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its so fucked that not only did they erase our languages and beat and kill our people for using them but they stole the words of important tribes and important people and used them for the military and for trees and for food and for summer camps. average native american name is seen by non ntvs as a joke or something to use or consume, not a human being

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There’s a regular at the fabric superstore. She’s at least 80 years old, and she just got back into sewing after giving it up for 40 years. We’ll call her Irma.

I love Irma.

Irma is constantly surprised by the newfangled sewing gadgets our store sells. Today she bought some extra-fine glass-head pins and a magnetic pincushion. As I’m ringing her purchases up, she tells me very seriously, “did you know, if you’re careful, you can sew RIGHT OVER those pins? You don’t need to take them out!”

I told her that I liked that you can’t accidentally melt the head of the glass pins with your iron, and she nodded. “They used to all be like that, but times changed.”

I love old sewing machines and asked what kind of machine she has, and she goes, “Oh, it’s an old Singer Featherweight that my husband bought me when we were first married. It’s probably not worth anything anymore, but the thing sews fine. Have you seen the ones those girls over there–” indicating the sewing machine sub-store in my location “–have? Those things go in every direction and the needle always comes to the top when you stop sewing! Imagine how handy that is!”

I mention that I used to sew on my grandmother’s Featherweight but now there’s a intra-family war about who owns Grandma’s Featherweight and so no one gets to use it. It’s genuinely the best portable straight-stitch machine I’ve ever used.

I warn her to never let anyone tell her that Featherweight isn’t worth something. “I know, I miss my husband and it’s always going to have a place in my heart, just like your grandma’s.”

“I mean, Irma, there’s that, but they’re also worth a really notable amount of money. The Singer Featherweight is really financially valuable. I almost never see them for sale around here for less than about $400, and that’s in bad condition.”

“It’s a good thing my husband’s dead, honey, because if you told him that he managed to buy a sewing machine that’s worth more in 2021 than he bought it for in 1950, well, he’d be so smug that I just wouldn’t be able to tolerate driving home with him.”

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Objects as spaceships, by Eric Geusz

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You have the coolest bunny.

If he did a spin and whipped someone with it would it land like a sack of potatoes or more like a leather belt?

i drew him with a bigger tail

(HE/HIM)

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i drew him with a bigger tail

(HE/HIM)

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Any more to this image and my device will actually commit to the threat of self destruction

hello!

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Based off two real customers I had lol

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TFW you see a familiar blog in a stolen Tumblr post on FB. UwU

@asteroidtroglodyte

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did not realise until just now that the karkat guy is from homestuck i thought he was from one of your marble hornets or locked tombs god bles

karkat from marble hornets

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Correct

[what your favorite]

Stardew Valley Spouse

[says about you]

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Yea I don’t know the context either

Naw I’m good I think this is fine

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Shiny

I just spent so long trying to understand that post about glass. As somebody who thinks glass is extremely cool but doesn't know a whole lot about how it's made, we're you saying that clear glass is entirely colorless by definition? Also do you have a good resource to learn out clear glass being invented in the 15th century? If not I'll Google it. I'm a history nerd so this is right up my ally. Thanks for reading all that I hope to hear back from you if it's not too much trouble.

So, for clarity’s sake (heh), I’ll start off by pointing out that photons of Visible Light do not go through glass in the same way that Radio or Microwave photons do. The scale of Visible Light is small enough to meaningfully interact with the crystalline lattice of most stones, glass included. In order to be optically clear, a piece of glass must transmit the signal coherently through its bulk mass, and emit an image out the other side. Clear glass, in response to Visible Light, behaves more akin to how an electrical conductor (like wire) interacts with electricity than an absence or void would. This is, incidentally, why we can make optical devices like lenses and glasses and telescopes out of clear glass.

Glassmaking in the Mediterranean owes much to a few key events. Firstly, there was a tradition of artistic glass working in Byzantium many centuries ago, a descendant of Glassmaking traditions from Rome and the Levant, which peaked in the 10th century.

Many families knowledgeable in such things would eventually flee the fall of that empire west, into Venetian territory. Unfortunately for the wood-framed-building-inhabiting people of Venice, the glassworks would often spark municipal fires, so in the 13th century the Doge of Venice banished them to a mist-shrouded island prison set them all up on the island of Murano, under guard, creating an Artist’s Colony of Glassmaking families.

This arrangement worked out well for all involved for several centuries. Although the Glassmakers were not permitted to leave, they had access to all the raw materials of a far-flung trade network, state protection, wealth, and prestige; and Venice had an in-house luxury export that constantly evolved as the various families of craftsmen flexed on each other, trying to one-up each other with innovations in color, hardness, and form.

The far-flung trade network was important, as it allowed for very pure samples of a wide variety of chemically active minerals to be made available to these workshops. Critically, these ingredients included pebbles of very pure quartz, and Alume Catino, a form of soda ash from the Levant.

Ultimately this culminated in the 15th century invention of Venetian Cristallo: a perfectly clear synthetic Rock Crystal Glass. This cemented Murano as center of the Glass-making world in the west for 2 centuries, until the English discovered that adding Lead Oxide to the process also produced a clear glass that was cheaper to make and easier to work.

The ability of these, and later, clear glasses to be ground into optical lenses, and the resultant invention of telescope and microscopes, would kick-start scientific elements of the Renaissance, and the relatively inexpensive and high-quality mirrors and spectacles produced would kick-start the symmetrical Renaissance in Philosophy and Moral Theory.

To circle back to your question:

Glass is a transmitter of light. A photon hits a spot in the crystalline lattice and sets off a chain reaction of vibrations in the atomic lattice of the glass, which, upon reaching the far side of the glass bulk, release an equivalent photon. In optically clear glasses, this is done in such an orderly and coherent manner that actual resolvable images emerge. That said, I reiterate for clarity: photons are destroyed and created by this process. What emerges is not what went in.

The inclusion of metal oxides such as Soda Ash and Lead oxide is necessary to furnish particular metallic ingredients into the crystalline lattice of the glass. This provides forms of long-range order conducive to signal transmission. Remember, glassy materials are defined by a variable degree of long-range order in their lattice structure. No order; you get scattering; and the light that emerges is a hazy white color. Choose particular metals to also dope your molten glass with, and the glass will emit particular frequencies: this is what we call colored glass, or stained glass. The reasons those dopants resonate at those frequencies of light are Electro-Chemical and Quantum, and beyond the scope of this post.

Glass is one of the Foundation Stones of modern, technologically advanced Civilization. Modern glass is nothing less than a Miracle of Artifice, crafted by skilled hands across dozens of generations. Our Ancestors worked very hard to give us this. It is good for us to tell their stories.

Hope that gave you a good place to start! Enjoy your journey! There is much still to learn!

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When I was trying to write my tags on the last post, I attempted to copy-paste my special tag-friendly comma (‚) and it. It pasted an image of a spiral staircase? This wasn't on my clipboard. I've never seen this staircase before. What the fuck?

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I will continue posting in favour of there being fewer people like that

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Source @hotshotriot

I liked the drawing and wanted to share it with you.

Don't stop talking about Palestine, about the massacres in Gaza, about the famine in Gaza, about the children in Gaza, Also, don't stop sharing and donating, we need you.