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happy pacific rim breach closing day everyone

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And so Pacific Rim passes from futuristic sci-fi to alternate historical fiction...

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You guuuuuys, you are going to be. So. Jealous. Of what I did today

So Amgueddfa Cymru is the umbrella super museum in Wales, and it is in charge of multiple museums around the country. Seven branches specifically. Entry to each is free, and each commemorates a different facet of Welsh history and culture; of the seven, I had (until a few hours ago) been to five. I've done Caerleon Roman Museum and Amphitheatre, Cardiff Museum, St Ffagan Folk Museum of Welsh Life, Big Pit Coal Mining Museum, and Swansea Waterfront Museum. I have yet to do the Slate Museum in Eryri.

And today, I went to:

The National Wool Museum

YEAH THAT'S RIGHT we have a national wool museum. It's so cool. We arrived at lunchtime so we started in the cafe and we had soup and also cheese and leek Welsh cakes. Except the soup was so Welsh it was correctly served with a piece of cheese:

AS IT SHOULD

Anyway, the building was a wool mill once upon a time, and half of the machinery still works, and still produces 100% woollen textiles. Also they run workshops for knitting and weaving and stuff. But you follow the rooms around and they show you the full process, from fleece to flannel.

BUT ALSO at each stop they had little stands where you could try a bit for yourselves. So for example, there was an exhibit where you could card fleece by hand, with a pile of washed fleece beside, and you could just... go ham with the carding.

I deliberately tried not to photograph literally everything. But here's a lil collection:

I should have taken a picture of the carding, actually, that was my favourite.

OH MY GOD YEAH and also, they had a section on the uses of the wool. A whole display of traditional Welsh blankets, trad and modern clothes, and, of course, instructions for how to cwtch a baby in a shawl, which was so lovely because that's what my Welsh paternal grandmother taught my English mother to do with me as a baby.

Anyway, then the gift shop sold balls of 100% wool in many fun colours, and tabletop looms, and books on how to knit/weave, and bags of roving that you could spin yourself, and plushie sheep and dragons. And Welsh blankets and shawls/scarves and that.

Anyway, you lot are textile nerds. You should all go. It's in the tiniest village in Ceredigion and it is the BEST.

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"The prophecy was unambiguous and immutable."

"I know."

"No weapon forged on Earth could defeat the Lord Baarthus"

"I know."

"And yet here we are, you telling me, Lord Baarthus was struck down by the Peasant King. Wielding... just a regular sword. Forged on Earth."

"I know what I saw, okay! The Peasant King walked up to him, shoved the sword in his neck, and then just kept going. It was nasty!"

"Okay, okay, fine. Clearly what's happened here is there's some kind of loophole in the prophecy that enabled this. Happens all the time. No weapon forged on Earth... How sure are you that sword is of this world?"

"What do you take me for? I've done my research. Even tracked down, interviewed the original blacksmith."

"There must be something. Prophecies can't be wrong!"

"I mean... I didn't take stock of her inventory. If it was one of those meteorite swords..."

"No, no. The prophecy didn't say 'No weapon with parts sourced on Earth'. It was pretty specific about the Forging."

"I don't hear anything better coming from you!"

"How about this. What if it wasn't a weapon? The Peasant King... it'd only be fitting for him to slay the Dark Lord with a blade meant for peasantry! Not a weapon, but a farming tool, like a scythe, or a really long trowel--!"

"A long trowel?? It looked like a damn sword!"

"That doesn't mean anything! A ritzy, college-educated diviner like you, you wouldn't know a trowel from a ploughshare!"

"It had a hilt, and a pommel, and it went in a scabbard-- come on! Even if it was some kind of-- newfangled grass cutter I've never heard of, it was used as a weapon, and it was forged to be a weapon! I've seen the ledgers!"

"Clearly you screwed something up, madam, because the Lord Baarthus just got sliced up like an old dairy cow and the prophecy very clearly specifies the only instrument that could bring his end is--!! Oh. Ohhh. Oh, gods damn it."

"What?"

"Fucking... 'forged on earth'."

"Yes, and?"

"It wasn't forged on earth. It was forged on a fucking anvil."

"What? No, you're-- you're joking. That wouldn't-- that couldn't-- what weapon would be forged on earth, by that definition!!?"

"I hate prophecies so much..."

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My wife did some glass etching, so we have a bunch of glasses with this at the bottom.

This was early on in our marriage, these are just the glasses we use every day.

Fast forward to when my son is five years old. He has learned to read. He has graduated from sippy cups.

When I hear him wailing and crying I come running down the stairs, and he's inconsolable. Took a lot of soothing and time to explain to him that it was just a joke. He wanted the glasses destroyed, but as a compromise we retired them from use for a while.

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My wonderful spouse, who I love very much, set a phone alarm to remind him to send drunk texts to his friends this evening, and ensured that he would be appropriately drunk (0.086%, currently) by consulting a blood alcohol calculator that factored in change over time. He was worried that this level of planning was against the spirit of Drunk Texts, but I assured him it was not.

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Seriously though I imagine that Hobbits are like masters of the polite fiction. They clearly love to gossip and tell tales, but they also really love the idea of nothing actually disrupting their leisurely, quiet lives, so you figure when they decide that not talking about something is required to do that, nobody talks about it. They pick themselves a nice little delusion and by god they stick to it.

Like this other thought I had once was that there’s this Dwarf that used to come by and visit Bilbo, probably one of the many cousins and relations of Thorin’s Company. And he kind of falls in love with the Shire and is like “That’s it, I’m retiring here.”

A Dwarf. Living in the Shire.

People don’t emigrate to the Shire. It’s not done! Hobbits can move from one part of the Shire to another, but you don’t have something else entirely move to it from outside of it!

Except it would be abominably, beastly rude to actually tell him that. “No, you can’t live here”, what, are we animals? Beasts? Orcs? Plus, uh, he’s kind of fucking rich. Like, really rich. Like he just plunked down a good three times what a hill is actually worth because he says it has “good bones”.

So everyone decides, for the sake of the peace, for the sake of their own minds…

… he is a Hobbit.

Hairiest Hobbit you ever saw. With a weirdly deep hole. Yeah people have been in that sucker and it just keeps. Going. Down. A weird distance down. Lot of stonework. But that there is Mr. Talbin Ironnails the Hobbit. Mm-hmm. Oh, the beard’s just a bit of an eccentricity, don’t mind him.

Need some metalwork done? Why, you want ol’ Talbin! Best Hobbit you’ve ever seen with a hammer and tongs. Dwarf? No, no, who ever heard of a Dwarf living in the Shire! That’s just old Talbin! Bit on the tall side, but don’t be intimidated at all.

Oh dear, wolves you say? Well, let’s go ask ol’ Talbin if he can take care of it. Once took a wolf’s head clean off with what we’re very sure was a very fancy woodsman’s axe, what with the long metal haft and two heads. Must have a bit of Took in him, does ol’ Talbin. Explains why he’s so odd, eh? Eh?

Beer? Drink you under the table, ol’ Talbin will! Why, some say he has the constitution of a Dwarf, ha ha ha! HE’S NOT THOUGH.

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Ji Lee

Redundant Clock 2017

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2025 is a good number, it’s a quarter of the way through the 20 hundreds and it’s got that nice set of 2s separated by only a 0. not bad. whatever happens this year at least it’ll be happening during a good number 😌

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2025 is a good number, it’s a quarter of the way through the 20 hundreds and it’s got that nice set of 2s separated by only a 0. not bad. whatever happens this year at least it’ll be happening during a good number 😌

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That particular disappointment of the more literate-than-average child upon discovering that “gaol” is just pronounced “jail”

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Idk exactly how to explain this but the softness of real wool and real linen is very different from the artificial softness of polyester “sherpa”, fuzzy faux-fur, spongey acrylic knits and people have gotten too used to the soft plastics and now associate wool with “itchy” and linen with rough and cotton with “too heavy” and then go and wear 100% polyester fleecy sweatshirts and say it’s so warm and cozy but actually they’re just staticky cooking in their sweat locked inside a plastic membrane and you are paying too much to be wearing filaments of petroleum products and the money isn’t going to the people sewing them either. I’m saying you all need to touch grass and the grass in this situation is good quality textiles made of natural fibres.

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my christmas cookie decoration was the survivorship bias diagram

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mr. acula, who is working on his PhD,

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Someone hit me with their car and I got isekai'd to a world that's really similar to my old one except in this one my collarbone is mysteriously broken

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Mort illustrations by Omar Rayyan for The Folio Society

I like them a lot. They are beautiful and convey the atmosphere and tone of the book perfectly. Loose enough to leave room for the imagination, and still faithful to the text. I wish he illustrated more Discworld.

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i know this means absolutely nothing to most people but basically all of the little web game things I've made recently (angels in automata, hex plant growing game, d.a.n.m.a.k.u., life music, sudoku land, the metroidvania style map editor, etc etc etc) are all entirely self-contained individual client-side html files that can be downloaded and run offline and have literally no libraries or frameworks or dependencies, because i'm an insane woman who enjoys hand coding my input handling and display code from scratch in vanilla js and having it all live in one single html file with the game logic and the page structure and the page style all just living and loving together side by side in a universal format that can be run by any web browser on any devixe. i'll even include image files as base64 data-uri strings just to keep every single asset inside the one file.