Go forth and fill your libraries with media.
Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.
- ttttttttttttttttttttt
- UuVvWwZ
I was just told that the Amazon Conduit will be fixed by tomorrow. I will post here as soon as I get word that it's back up and running.
I know this has been frustrating and I am sorry there wasn't more I could do to make it less so. I really appreciate your patience though.
Cheers,
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
Bad news. As many of you have probably noticed, the Amazon Conduit was not fixed in the last week's release. Unfortunately, there was an undetected bug that is preventing the conduit from working.
We are working on this bug fix and hope to have the Conduit back up and running this week.
I will keep you posted.
Thank you for being so patient.
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
Blog Action Day is every October 15th, when blogger are asked to post something about a single issue to show our strength and conviction as an online community. It's a great way to feel connected to the greater good, and the participation of so many bloggers to support the world's leading non-profit organizations is something you can do to help, right now. By blogging today, you're supporting some of the world's leading non-profits and sharing your voice for change.
This year's topic is climate change, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the topic. If you participate, leave us a link to your post in the comments, so we know to check out your post!
Go to www.blogactionday.org to learn more, get a badge for your blog showing your participation, and see some ideas for your post on climate change.
Can't wait to read your posts!
~ daisy
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!
