Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.

I have been waiting for this post all my life.

They are indeed purple, But one thing you’ve missed: The concept of “purple” Didn’t always exist.

Some cultures lack names For a color, you see. Hence good old Homer And his “wine-dark sea.”

A usage so quaint, A phrasing so old, For verses of romance Is sheer fucking gold.

So roses are red. Violets once were called blue. I’m hugely pedantic But what else is new?

My friend you’re not wrong About Homer’s wine-ey sea! Colours are a matter Of cultural contingency;

Words are in flux And meanings they drift But the word purple You’ve given short shrift.

The concept of purple, My friends, is old And refers to a pigment once precious as gold.

By crushing up molluscs From the wine-dark sea You make a dye: Imperial decree

Meant that in Rome, to wear purpura was a privilege reserved

For only the emperor!

The word ‘purple’, for clothes so fancy, Entered English By the ninth century

.

Why then are voilets Not purple in song? The dye from this mollusc, known for so long

Is almost magenta; More red than blue. The concept of purple is old, and yet new.

The dye is red, So this might be true: Roses are purple And violets are blue

.

While this song makes me merry, Tyrian purple dyes many a hue From magenta to berry And a true purple too.

But fun as it is to watch this poetic race The answer is staring you right in the face: Roses are red and violets are blue Because nothing fucking rhymes with purple.

Hirple - To limp or walk awkwardly

Cirple - An old Scots word for the hindquarters of a horse

“Roses are red, violets are purple,

My boner for you has caused me to hirple.”

…

DYING. I AM DYING.

Calling theshitpostcalligrapher! We need @theshitpostcalligrapher

@kiranovember u better buy this as a commission lmao

me

So I actually wrote my dissertation about this and it’s not just that the Department of Defence (there’s an office in the Pentagon dedicated to liaising with Hollywood productions), but they effectively have a strangle-hold on how Hollywood portrays the US military since the DoD give permission for producers to use military hardware, without that permission the cost of filming sharply goes up and films end up extremely over-budget. So the producers can either drop any critical elements at the DoD’s discretion, or continue with a film which will barely be released at all and will never make its budget back. 

Any American film which involves the military, know that the DoD probably signed off on it, or were directly involved with. Films like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty had a heavy government influence, the latter to falsely justify the methods the CIA used in finding and killing Osama bin Laden, which included torture.  

It’s why the military figures are always the heros and there will never be a Hollywood film which is critical of the US military because of this. Just remember, whenever you see the US military in a Hollywood movie, it’s exactly what the Department of Defence want you to see. It’s not being hyperbolic when these types of films are called propaganda. 

Watching Ruby and Sapphire kiss on the lips is so satisfying, nevermind that they’re literally two lesbians proposing and getting married on children’s programing, imo that kiss would’ve made cartoon history on its own. It’s not implied, cast off far away onto the background where you have to squint to see it, or even a quick peck on the cheek, it’s right on the lips and right FRONT AND CENTER with the shot zoomed in onto their faces holding there for a moment so it’s impossible to miss and it’s just so passionate and romantic and on your face and I gotta say after a lifetime of having to settle for subtext or “I dunno they might be girlfriends…it’s up to your interpretation ;)” from cishet creators, it feels so incredibly refreshing and I really owe Rebecca Sugar and this show my entire gay life

Rebecca Sugar fought the hell back against not only the people trying to deny that Ruby and Sapphire were romantically in love, but also the countries trying to erase the lesbianism by casting a male VA for Ruby.

She had them getting married, put Ruby in a dress with flowers in her hair so it was abundantly clear she was a woman (or a cross-dresser which I’m sure these countries wouldn’t approve of either), put the wedding in the middle of a HUGELY PLOT IMPORTANT EPISODE that they can’t just refuse to air, and had Garnet spend her entire time in the episode in her tux/dress fusion and everyone else spend the episode in their fancy clothes so they couldn’t just try to cut out the wedding stuff.

Rebecca Sugar is a fucking legend whom we don’t deserve but still somehow have B”H.

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)

This is fantastically interesting and informative! What a great post!

Maybe a stupid idea, but maybe it already exists

You start a game of DnD with a blank character sheet. Your DM has them all. You only discover stats and things as they become relevant. 

Like, “I rolled 7 on my constitution check” “You get a +2 bonus so that’s a 9.”  *Hurriedly marking it down*

Or 

“I would like to ask the innkeeper if there is anything weird going on in the area” “Dragonborn are rare in these parts, so she is suspicious at your approach.” “Wait I’m a DRAGONBORN?!?”

It would be absolute chaos but for a one-shot I feel it would be fun. Maybe all the characters have amnesia and they have to figure out what they can do from scratch.

It’s not D&D, exactly, but Alas Vegas is a RPG where the characters dig themselves out of shallow graves at the edge of the city and have to figure out who they are and what’s going on.

Notable for: instead of rolling dice, you play blackjack with tarot cards; the position of GM rotates every act so even the GM won’t know everything that’s going on (unless they read ahead where they’re told not to); you gain skills with flashbacks to your former life where you remember a little bit about who you are; you play blackjack with tarot cards

“Three Ruff Moon”

A ‘Three Wolf Moon’ parody.

What a time to be alive

After 2 years of dealing with near homelessness and constant discrimination due to being completely bedridden, I have found a cheap and permanent home.

Deposits, ramp construction and resolving costs at my current accommodation will cost $9,015. I am running on emergency funds for disability carer fees + food, I have NO other means of funding this and desperately need every bit of help I can get. I hope this can be a community effort and even if you don’t know me, I hope you’ll help me attain something that will improve my life vastly.

The $9015 MUST be raised within 48 hours by end of Sat 3rd Dec for on-time payments on Thurs 8th Dec (NY time). But if all goes well, I will be unlikely to ask for assistance with housing costs (specifically) ever again.

Breakdown of costs -        Deposit: $3,000+ -        Current room fee (must be paid to leaving): $2,500 (incl. overdue amounts) -        Cancellation fee - current accommodation: $1,500 (must be paid before leaving) -        Anticipated cleaning costs: $200 -        Ramp construction: $1,815

The reasons this is needed so urgently are a)     Transfers from Gofundme take 2 working days + 2 weekend days to arrive in my bank b)     Any additional days spent at my current accommodation and my costs will only INCREASE, due to the room costing over $200/day. c)     Delaying the lease signing by more than 1 day would be difficult.

I know this is a lot of money so please feel free to message me for verification, I just don’t want to post paperwork publicly for my personal security. This is also why I am at a new URL.  

Please consider making a donation at this link

I also need this post to pretty much go viral to cover these fees so quickly so please reblog if you can.Thanks to everyone who has supported me these past two years.

WHAT TO DO POST-GAME IN POKEMON SUN/MOON

A handy list that the guidebook provides for things to look for when you are done the main story! c:

When life gives you lemons, but you’re only allowed one other flavor.

Edit: 2000 notes wtf lol yall laughing at this misfortune

That is both the best and worst luck at the same time. WTF

…pokemon is no longer a game where u can mash A through the dialogue