This blog is a place to save things I find inspiring, interesting, researchable, adorable or beautiful. I have strong political opinions but I'll try to keep from posting about politics unless it is for worldbuilding details.
They didn’t forget. They were never taught or they don’t believe if they were. We need to bring back The Pledge, American and World History, the good and the bad, so we can all learn from it. Please, leave if you are someone who doesn’t think America is great. All traitors must be held accountable.
“Some parents just don’t want to raise a disabled child”
Disability can happen at any time, sweetheart!
Your perfectly healthy, abled kid can be in a car accident that paralyzes them from the neck down
Your lovely neurotypical toddler can contract a rare disease that leaves them with irreparable brain damage
Your child can lose motor skills from a sports head injury
Your child can become deaf or blind from an illness, an injury or a recessive gene
Your child can suffer an accident that costs them a limb
Your child can develop a brain tumor or a heart problem or a myriad of issues that will disable them long after they are born a healthy, abled, neurotypical baby.
Just because your child was not born disabled does not mean they cannot become disabled.
If you would abort a fetus because you don’t want to deal with a disabled kid, you shouldn’t be having kids at all.
This post. Read it. Read it again.
Your kids don’t owe you to be able bodied or neurotypical. They aren’t consumerist hobbies. They don’t exist for you. Parenting is not about fulfilling You. It’s about serving others.
Babies aren’t something you get to custom design or shop around for. This isn’t build a bear. This is your child and it is your job to raise and care for them, regardless of the struggles they face.
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
This ought to be a holiday, and the fact that it isn’t is a crime.
I am redoing this weaving post as its own post, because it was originally done as a reblog that I’ve deleted.
Anyway, Ancient Greek weaving!
The information below is drawn from my personal understanding of weaving and Greek pots, as well as thisincredibly thorough and detailed examination of Homeric weaving by Susan T. Edmunds.
Some basics in case people are unfamiliar with weaving terminology:
a loom is a frame or other device, can be super basic or really advanced, that holds yarn threads under tension so that you can weave.
the warp is the set of threads stretched vertically on the loom and held under tension. If you have a woven scarf with tassels, those tassels are leftover warp threads.
the weft is the set of threads that are inserted at a right angle to the warp. The simplest way of creating a cloth is to interlock the weft and weave in a way where the weft thread passes over the one warp thread, then under the next, and so on.
a shed is a space between two sets of warp threads to help you move your weft thread easily across, instead of weaving it through the warp thread by thread. See below an example on a modern horizontal loom:
a bobbin is a thing on which you wind your weft yarn so you can weave, instead of using the whole cone or skein of yarn
a shuttle is a device you can use to bring weft yarn from one side of the warp to another.
Looms in Ancient Greece, as far as I know, were likely all or primarily warp-weighted standing looms, meaning they were large wooden frames that would be set vertically against the wall. So while John William Waterhouse’s gorgeous painting of Penelope and the Suitors is one of my favorites:
Its depiction of a horizontal loom doesn’t seem to be supported by ancient sources.
In addition to the flask I included in my original post, here are some additional depictions of looms on pottery from around the 5th century BCE.
This first one is supposed to show Circe’s loom:
This second one shows Penelope at her loom and Telemachus probably being a brat:
And here is a 360 view of that oil flask attributed to the Amasis Painter, which shows not only the weaving but also the spinning of the wool (which would take place before weaving could happen) and folding the finished cloth:
As you can see, the looms are all vertical.
How did the actual weaving work? Below are the basic steps for a plain weave, not getting into complex patterns, tapestries, or heddles. I am skipping the spinning of the yarn part because I don’t know how to do that.
First, you would weave a header band, the start of the cloth. On horizontal looms now, you can put the warp onto your loom and just start weaving. With warp-weighted looms, it seems that you would have started the header band off the loom (on a separate band loom or just some device to keep your threads under tension and a shed in your warp so you can pass the weft through).
The header band would be rolled onto a cloth beam that sits horizontal on top of two vertical posts of the loom. That’s the thick horizontal black line you see at the top of the looms in the vases above.
The warp threads would pass alternately in front of or behind the crossbeam(s), which are the horizontal lines in the middle of the loom.
At the bottom, you would tie bunches of warp threads to what are called warp weights or loom weights, which might be cylindrical or pyramidal weights made out of clay or stone (or maybe lead!).
Now, you are ready to really start weaving. You would walk your weft thread from one end of the loom to the other, change the shed, and walk back. For each weft thread, you would “beat” the thread into place (pushing on the thread so that it is not straggling in the middle of your warp, but is neatly touching the last thread you wove) with a pin-beater or comb. (The Greek word κερκίς (kerkis) is often translated as “shuttle”, but I find Susan Edmunds makes a persuasive argument that it is not a shuttle the way we think of today, but a pin-beater—basically a long, pointed stick—used to beat the threads and/or strum the warp to even it out.)
Unlike horizontal looms now, where you would beat down on the weft threads, you would beat up on ancient warp-weighted looms (as you can see from the vases, the cloths are being woven from the top down). If your cloth is pretty long and you’re getting to the bottom of the frame, you could use the cloth beam at the top to roll the thread up and give you more space.
If you wanted to weave a pattern or an image, you would do this by arranging the warp in different ways, picking up different warp threads, etc. Helen in the Iliad is mentioned as weaving a crimson cloak on which she depicts the Trojan War. I assume Penelope was also weaving elaborate details into her shroud for it to have been remotely plausible to the suitors that the shroud would take years to complete (although maybe this says more about how utterly disconnected with women’s tasks these men were).
Weaving was an incredibly important and time-consuming part of daily life. All women would weave, including the noble women (in addition to Penelope and Helen, Andromache also is seen weaving in the Iliad). This was how fabric and clothing got made!
Some additional points of interest, in addition to the Edmunds article linked above:
Here is a short article on modern scholars recreating the weaving process to understand how long it would take and the effect it would have for household earnings, and a related video presentation.
Not Greek, but this video might give you a general sense of what the weaving process looked like.
Finally, the Penelope Project recreated the weaving from the Penelope vase above, which is so incredible:
I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.
To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.
I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while.
Its parts were obscenely limited in their movement. Each hinge could open or close only a small amount before reaching its limit, yet by working in concert they demonstrated unexpected dexterity, moving and manipulating the objects before it with cunning equal to my own. It was more torso than limb, as though a seal had been stretched and warped, given long grasping tentacles filled with bones like bars of coral. It’s head was most horrid of all, flat and ovoid, jutting out too small from the trunk as though it belonged to a beast half its size.
The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. It’s triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.
I froze, as the thing’s gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.
I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.
I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.
I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thing’s grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.
I saw thousands of lights.
ok so it turns out “horror but it’s about something mundane from the perspective of a non-human animal” fucks severely
I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.
To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.
I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while.
Its parts were obscenely limited in their movement. Each hinge could open or close only a small amount before reaching its limit, yet by working in concert they demonstrated unexpected dexterity, moving and manipulating the objects before it with cunning equal to my own. It was more torso than limb, as though a seal had been stretched and warped, given long grasping tentacles filled with bones like bars of coral. It’s head was most horrid of all, flat and ovoid, jutting out too small from the trunk as though it belonged to a beast half its size.
The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. It’s triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.
I froze, as the thing’s gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.
I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.
I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.
I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thing’s grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.
I saw thousands of lights.
ok so it turns out “horror but it’s about something mundane from the perspective of a non-human animal” fucks severely
