- ttttttttttttttttttttt
- UuVvWwZ
Big Brother is watching you and smelling good.
- Melissa Bateson, "Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting"
- Katie Liljenquist, "The Smell of Virtue"
All that remains is to overload our sense of taste, touch, and hearing with good vibes.
Dynamic Open-Participation Divisions
- ZeFrank's Color War
- Tumblr's Sharks vs Cats
Dynamic Closed-Participation Divisions
- Hogwarts Sorting Hat
Fictional prejudices, stereotypes, and slang which produce derogatory terms that reveal our own tendencies towards prejudices, stereotypes, and slang have been on my mind.
Mutants in the Marvel Universe are decried as muties. The alien race in District 9 is crudely referred to as prawns. Robots get toaster, tin can, and bucket of bolts which relate them to inanimate metallic objects of lesser value.
Then there is the seemingly rare viewpoint of the human being as a lesser being. Possibly only available to aliens, artificial intelligences, and ascended beings. The slurs that stand out tend to refer to our evolutionary tree (hairless ape) or our biological traits (meatbag or fleshling). Aaron Stack (the Machine Man) and Bender are perhaps the most noteworthy for their proficiency at demeaning humans.
As with all things that dwell on my mind, this has already been covered at tvtropes.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasticSlurs
A while back M. and I did some experimentation with yarn dying with kool-aid. I tell you what, if you are wanting to kick a kool-aid habit, dying yarn with it should do it for you. It's kind of creepy how well it dyes the yarn. Kind of makes you wonder what it does to our insides. We started off with Knit Picks Bare Merino Wool Fingering weight yarn.
We did a couple of skeins of just solid. One with pink lemonade kool-aid for M. and one with black cherry kool-aid for me.
Then we branched out into multi-colored yarns. We tried two, three, and four colors:
I got the idea of hanging the yarn into the quart jars of kool-aid from a tutorial on the web. I thought the yarn above the jars would absorb the color, but it didn't, so I ended up with sections of undyed yarn in the multi-colored skeins. Here is the finished yarn from the first dying. It's hanging to dry outside on our patio.
I like the white sections in some of the color combos, but not all of them. Also, some of them turned out a little brighter/more pastel than I wanted, so I overdyed a few skeins a couple of weeks ago.
The skein on the left was originally dyed with orange and black cherry and then I overdyed it with a mixture of both orange and black cherry. The skein in the middle was originally dyed with tropical punch, grape, and lemonade and then overdyed with blue raspberry. The skein on the right was dyed with black cherry and then overdyed with grape. I'm pleased with how the over dyed skeins have come out. I have one more skein that I might overdye, but I haven't gotten it done yet.
I've started knitting with one of our dyed yarns. M. requested a pair of socks out of the pink lemonade dyed skein. This was specifically her skein.
This was the first skein that we dyed and I sort of messed it up, but it ended up being a happy accident. I had the kool-aid too concentrated and not enough water in the bowl to fully emerse the yarn, which meant that the color wasn't evenly distributed and there were some paler and even white spots. I was really upset with myself for messing up M.'s yarn, but it actually turned out really neat.
Just based on the kool-aid experience, I don't think I'll ever become a serious yarn dyer. It was a fun experiment, but not anything that I would want to do too much of. Plus there are so many fabulous indy dyed yarns out there for sale, that I'm not lacking for yarn!
This has already been a crazy fall and it's going to get crazier as it goes on. On the school/career front, I have started collecting data for my dissertation. This has eaten up a huge chunk of my time and has created a constant stream of things that I need to do each day. I should be done by the end of this week and I'll be relieved when it's over. I will then move directly into doing job interviews. We do everything way in advance in the accounting field, so I'll be interviewing for faculty positions that will start next fall. I've done one already and have more over the coming weeks. These interviews are all day affairs with research and sometimes teaching presentations and two days of travel to get there and then home again, so they are both fun and exhausting. Plus sometime in there I have to analyze the dissertation data and get it written up.
On to a more fun topic... knitting! I have finished up a number of projects that I haven't had time to blog about, so I'll just give quick details and pictures on each. The first up is the Wisp.
Over the summer, just about everyone my LYS made this out of the pattern yarn (Rowan Kidsilk Haze) and I just didn't like it. I think I just don't like that yarn because at some point someone made one out of malabrigo lace and I just loved it. After several false starts on other patterns with my Azul Profundo Malabrigo lace weight, I decided to jump on the Wisp band wagon. I knitted this on size 8 needles. I used the square circular needles which were kind of neat to knit with. The malabrigo is smaller gauged than the kidsilk haze, so it ended up a lot narrower, which was ok with me since what I really wanted was a scarf. I did 24 pattern repeats to get enough length on it.
The second project that I finished up was a pair of crazy, striped socks:
I made these out of two colorways of Noro Silk Garden Sock. One colorway was #252 and I lost the yarn band on the other colorway, so I'm not sure what it was. I think it was the same colorway that I made my very first scarf and hat out of. I used a basic sock pattern with just 12 rows of ribbing at the top and then the rest stockinette stitch. I alternated the colorways every 4 rounds on leg and foot of the sock and every 2 rows on the heel. I did the entire heel turn and toe in the non-#252 colorway. These turned out great. They are extremely warm and dense though, so I haven't gotten to wear them yet. I look forward to wearing them on some dreary day this winter when my dissertation and job search has me stressed and depressed, because really how can one not be happy when wearing crazy striped socks.
The next project was a quick little hat. I joined a Halloween Vampire swap on Ravelry. It's been fun. It's kind of like secret santa except that it's for Halloween and it's supposed to have a vampire theme. My spoilee for the swap appears to be a big Twilight fan, so I knitted her on of the patterns that were designed to replicate the hat that Bella wore in the movie on the beach at La Push.
I actually didn't care for the hat in the movie, but I've decided it's just the way the actress is wearing it. I had M. model the hat it looks adorable on her. I think I'm going to knit her one now. The hat knits up fast, but it's a killer on the hands. It's moss stitch, knitted in bulky yarn on size 7 needles.
The final project that I've finished up is what I have dubbed my "Vampire Scarf":
This is actually the Montego Bay Scarf pattern. I love this pattern and tried to knit it out of a different yarn a while back, but that yarn just wasn't right for this pattern. This time, I've knitted it in the much coveted Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100% Superwash yarn in the Rosenrot colorway. I call this my vampire scarf because I started knitting it only while watching True Blood this summer and then finished up while watching the Twilight movie and The Vampire Diaries. I love the scarf. I think my favorite part is the fringe, which is the only modification I made. The fringe was supposed to be braided with five strands folded double and I didn't like how thick the braids were, so I made them with three strands folded over.
M. and I did some kool-aid dying of yarn a while back and I overdyed some of it just recently, but I'm going to put those pictures in another post.
At the start of this latest episode of Fringe a police officer receives a phone call that instructs him to carry out an enigmatic task. The immediate thing that came to mind was that some writers had finally got wind of Alternate Reality Games and worked them into a story.
What a sinister thing that would be - a game that would drive participants to commit crimes.
Or at least unknowingly serve as accomplices as the case of Anthony Curcio and his Craigslist decoys.
"So you guys really embedded a top secret problem in a game hoping that someone like me would solve it?" - Eli Wallace, Stargate Universe
This trope of gamer-turned-hero is never going to die is it?
- The Last Starfighter
- Captain N: The Game Master
- http://www.eegra.com/show/sub/do/browse/cat/comics/id/77
Now that the customer is getting a voice there seems to be no shortage of stories of PR departments bending over backwards to appease them.
I wonder when the point will come where a company forgets what it's supposed to be selling and instead spends all of its time attempting to put out the multitude of fires.
Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
