*walks into an antique store* i'd like to see your most evil items, please

This duck got himself all in a flap after inadvertently straying into the path of a giant Shoebill while heading towards water.

But it was all water off a duck’s back for the imposing 4ft tall bird which instead of eating his smaller friend, carefully picked him up in his beak and moved him aside.

Despite its fearsome reputation as a predator around water, the Shoebill seemed more concerned with completing its journey than tucking into a feathered snack.

These extraordinary pictures were captured by 51-year-old amateur photographer Mark Kay, at the San Diego Wild Animal Park in the U.S.

‘I thought the Shoebill was going to eat the duck, but soon realised he was moving him out of the way.

‘After the duck fell to the ground, he seemed flustered and just walked away. The Shoebill just carried on.’

Credit / Full Article can be found HERE

As a short person, I can attest to the frustration the little duck was feeling

Daily reminder that the concept of untouched and unclaimed land in the Americas is a colonialist fantasy that was purposely spread to justify the theft and destruction of indigenous lands, peoples, and ways of life.

we’re all getting “older” but age is a relative thing. i’ve licked things that are 250 million years old. you’re not that old and you’re not worth licking. 

S. M. Shattelroe, An Ode To My Twentysixth Birthday

Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).

Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.

You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.

I was already disgusted just reading about this but looking at the side-by-side comparison of the real speech and the rewrite really brought it home.

See the two versions of her first line below:

if you want to seduce me, bring me skulls, teeth, pelts and skins as well as interesting rocks and cool bits of wood

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

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

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

Hi fun fact!!

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.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

@we-are-threadmage

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

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.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

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. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

So women took men to the moon. No surprise men never mention that part. It’s always, “women have never been to the moon”. It’s because they did all the hard work bastards.

bro, a lot of men NEED to go to therapy not just for their own sake but for the sake of every person they have power over in their lives

if you are a grown ass adult man and you refuse to handle your personal issues that directly negatively impact the people around in varying degrees of harm, even leading up to abuse, that’s YOUR responsibility to fix. no one is saying abusive men dont have ‘reasons’ to be the way they are, but that doesnt change the fact that no one who isnt them can fix their shit

i put “All I Want for Christmas is You” through a MIDI converter, and then back through an mp3 converter

the result is this garbage

I’m driving myself up the wall because I swear I can hear the vocal line but I don’t know how that could be if it was truly converted to MIDI. Unless you can replicate speech sounds entirely with modulated MIDI notes, in which case I’m actually impressed with this tire fire of an MP3.

the holiday season is almost upon us and I’d like to bring back this absolute fucking monstrosity of an audio file

“how can you even like villains??? they—”

they’re Big Sexy. next question. 

“Babies only cry if they are hungry, need changing, or need to be picked up”

Lies

Babies (and small children) also cry for reasons such as:

1. “I am tired and that makes me angry”

2. “I scared myself with a fart”

3. “You are the wrong parent”

4. “I ran into something with my face”

5. “I’m facing the opposite direction then the one I want to”

6. “I fell asleep in one place and woke up somewhere completely different”

7. “I am a very small person in a very big world”

8. “I got scared because YOU farted”

Babies have more then 3 states of being and sometimes you just have to hold them and bounce them gently while saying solemnly “yes it is very hard to be a baby” because frankly it is

you have to remember that when you’re that tiny… pretty much any bad thing that happens to you is LITERALLY the WORST thing that has ever happened in your life. they have no perspective. everything is awful. help them

#everything is happening for the first time and they cant even google it  

You gotta understand that some people never really grow. They never learn their lesson. They never recognise their mistakes, they never acknowledge their faults, they never admit they were in the wrong. You will never receive an apology from them, and you will never see their behaviour change.

I want my body to be my own again. I want my mind to be my own; not occupied by the ghosts of things that have been done to me.

“Made possible by my stepfather, Mike Noonan (1940–2004): may the peace which eluded you in life be yours now.

Dedicated to any young men and women anywhere who live with people who abuse them, with the following good news:

You are going to make it out of there alive.

You will live to tell your story.

Never lose hope.”

-John Darnielle, from the liner notes of “The Sunset Tree.”

they’re lovely

who?

the nonbinary lesbian reading this

everytime I stay at a hotel I take a bite out of the soap bar to confuse the cleaning staff

hey op real quick what the Actual fuck