I Made A Thing

A man browsing for books in Cincinnati’s cavernous old main library. The library was demolished in 1955 .

it will also work on protein-based fibers like wool, silk, and human or animal hair wigs. to make sure it won’t wash out, you’ll want to set the dye with a mild acid – vinegar will do, though professionals often use powdered citric acid instead because it’s cheaper in bulk and doesn’t smell so much. of course, kool-aid already has citric acid in it, but with food coloring you’re not stuck with their color palette.

add maybe a cup of cleaning vinegar to a gallon of water, add your food coloring, and submerge your wig or socks or opera gloves or whatever. a drop of dish soap can be handy for breaking surface tension, helping the dye absorb faster.

heat will help, if it won’t damage the item; for wool, i like to use a crock pot set on low, so it gets warm enough to steam but not to boil. occasionally GENTLY agitate the item in the water until the dye is absorbed.

rinse until the water runs clear. with wool (including non-sheep wool like buffalo and goat) you have to be careful not to shock it with sudden temperature transitions or agitate it too much, or it’ll felt. smooth fibers like silk don’t have this problem.

lay it flat to dry (if it’s fabric) so it doesn’t stretch out of shape under the weight of the water, and voila, your item is permanently dyed whatever color you want.

When you’re on the last day of a palace (click for audio).

you know that line about “if a soldier forces you to carry his pack for one mile, carry it for two”?

there was a thing where roman soldiers could demand that civilians carry their gear, but only for a mile. obviously people did not like this. they had shit to be doing. they did not want to be some rando’s pack mule any more than people today would. also, it was kind of scary, because here’s this guy with a weapon saying “you’re my fetchit bitch or else.” and you had to go off with him wherever he wanted, up to one mile.

but jesus was all about the nonviolent resistance. i mean, sure, you could run, but then maybe they see you later and point you out to the cops, it’s a small world. maybe they chase you down and kick you around a bit. hell, maybe they show you their stabs. you gonna bring a sword of your own and make a duel out of it? that’s even worse than just carrying the damn pack.

so what you do is, you just keep carrying it.

at first they don’t notice the mile’s up. but then it starts feeling kind of long. they find themselves waiting for you to call time. but you don’t. you just keep going. they start checking the landmarks. are they lost? are they dreaming? are you stealing their shit? you can’t be, can you, since you’re right there. but you’re still HOLDING it. they’re wondering if they’re ever gonna get their centurion undies back. they could ask, but waitasec, you’re carrying their stuff, which is what they said to do, so that’s good, right?

but why are you still HERE?

are you trying to be friends? are you an assassin? are you a vet just helping a brother out? are you up to something? are you crazy? are you sleepwalking? are THEY sleepwalking? WHAT IS EVEN GOING ONNN NN N

at mile marker 2 you set the pack down and go “have a nice day!” and bail

They could only carry it for a mile, and if they carried it further (the assumption being that the soldier kept forcing the person to keep carrying it) the soldier could get in HUUUUUGE trouble.

So this soldier and some civilian (I believe it had to be someone who was not a Roman citizen??  I can’t quite remember) are walking along, and they hit the mile marker.  The soldier demands his pack be returned.

“No no, allow me, I’m not tired!”  Says the civilian, and keeps on walking.

The soldier keeps asking, maybe rather threatening, but the civilian just keeps kindly insisting to help, it’s not a problem, let me help you, etc. and continues walking.

It then gets to the point that the soldier has to be like “Hey, man c’mon, I could really get in trouble for this…please give it back”

What has just happened was a serious change in power dynamics.  It went from the soldier being in control of the situation and treating the civilian as lesser, to the civilian being in control, and the soldier treating the civilian as an equal.

Noctis latin for “Night”

Prompto latin for “Ready”

Ignis latin for “Fire”

Noctis does, in fact, come from the Latin word for “night”. Latin, however, is a language that declines (think conjugation, but for nouns). Nox is the base of noctis (a certain other royal family uses the base form of the noun). I think the reason that SE went with the genitive (noun type that indicates possession) is more clear when we look at his whole name, Noctis Lucis Caelum. Latin sometimes is nice and puts matching endings on things that are related. In his full name assuming SE wasn’t BSing its way around Latin we can assume that Noctis and Lucis are both in the genitive case; Lucis here being the genitive of lux “light”. Caelum (meaning sky) could be in one of several cases, but given that it is preceded by two words that are in the genitive case, we’re gonna assume it’s in the nominative case (so it’s the subject). So, all together, Noct’s name comes to mean “the sky of night (and) light”. His name has a very liminal feeling, imo, and fits well with his story arc.

Prompto’s first name comes from the verb “to give forth or out abundantly, to distribute, dispose of a thing“ and is conjugated in the first person singular (”I”) form. Argentum comes from the Latin for “silver/money”. I thiiiiink SE was trying to make a pun on “quick silver” here, but they used the verb form for his first name, which makes this name also take on another (probably unintentional) translation “I give out money”.

Ignis’ first name does mean “fire”, but also could be translated as “passion”. Weirdly, Ignis is the only non-royal that I can think of off the top of my head that has an established middle name. Stupeo could mean “I am astounded/amazed/senseless” but also could be a form of the adjective meaning “coarse-flaxen”. Sciencia can mean “knowledge, science”, but also “skill”. The words ignis and sciencia are in the same case and therefore probably relate to each other. I’m having a tough time making a neat phrase out of his name, but all together, I get a sense from his name that he has a deep curiosity/drive for knowledge and skill, which fits perfectly.

i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)

at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)

i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.

this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.

to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.

now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?

the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?

the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.

the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.

what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.

what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.

that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.

the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.

the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money. 

when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”