Shein is going down for being an organized criminal organization. Actors and Writers are striking. Student Loan debt relief may actually go through after all. Jack Smith is closing in on Trump, and all signs point to him dying in prison. Billionares are dying in ignoble and humiliating ways. Please God keep this ball rolling, it almost feels like the first taste of justice in about as long as I can remember.
“‘The brand has made billions by creating a secretive algorithm that astonishingly determines nascent fashion trends… coupling it with a corporate structure, including production and fulfillment schemes that are perfectly executed to grease the wheels of the algorithm, including its unsavory and illegal aspects,’ the lawsuit reads. …
"The plaintiffs additionally claim that Shein has ripped off their designs for its products, maintaining that 'exact copying is part and parcel of Shein’s ‘design’ process and organizational DNA.’”
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
Oh my god Wisconsin’s governor just used a line item veto to secure school funding increases every year through 2425. He struck out a line so it now reads “through the 2023-2425 school year”. He’s allowed to do this lol
I’m visiting my family in Iceland, and there’s a big statue of the Saviour in the chapel here. My two-year-old niece often points at the scars in the Jesus statue’s hands and says, “Boo-boo!”
So now I have an image in my head of when Christ visited the Nephites and Lamanites and blessed all their children. Maybe he picked up a tiny Nephite child, too young to understand what the scars meant, only knowing that she was being held by a kind man in the shiniest clothes she’d ever seen, and she touched his palms and exclaimed, “You have a boo-boo on your hand!” And Jesus smiled at her full of love and said with a laugh, “That’s right, dear child. I do have a boo-boo on my hand.” Maybe He even let her kiss it better before blessing her and healing all her wounds.
i will expound on this tomorrow probably but with every new batch of vault tracks it becomes more clear how the rerecording process inspired and motivated both the concept and the direct lyrics of Midnights
ok i’ve slept on it so i think i can make slightly more sense with this. i think revisiting all her old music and especially going through songs she felt were too personal or vulnerable or risky to put out at the time has helped her recognize some significant patterns in the different personal demons she’s fought throughout her life. like revisiting Castles Crumbling and Nothing New, or even Long Live and Change, she’s been able to examine all the facets of her fear of the fragility of peoples positive feelings toward her both personally and professionally. You can see how her remembering writing “You don’t want to know me, I will just let you down” for Castles Crumbling led directly to expanding on that concept by writing Dear Reader (which tbh I think she was trying to hint at with including “dear reader” in the SNTV announcement post?).
Anyway, these rerecordings are making me like Midnights more and more, its becoming clearer as a processing technique. just having to consider the concept of having the same mental struggles throughout the years just in different flavors throughout the years could be the thing that kept her up at night that sparked writing about a whole album of things that keep her up at night, to map it all out.
I keep thinking about this post while listening to Speak Now and recognizing so many emotional throughlines present in it and Midnights
In Castles Crumbling she talks about people looking at her like a monster, which definitely informed Anti-Hero’s “now I’m a monster on a hill”
Idk how much more I have to add but I just really think Midnights is a direct result of the rerecords, and I’m curious whether we’ll get another new album directly informed by them as well (not to say the future ones won’t, but they wouldn’t be recorded at the same time as the rerecords)
modern au renarin gets diagnosed with autism and the psychiatrist asks about family history and dalinar is like “oh I’m definitely not autistic I just require structure to function and rely on an ideology with strict explicit codes to dictate my behavior and morality and obsess over this one specific book and have trouble with subtle social manipulation and telling when people are lying and experience occasional seizures :)” and the psychiatrist looks at him like -_-
