Thinking About How I Could Probably Convince People That Guns For Australian And South American Markets

Thinking about how I could probably convince people that guns for Australian and South American markets have anticlockwise rifling because of the Coriolis effect in the same way that a toilet's flushing action spins in the opposite direction south of the Equator

More Posts from Kyn-elwynn and Others

kyn-elwynn

2 months ago

Cora Harrington
@lingerie_addict

Having a thread about a stone age girl going viral and having a thread about the fashion industry going viral makes me want to do a thread connecting both of these subjects to talk about one of my favorite prehistoric articles of clothing: the Lendbreen Tunic.

img desc: Norwegian historian and researcher shown alongside the Lendbreen Tunic. Tunic is long, brown, and plain.

Cora Harrington
@lingerie_addict
Starting off with the technicalities, the Lendbreen Tunic is actually from the Iron Age, not the Stone Age. As far as I know, we don’t have any Stone Age clothing still in existence. The oldest garment we have is from the Bronze Age and is called the Tarkhan Dress.

img desc: Photo of the Tarkhan Dress. It looks like a linen tunic with some threadbare areas and pleats.

tweet: The Lendbreen Tunic was found chilling in a crumpled up ball in the Norwegian mountains because the earth is melting, and the ice going away revealed it. It's roughly 1700 years old, is made of wool, and has what we would think of as a very basic construction.

img desc: Deceptively important ball of dirty wool in some rocks

Tweet:
So let's set the stage. While clothing today is the cheapest it's ever been in human history (this is a fact, not a debate), for the longest time, clothes were one of the most expensive things you could own.

Part of what makes clothing so cheap today is that a lot of the initial work - such as planting, harvesting, processing, and weaving the fibers - can be done automatically. While the actual sewing still takes human hands, the spinning and weaving part does not.

People collecting clothing is a very recent thing in human history. If you own multiple outfits, you are more "clothes rich" than most human beings in the past ever were. It's like spices. They're ubiquitous now, but were once a sign of wealth and prestige.

The Lendbreen Tunic is made of undyed wool in a twill weave, no fastenings, and is clearly well-worn. But here’s why I chose this garment specifically. Because textile historians recreated it using the technology of the time, which is *fascinating.*

They started with an old Norwegian breed of sheep, and pulled the wool naturally rather than shearing, which would have changed the fiber qualities. In total, they gathered 2.5kg or roughly 5.5 pounds of wool.

Then they had to spin all this wool into thread. And no spinning wheels! The technology of the time was a drop spindle. They gathered 10 expert hand spinners and asked them to time themselves. It took 11 hours to spin 50 grams (about 1.75 oz). For all that wool, that's 544 hours.

(At this point, the researchers did turn to technology and used machine spinning because that's a lot of time and expense.)

Then all that thread had to be woven into cloth. They got an expert hand weaver (no shuttles!) and used a vertical loom. Working at peak capacity, she could weave 2-3 cm per hour (a maximum of around 1.2"). That worked out to 160 hours of just weaving.

Then, of course, it had to be sewn but that took a lot less time. What was interesting though is that the makers used 3 different stitches, which indicates expertise, deliberateness, and care.

So what is the total of all that hand labor?

760 hours.

760 hours to weave a plain tunic with no embellishments or fanciness at all. Just up a straight up t-shape. At the time this garment was made, the value of that labor was 380,000 NOK.

In US dollars, that's almost $38,000.

(Yes, I know the currency conversion isn't exact.)

That is an ASTONISHING amount of labor. For exactly 1 item of clothing. It is mind-boggling. I'm over here feeling like my head will explode if I think too hard about it. We have no real point of comparison for that type of work today (except maybe, haute couture, sorta kinda).

For me, the Lendbreen Tunic shows just how expensive and time consuming clothing was. And that's what I love about this topic. It's not just clothes. It's history and economics and math and technology and humanity. We're the only animals that wear clothing. It's a story of us.

But I do wonder how the person who lost it felt. I'd have been pissed as hell.

Sources:

https://t.co/r3sjz7YWZT

https://t.co/3hdDxBvGAw

https://t.co/prCBj5snUX

@lingerie_addict has a really cool thread on ancient fashion over on twitter.

Those source links are here

cambridge.org

Youtube

ucl.ac.uk

22K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

2 months ago

13K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

4 months ago

These men just stole the personal information of everyone in America AND control the Treasury. Link to article.

Akash Bobba

Edward Coristine

Luke Farritor

Gautier Cole Killian

Gavin Kliger

Ethan Shaotran

Spread their names!

148K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

4 months ago

(X)

56K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

3 months ago

Hand References

Pin on Pinterest

50 notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

2 months ago

Suzanne Collin’s just said fuck you to everyone who’s ever critiqued the Hunger Games as being a “teen girl saves the day” story. She said oh, Mockingjay didn’t make it clear enough? Here’s a book about how people have been rebelling for decades only to have their efforts suppressed and propagandized. Rebellion takes time and it takes failure and Katniss may have been the spark that ignited the wildfire but she did so standing atop the doused flames of everyone who came before her.

27K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

2 months ago

The people who are in power right now want us to be quiet and cowed. So we need to be noisy and defiant to show that we are not going anywhere. And we need to show each other that we are going to survive this — even if it gets dark.

"Flaunt and Flail": Queer Art in the Age of Techno-Fascism (my latest newsletter!)

561 notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

1 month ago

17K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

3 months ago

Hey, you reblogged that AI post and I was surprised to see something so mean on your blog. "If you cant write unassisted, fuck you, youre a disgrace to the community." Is that really something you want on your blog?

Just in case this isn't a spam message:

Posting AI-generated content to a platform intended to be an archive for writers is not appropriate use of the platform. On a platform intended for human creation, it is rude and inappropriate to clog search results with AI-produced content which often plagiarizes the work of human authors.

Use of generative AI is also horrible for our environment, leading to massive waste of fossil fuel energy and water. We should not be doing damage to our planet for the sake of generating (robot-produced, often plagiarized) fiction, especially when the joy of fiction comes from the creation and emotion of real people.

Rather than giving a prompt to a generative AI, people should consider attempting to write their own work, or asking another writer from the fandom if they would be interested in writing it. Anyone who is capable of typing a prompt into ChatGPT is capable of writing a story. The first attempts may not be amazing, but that is true of any skill, and anyone can improve with time and practice - and while ChatGPT may give you big returns in your time, it doesn't give you practice, growth, or creativity, which is where the joy of writing should come from.

18K notes View Post

kyn-elwynn

2 months ago

they took 14 vials of blood from me