i have no idea how to start this post so uhhhh hi! it’s been a hot minute since i’ve even been on this site but if i still have any followers who were wondering what the heck happened to me, here i am! here’s an update i guess?

- i got engaged and then got unengaged, moved in with a different partner and then un-moved in
- i went through a pretty severe mental breakdown due to the above events but im in therapy now and im improving!
- i cut all my hair off and made it purple (magenta? magenta).
- my mom is divorcing her dumpster-fire of a husband and her and i now rent a cute little house of our own!
- i took up pole dancing six months ago and it’s become a huge passion of mine!
- i went to disneyland for the first time EVER last month
- my cat Princess Zelda is even chonkier than before and i love her with all my heart

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Who wants to guess how many bags of peaches are in my dad’s freezer?

The answer is:

Too fucking many

This is gonna make … a lot of jam …….

So, I managed to fit all but one big bowl of peaches into the two stock pots …

An hour and a half later, here they are simmering away …

How long is it gonna take to reduce them to jam, you ask?? Fuck if I know at this size lmao

In case you were wondering, it is, in fact, longer than 5 hours, as I am still stirring this jam over the oven :) :) :)

Oh and also there was another large bowl of peaches in the other fridge that I did not see until later, so I did not in fact fit ALL the peaches into the stock pots

On a brighter note, the whole house smells like a Victorian Christmas dinner

Hello again friends, it is currently REAL JAMMING TIME and I have been in stirring hell for seven hours

Went through two whole containers of pectin and a bunch of cornstarch already and things are looking just PEACHY

So, uh, the first stock pot alone yielded 272 ounces, so I … may have accidentally made about 68 8oz jars of jam …… and I only had 36 jars …

Guess I’m going back to the store tomorrow … and going to have to join the local farmers market to sell them …

Anyway, TEN CONTINUOUS HOURS OF WORK LATER, here I am at around 3am sealing my first batch of jars … (entire other stock pot of jam lurks ominously in the background)

God, it’s like when you overestimate how much pasta you’re gonna end up with, only 300% worse

So I woke up today after sleeping like a log to fibd my dad had already gone back to the store (which is like 30 min away) and gotten me more jars because he saw that I needed them

As you can see one of those pachages is the wrong size jar (4oz) so we’ll see if I can fit all the jam into these suckers (plus the two 8oz ones I had leftover)

My dad also put all the jars of jam in the fridge, although since they were all properly sealed (aw yeah) was totally unnecessary lol

He said he accidentally dropped one on the way to the fridge but I checked and it amazingly A) didn’t break, and B) remained properly sealed, so hats off to Ball corp, and also me I guess

Update: WE BE JAMMIN’

Spices I used for this recipe:

-Cinnamon

-Nutmeg

-Ginger

-Allspice

-Vanilla Extract

The combination worked out very well!

Gotta can the rest of it after I eat tho :P

So, I FINALLY managed to can all the jam, except for like … 6 oz of it, so I made shortbread cookies to use that with ;)

Altogether I did end up with 72 jars of jam, 12 of which are the 4oz size though. What the fuck am I gonna do with all this jam, jesus christ

Anyway, thanks for coming to my jam-filled TED talk guys, take care

annnmoody:

isnerdy:

rolypolywardrobe:

systlin:

darkersolstice:

max-vandenburg:

eldritchscholar:

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.

Don’t underestimate the impact craft has had on our culture