A few years ago I was at a museum that had some old grimoires and alchemy books on display and translations to the pages posted by them. My favorite grimoire page was a spell for rain where the person would go outside with a bucket of water and pour it onto the ground, then proceed to pretty much yell at the clouds about ‘see its not hard!’. To date that is my favorite rain spell I have ever seen.
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#wicca #everyday witchcraft
This German Kindergarten
every building built mainly for children should be fucking weird like this i cant even imagine how much happier my memories of early childhood would be if i could look back on having gone to kindergarten in a big ol cat
downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture
upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because
ALTfollowed by
ALTis such a funny sequence
i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE
I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd
No, y'all don't even understand.
There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.
That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop
Yall don't know how much I adore all of this
Sewing Machines & Planned Obsolescence
I've got these two sewing machines, made about 100 years apart. An old treadle machine from around 1920-1930, that I pulled out of the trash on a rainy day, and a new Brother sewing machine from around 2020.
I've always known planned obsolescence was a thing, but I never knew just how insidious it was till I started looking at these two side by side.
I wasn't feeling hopeful at first that I'd actually be able to fix the old one, I found it in the trash at 2 am in a thunderstorm. It was rusty, dusty, soggy, squeaky, missing parts, and 100 years old.
How do you even find specialized parts 100 years later? Well, easily, it turns out. The manufacturers at the time didn't just make parts backwards compatible to be consistent across the years, but also interchangeable across brands! Imagine that today, being able to grab a part from an old iPhone to fix your Android.
Anyway, 6 months into having them both, I can confidently say that my busted up trash machine is far better than my new one, or any consumer-grade sewing machine on the market.
Old Machine Guts
The old machine? Can sew through a pile of leather thicker than my fingers like it's nothing. (it's actually terrifying and I treat it like a power tool - I'll never sew drunk on that thing because I'm genuinely afraid it'd sew through a finger!) At high speeds, it's well balanced and doesn't shake. The parts are all metal, attached by standard flathead screws, designed to be simple and strong, and easily reachable behind large access doors. The tools I need to work on it? A screwdriver and oil. Lost my screwdriver? That's OK, a knife works too.
New Machine Guts
The new machine's skipping stitches now that the plastic parts are starting to wear out. It's always throwing software errors, and it damn near shakes itself apart at top speed. Look at it's innards - I could barely fit a boriscope camera that's about as thick as spaghetti in there let alone my fingers. Very little is attached with standard screws.
And it's infuriating. I'm an engineer - there's no damn reason to make high-wear parts out of plastic. Or put them in places they can't be reached to replace. There's no reason to make your mechanism so unbalanced it's reaching the point of failure before reaching it's own design speed. (Oh yeah there is, it's corporate greed)
100 years, and your standard home sewing machine has gone from a beast of a machine that can be pulled out of the literal waterlogged trash and repaired - to a machine that eats itself if you sew anything but delicate fast-fashion fabrics that are also designed to fall apart in a few years.
Looking for something modern built to the standard that was set 100 years ago? I'd be looking at industrial machines that are going for thousands of dollars... Used on craigslist. I don't even want to know what they'd cost new.
We have the technology and knowledge to manufacture "old" sewing machines still. Hell, even better, sewing machines with the mechanical design quality of the old ones, but with more modern features. It would be so easy - at a technical level to start building things well again. Hell, it's easier to fabricate something sturdy than engineer something to fail at just the right time. (I have half a mind to see if any of my meche friends with machine shops want to help me fabricate an actually good modern machine lol)
We need to push for right-to-repair laws, and legislation against planned obsolescence. Because it's honestly shocking how corporate greed has downright sabotaged good design. They're selling us utter shit, and expecting us to come back for more every financial quarter? I'm over it.
My Mum had an Singer treadle machine on a wooden stand, inherited from her mum, my Gran. According to Mum, Gran got it "the year old King Edward died", meaning 1910.
Machines like that weren't cheap (up to a couple of months' average wages) so it probably did dual service as a household machine and in my Grandad's saddlery shop.
As @viridianriver mentions about their machine and which I saw done more than once (repairing my leather schoolbag, for instance) it could put a needle and a waxed linen thread through thick leather with no effort at all, and do it fast.
The only update Mum gave it, sometime around 1975-ish, was an electric motor with variable-pressure foot-pedal, though she still preferred the treadle or even the hand-wheel for delicate work.
About that same time Dad bought her a fancy new Brother machine which could do all sorts of tricks, but it was only ever used for fancy work, and not much of that since Mum already had years of practice on the older machine.
The Singer even folded down into its stand, which had its own corner in the living-room and doubled as a table for a flower vase, so was also handier to use.
Like so...
Clever…
Mum's Singer was running like a sewing-machine (hah!) right up to her death in 2007, and my sister still uses it now and then.
Nearly 115 years isn't a bad service record. These machines are solid.
Roommate went out of town once, asked me to look after her cat.
Night one she comes down meowing at me. I go check her food/water, they're full. Litter box empty. Make sure my roommate's door is still open and she's not locked out of her room or something. I try to pet her and she dodges me, offer her treats and she won't have it, try playing with her but she won't play, try just ignoring her and she won't stop following me around meowing at me.
So I call my roommate, concerned maybe she was sick or in pain and that's why she was being so insistent despite having all her needs met.
Roommate goes: "OH! She wants you to go to bed. Go upstairs to my room and just sit in my bed with her for a few minutes. She should curl up and get comfortable. Once shes laid down she usually lets me go back to what I'm doing she just can't seem to go to bed on her own"
Sure enough, I go sit on roommates bed and she just happily jumps up, curls up on the blanket, and purrs herself to sleep.
I like when cats try to give their humans healthy habits.
From Theophile Gautier, mid-19th century, about his very floofy white cat:
Don Pierrot of Navarre always sat up at night until I came home, waiting for me on the inside of the door, and as soon as I stepped into the antechamber he would come rubbing himself against my legs, arching his back and purring in gladsome, friendly fashion. Then he would start to walk in front of me, preceding me like a page, and I am sure that if I had asked him to do so, he would have carried my candle. In this way he would escort me to my bedroom, wait until I had undressed, jump up on the bed, put his paws round my neck, rub his nose against mine, lick me with his tiny red tongue, rough as a file, and utter little inarticulate cries by way of expressing unmistakably the pleasure he felt at seeing me again. When he had sufficiently caressed me and it was time to sleep he used to perch upon the backboard of his bed and slept there like a bird roosting on a branch. As soon as I woke in the morning, he would come and stretch out beside me until I rose.
Midnight was the latest time allowed for my return home. On this point Pierrot was as inflexible as a janitor... Twice or thrice Pierrot sat up for me until two o’clock in the morning, but presently he took offence at my conduct and went to bed without waiting for me. I was touched by this mute protest against my innocently disorderly way of life, and thereafter I regularly returned home at midnight. Pierrot, however, proved hard to win back; he wanted to make sure that my repentance was no mere passing matter, but once he was convinced that I had really reformed, he deigned to restore me to his good graces and again took up his nightly post in the antechamber.
Cats : trying to make us go to bed at a Reasonable Time since forever (so they can wake us up at 3 am for treats)
[Image description: a tweet by @mixbecca "rebecca mix" which says "i love when pets just make up Rules and their humans are like "oh, fine." my cat has a bedtime & he won't go to sleep until we do. every night at 10:30 he starts trying to herd us up the stairs. & now we, two grown a[censored] humans, adhere to the bedtime of a 12 pound cat."]
Don Pierrot of Navarre is an absolutely spectacular name for a cat.
can't for the life of me remember how to spell sisyphean, no matter how many times I write it. I have to look it up every time, and you'd think that would give me a chance of remembering it for next time, but no, brain retains none of it it's always back to square 1, no progress at all. it's like. like. idk i guess there isn't really a word for it.
