to knit it yourself.

That challenge has crafty fans of the film racing to source yarn and patterns, and share their progress on a DIY project that can take weeks or longer to complete.

Jaclyn Ziegler, a knitting and crochet creator in Phoenix who posts under the name Purls & Top Knots, got going on her “Hail Mary” project before even watching the movie because “the sweater was just everywhere.” She has since seen the film twice, including from the third row of a packed IMAX theater, where the huge screen helped her count stitches in the fox tail on Gosling’s costume. She typed the specs—“six stitches across, six rows down”—into her phone when the credits rolled.

On Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, Ziegler shared her yarn-sourcing trips to Michaels and Hobby Lobby, and tested her stitch spacing in a “gauge swatch.” Guys bombarded her with requests to buy the sweater when she was done, including one who commented with his size (“between XL and XXL”). She explained that the cost would be absurd for a project she expects to spend three weeks on.

“I’ve even had a few people say they’ve asked their wives to make one for them,” says Ziegler, who has completed one sleeve and a partial front panel on the one she’s making for herself.

The company behind the original sweater design, Mary Maxim, a fourth-generation, family-owned knitting and crochet supply company with about 100 employees, has scrambled to fill more than a thousand orders for its new “Project Hail Mary” knitting kit.

With the movie entering its third week as Hollywood’s top-grossing release of the year, the aura around Gosling’s knitwear even has some people picking up needles for the first time.

In Des Moines, Iowa, Nicole Nayima is expecting about 20 participants in her Black Sheep Craft Shop’s first “knit along,” which will have the group toiling through their ““Hail Mary” projects”Project” pieces together starting next week. Three of her sign-ups are new to knitting. “We’re going to get them through it,” says Nayima, a corporate attorney by day who once knitted her brother a “Dude” sweater like the one in “The Big Lebowski.”

Celebrity knitter Tom Daley helped fuel the sweater buzz. He’s a former diver with five Olympic medals whose calm-down ritual of knitting helped jump-start his “Made With Love” craft and clothing company. He whipped up a version of Gosling’s costume as a paid promotion for the film.

Daley posted a minute-long video documenting a process that actually took him 30 hours to complete with “a super chunky merino wool blend yarn and 10 mm needles,” he says in an email, noting that he did it without an official pattern. “I just had to look at some pretty basic screenshots from early scenes from the movie to try and figure out how it was made.”

For the proudly nerdy subculture of crafting, it’s a spotlight moment that lines up with the themes of “Project Hail Mary.” In the adaptation of a sci-fi novel by “The Martian” writer Andy Weir, Gosling’s reluctant hero is a maker, using science, hacks and the help of an alien made of rocks to defeat space microbes that are devouring stars, including Earth’s sun.

The character’s now-famous sweater barely made it into the film.

During a costume fitting for Gosling, the star (a sometimes knitter himself) spotted a vintage Canadian curling-style sweater that costume designer Glyn Dillon had bought at a London clothing fair. Its creamy drape would help connect Gosling’s solo astronaut to the life he left on Earth, “almost like a comfort blanket,” says the film’s other costume designer, David Crossman.

But the piece, made from a pattern that the Mary Maxim company has sold for 70 years, had a pair of snarling gray wolves on the front with blood-red footprints, which the film team deemed too ferocious for Gosling’s goofy hero.

Dillon redesigned the wolves into cute red foxes, but had just days before filming began to make the new cardigan and backup duplicates. “Two things that just don’t go well together: knitting and high pressure,” he says.

The costume heads called on some pro knitters who got the job done. Crossman declined to be more specific about these ringers, saying, “They’re very closely guarded secrets.”

(Mitch McPhedrain, owner of Mary Maxim, poses as the sweater’s model on the company’s web store.)

Mary Maxim owner Mitch McPhedrain, whose great-grandparents founded the company in the 1930s, wasn’t fully prepared for the rush when the movie came out. The company, which has warehouses in Port Huron, Mich., and Paris, Ontario, quickly sold out of its “Project Hail Mary” knit kit and is now taking $90 preorders for its incoming supply of yarn.

The last decade has been challenging, says McPhedrain, 32, but as the longtime catalog business has shifted to e-commerce, it’s made headway by partnering with crafting influencers to promote Mary Maxim products. Now, “Project Hail Mary” has tied the company to a cool moment for handmade knitwear. “I wish we would have ordered more stock ahead of time,” McPhedrain says.

The executive did manage to secure one of the hot sweaters for himself—he’s posing in it as the model on the Mary Maxim web store.

(source)

Warning: repetitious flashing/pulsing lights When the travelling theater ports in your village and the troupe’s lead thespian apparently moonlights as a male pole dancer: 

 "[Nina’s] PONY" - A Ginuwine/The Pirate (1948) video mashup. 

Previous episodes:

Benny Benassi / Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954).   

Post Malone / Fred Astaire (1970).

House of Pain / Singin’ In the Rain (1952).

Missy Elliott/Ludacris + Sound of Music (1965)

Dr. Dre / Thoroughly Modern  Millie (1967)

Missy Elliott / Singing in the Rain (1952)

Missy Elliott / Sound of Music (1965)

Jay-Z/Kanye + Mary Poppins (1964)

Flo Rida / The King and I (1956)

 Kstylis / Darling Lili (1970)

Another thing that had been on The Pile for a long time was this space waistcoat! I dye painted this piece of cotton back in 2015 when we were doing silk painting in Textiles class. I think I started cutting the waistcoat about 2 years ago, covered the buttons, and then got distracted. I had to piece part of one shoulder because I'd already used up part of the fabric to make a couple of handkerchiefs, but I don't think it's too noticeable. After dyeing the cotton I had splattered some fabric ink on it and painted a few stars, but after lining the fronts recently I painted a lot more stars on, and then painted glow in the dark ink on top.

It was a bit tricky to get photos of the glowing, and the first two are brighter than it looks in real life, at least with the small amount of charging it had when I took them. I also did a running stitch around the edges with glow in the dark thread which I've had for at least a decade and never used! Then I accidentally melted part of it with my iron and had to redo that bit.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

Well, damn.

What also emerged from the war and the pandemic in the early 20th century was a dangerous mixture of nationalism, fascism, and totalitarianism that was not confined to Europe. For the first time, Americans had entered a major conflict that was fought outside North America. Mass media in the form of newspapers and the telegraph communicated this conflict with a speed and visibility never before seen. In 1920, we elected to the presidency “a nonentity in Republican Warren Harding, who made vague promises about returning to ‘normalcy.’” Americans were tired of international politics, and of depending on the behavior of others to ensure their own safety. Congress passed two highly restrictive immigration acts in 1921 and 1924, and the first Red Scare emerged in 1919. [...] Class unrest generated hysteria that led federal agents to target radical labor unions for destruction and foreign and domestic “agitators” for arrest and deportation. Race relations grew increasingly fraught. Chicago experienced a brutal race riot in the summer of 1919, and Tulsa, Okla., followed suit two years later. Thirty-eight people died in Chicago, perhaps hundreds in Tulsa, and the Ku Klux Klan morphed from a Southern hate group to an organization with national reach and membership. […] Real reform had to wait for the next major crisis: the Great Depression of 1929. The architect of that reform, Franklin Roosevelt, was the unsuccessful vice-presidential candidate of 1920. Tellingly, he proclaimed at the outset of the New Deal that the only thing Americans had to fear was “fear itself.”[source]

In his Discworld book, Going Postal, the late Terry Pratchett introduced a telegraph/internet hybrid called "the clacks".

It could be a dangerous job, and when a worker died in service, his name was passed around in memorium by other clacks workers with "GNU" at the beginning, which was clacks instructions to circulate it, despite not being any sort of "official" message.

"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken," is a quote from Going Postal, and it is a message the fandom has taken to heart, using Terry's own in-universe jargon in post notes (it also can be found in Discworld-related email and website headers).

YOUR BODY DOES THIS ON PURPOSE

Square Bloom

quilt by Jo Wollschlaeger

2nd place in American Patchwork & Quilting Transparency Quilting Challenge, QuiltCon 2025

So I looked up first place:

This is "Light Me Up" by Lindsey Berres. Closeups here.

Here is the (partial?) gallery of entrants on the QuiltCon website, but the image files are so large that I literally can't load them so have a selection of much lower quality screengrabs from this video tour instead...

"Neural Overlap" by Jane Eileen García (3rd place)

"Surfacing" by Tara Glastonbury

"Dot Your Eyes" by Nora Bauser

"Risograph Rings" by Colleen Kesterson

"Benched" by Linda Hungerford

"Windmill Meadows" by Lynett Muhaso

"Starman" by Lorena Uriarte

"Triple Silk Transluscence" by Cassandra Beaver

"Who Invited Cyan?" by Samantha Saturday

"Star Crossed" by Karin Rabe

"Contintuity of Radiance" by Svetlana Silver

"Mod Layers" by Anthea Naylor

"Dialectic No. 4" by Heather Akerberg

"Perfect Pansies" by Holly Clarke

"Still Life #1" by Barbara Strick

"Circle of Friends" by Erin Case

"Orange Peel Overlay" by Stephanie Bracelyn""Orange Peel Overlay" by Stephanie Bracelyn

"Spotlight" by Amy Friend

"Blobs" by Lucie Belanger

"Sunshine Amidst Rain" by Sarah Wigton

"Cellophane Squares" by Sharon Thomson

There was a shimmer - a demon appeared.

"Curious. What ritual is this?"

"I got it from ChatGPT. I included all protections in my prompt!"

"Your first mistake was entrusting your work to the hallucination machine." It reached down to pinch the mixture, give it a sniff. "Potassium chloride? What ash is this?"

"Um." The disciple nudged a bucket with their boot.

"Tastes like ... maple. And potatoes. Blech." It wiped its fingertips clean on their robes. It paused, rubbing its tongues against the roof of its mouth. "Damnation, what did you anoint the candles with? Is that ... PAM?"

The disciple whimpered. "It wasn't specified."

"Pfft. Of course not." It sighed, and extended its tri-fingered hand. "Let me see that incantation." Shakily, the parchment was extended, and snatched with irritation. " 'Bene! Ecce incantatio initiorum ...' What the seven hells is this? You didn't even trim the auto response."

"Well, I don't speak Latin..."

The demon snorted. The parchment sailed over its shoulder to a candle and hovered there, alight, then disappeared in a puff of ash and smoke. "Right. Legally I could take at least a limb for this, but hey, you like your limbs, right? Pretty attached to them, you'd say?" The disciple desperately nodded. "Great. So here's what we're gonna do: you're going to write me an essay --"

"What?!" The disciple gasped, paled. "Wait, no, maybe an arm would be okay..."

"-- shut up. You're going to hand-write a 2,000 word essay -- listen, no -- and you're going to write it on the perils of sourcing research from generative AI. You are going to source this in MLA format -- yes the fuck you are --" tired of the protestations, the demon's hand loosely threatened the human's throat, and quickly made its point, "and you will do this and turn it in in two weeks' time, with a proper summoning ritual. And -- and this part is very important, mind you -- you are going to tell all your little demon-summoner buddies that if this ever happens again I will simply eat your fucking souls and be done with it. Do you understand me?"

The disciple nodded again, with wetter pants.

"Good. Fine." The demon roughly patted the student on the head and retreated back to the ruined glyph where it stood expectant, hands on what must have been its hips. "Alright. Banish me and call me up properly in two weeks. Don't make me come looking for you."

"I -- uh -- well, that is to say, I don't... um."

The demon's shoulders dropped. "You don't know how to banish."

"I don't know how to banish, no."

The demon let loose a series of deep, frustrated grumbles that had some resemblance to speech, enunciated with emphatic gestures, and gave the vague impression of a dinner getting cold. "Get a pen."

"What? Oh, I --"

dragons