25mar2026

Well, hello, Happy Spring:) Resolutely ignoring the news, sorry, it will provoke my anxiety to levels requiring medication if I'm not careful. That said, my profound sympathy to everyone undergoing the assorted levels of hell our dreadful gov't is imposing on the world in their quest to a) make even more money and b) try to get us to forget the Epstein files exist.

Adjacent to my researches for today's art (& its way-too-long accompanying text) I've stumbled across some interesting linkies, so here are a few from tabs still open:

• Medieval Knitting Guild tests were challenging. Appallingly so. Spoiler: pay money, get in more easily.
• Shetland shawls could cost more than gold per ounce. What fascinated me was that these practitioners also spun the wool to make these gossamer garments; lace, before machines came in, was also made with hand-spun fibers thinner than can be produced by machine today. It too was fantastically time consuming and therefore, expensive. (Also, 1960s accents are fascinatingly different than now, which, since I lived through the 60s, kinda blows my mind;)
• Bronze Age (i.e. Ancient) clothing is basically rectangles, held on with pins. No surprise there!
• What did surprise me was how large these garments were (though, thinking about kilts, another rectangular garment that also served as a blanket, it shouldn't’ve) and especially, how colourful.

Turns out a wide range of vegetable dyes is documented to before the Common era, but I haven't watched that video yet:) I guess I've been too influenced by all these dull-brownish historical films & their earth toned costuming; before I looked it up, I would not have guessed that all that colour likely(1) pre-dated knitting, which—at least in Europe—seems to have been roughly contemporaneous with lace-making; bobbin lace, at least, requires lots (and lots) of fine steel pins, so I expect that was driven by the availability of good steel. Super fine knitting neeles, ditto, and yes, they knit stockings and the like to a very fine gauge, and at a speed that is really only available to someone who was bred to that task, from childhood. Which, nowadays, we're not, because we have machines to do all that.

Thank goodness. As much as I'm sad not to see handicraft practised at Olympian levels, I'm not sorry people are spared such repetitive—and for them, not at all ‘fun’—tasks.

(I once watched a video of czech production beadmakers, who IIRC made about 800 pieces a day? I was a “production” beadmaker, and never made more than 200 pieces a day, and certainly not every day; my hands never would've tolerated that kind of use. Of course we moderns specialize too—think about the narrowness of academic research—but craft is now mostly pursued as a form of art, so the focus is on discovery, as opposed to churning stuff out.)

Anyway. To celebrate messing about, here's an illustration of a Pern fanwork in which I play with a variety of media. It was fun to do, at least!

---

The origins of knitting are lost in the mists of time; though if you include its earlier single-needle cousin, naalbinding, then it fer shure goes back thousands of years.

23feb2026

I should be doing tax prep, which I hoped would simpler this year, but alas, the fates, or at least the US tax code, keeps finding ways to make my life complicated. Clearly, I have not yet mastered advanced intermediate adulting. (Advanced is health care or insurance companies, or worst of all, intersection of the two, ugggggghhhhhh)

Anyway: I have a couple of fun linkies, to go with the pretty snow that's currently falling—me trying to find joy where I can...

Via the ever growing slacktivist thread (Fred's computer evidently broke a week or two ago):

• a very cute blog post that goes back in hundred year increments to show how English has changed—pretty cool, and that long-ago Chaucer class got me back to (more or less) 1200, but 1100, let alone 1000 (well into Old English) was beyond me. Can we bring back the thorn, and those other cool runicly inspired glyphs?
• also very cool, sustainable mardi gras beads which not only are to address the 2.5 million pounds of plastic bead trash, but are cool looking.

As a glass bead maker, I'd love to see glass bead mardi-gras beads come back, but let's be real here, they'd likely be Chinese, as opposed to manufactured locally, so that old custom has likely sailed, so this seems like a nice update.

Also...it might not seem especially upbeat, but I was actually found hope in this 80minute podcast/vlog between three folks—2 POCs and a gay guy—discussing The Incel to ICE Pipeline. I suppose it's sort of a follow-up to what masculinity can look like that I was discussing in the prior intro.

And here's a little celebratory giftwrap.

19feb2026

So I was scrolling through the usual collection of of Midwest Cleaning, Antibot, Rebecca Watson, Girl with the Dogs type of youtube videos that sort of serve as timers when I'm attempting the never ending tasks of journalling and/or tidying up my office (usually from the mess the journalling generates...) and I finally decided to click this fella's reaction to some song or other after seeing it multiple times in my suggestions.

Wow. So I tracked down the original (animated) version of Lydia the Bard's Feed Us Your Girls (there's a more recent and prettier live action version, but in my opinion, the original, harsher animated one is more effective.

Then went back to Blackspeed's channel and watched the dolls mannequins vid which sparked the recces for the Lydia the Bard piece, Morgan St. Jean's not all men and, then, because it looked interesting, the reaction to Ren's single-take with (to me) fascinating set design featuring flickering lights, Hi Ren in which he (Ren, not Blackspeed) explicates the impact too-long-untreated lyme disease has on his mental and physical health (and people wonder why I'm wild to get the vaccine...!) Then read comments on the Lydia Bard reaction, which picked up on some stuff I missed (frex, it has three verses, each detailing the experience of a different person, not to mention the denouement at the end, which I think is really only, or at least only explicit? in the animation, another reason I really like that version.)

So, I guess that was my intro to musically inspired ‘reaction’ videos, as opposed to the AMSR-y housecleaning/pet-grooming or the politically tinged science vlog essays and their related material (i.e., religious criticism). I enjoyed them, but on the whole like this sort of thing better when related to the culture at large, which is what makes Antibot's reactions to assorted christian tiktoks interesting.

I've told people for years that I loathe horror, but that's obviously not true; I just interact with it a little differently. I liked Feed Us Your Girls because, though I'm relatively peaceable (age will do that to you), that song embodies the rage that runs like a white vein in black rock though me as a AFAB person: for me once upon a time as a young person, for young women in my life still subject to this garbage, for the grands who likely will: nieces and daughters and other children not even born yet. They should not have to go through this! And...mebbe they won't, quite as much.

This is why I listen to songs like that, read novella length essays detailing the repugnant behaviour of real-life rapists (valorized in my communities, so all the more painful than the garden-variety obscenely wealthy types dominating the news).

People consume fictive horror as a way to process, so they say. I, personally, find hope in the tiny cracks—the girls who get their revenge on one wolf, even as endless others surround them, the man secure enough to weep at their pain, the sf&f community's exposure of its monstrous, once-celebrated authors. On seeing decent people, men and women both, push back on this crap.

I have a friend who asked me, what is a man? I replied, someone who identifies that way. He didn't like my answer, but the decent men who push back on monstrous behaviour, who are brave enough to cry, willing to admit they're ill, even who just repeatedly take the time and trouble to explain to their viewers that hoarders are mentally ill, not lazy slobs —those folks are all admirably demonstrating how to be good men.

Cinder, however, is a cat.

26jan2026

Welcome to the Home of the Free and ...

Zzzzzzzzzt!\record scratch...(I hated that sound so much when I was a child...)

Yanno, I thought I wuz gonna spend my golden years shaking my fists at clouds, complaining about kids these days and nagging my youngest for grandchildren. Or at least, alternating bouts of putzing in the garden and/or making art and travelling.

But noooooooooooo, instead I'm making half-assed political cartoons while the country my mother and father in law served in WWII against nazis slowly ever faster slides into exactly the same situation.

I am, primarily, of German heritage; my genealogist uncle traced our ancestors back to a pair army-deserting peasants who came to this country in the mid 1800s for a better life because they didn't want to become cannon fodder in the squabbles between the various principalities as they became Germany.

That anyone in this country with German ancestors has the chutzpah to support anti-immigration efforts, especially ICE and the DHS, really grinds my gears, because of the appalling hypocrisy. Because, hello, we were immigrants too?

Anyway. This is my reaction to the wanton slaughter of a fellow US citizen. And yes, I'd like to get back to sunshine and puppies and beads too. Let's all work for that kind of future, shall we?

23jan2026

Today's FridayFugly is not so much the art (though you're certainly welcome to make that interpreation, of course;) but the thing it's meant to protest, namely the ICE invasion of Minnesota, the Twin Cities in particular.

Hello Yummy made this awesome gingerbread 2026 ‘2025 dumpster fire’ which is as far as I can tell only shows up on their fb feed, which is why I'm not linking/reposting, but it surely summed up my feelings in December; I was kinda hoping (with, I admit no basis whatsoever) that 2026 would be better. Somehow.

Ah ha ha...

It's been so bad. Not even one week in, and things are even worse. Not saying it can't or won't get even more worse, because it absolutely can, but gee whiz, what a mess. I basically cowered in front of my screens, watching gentle little things. I knew I should be protesting. Sending email. Even associating with local activist groups. I didn't have the gumption for any of those things.

After a couple of weeks of grief, realizing that no, stuff wasn't gonna get better, I dipped a toe in, and made this little art. It's not a lot, but it's a beginning. And today is a no-shop/no-work day. I can do that.

May you find some, if not happy, at least helpful, beginnings.

Take care.

7jan2026

There's not a lot I personally can do to push back against the current administration's war crimes, but ...one thing I can do is talk, just a tiny bit, about Greenland, because I think most Americans have only the vaguest idea of what this country is—certainly I didn't, before I took up kayaking.

Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenlandic), or Grønland (Danish; it's an ‘autonomous territory’ of Denmark) has less than 60,000 people. 60,000! That's barely double the population of the small town I live in. The US has, what, 300 million? Even Wyoming, the least densely populated state in the US, has about 10x the number of Greenland's people, who, you guessed it, are mostly Iniut peoples. And we propose to invade?

That's not an invasion, that's a bully stomping on ants for the sheer cruelty of it. It's ludicrous. Anyway. Back to Greenland. It's difficult to fly into and out of, because of fog—my kayaking teacher, who went on a trip there this summer, was fogged in for days—fortunately, after his trip and not before.

Qajaq is the Inuktitut word for the skin on frame boats that far-northern peoples used to hunt seals; because the country is rocky, without many trees (because, hello, it's in the Arctic Circle) wood is scarce, so traditional qajaqs are a frame covered with sealskin, which also served as material for the special garment seal hunters used to (ahem) seal themselves into the boat: this hooded jacket would bind around the opening of the boat to keep water out.

But it also means the paddler is bound to the boat, besides which spending any amount of time in frigid water is a death sentence. So, kayakers learned to flip themselves back upright when waves turned them under. This corkscrewing technique is called a roll, and it's among the trickier moves a serious sea kayaker has to master. I've managed, in dead flat or pool conditions, to do it maybe 10 times? over nearly three years of struggling with it? (Good thing we modern sea kayakers use something called a skirt, which is a good deal more detachable from the combing, or cockpit rim of the kayak, cuz I've had to do a lot of wet exits because of my lousy rolling skills;)

Greenland paddles are distinguished from so called Euro-style paddles in that they are longer, and don't really have blades per se—the ends are slightly wider, but that's all. Traditional greenland paddles might be reinforced with bone on the ends to protect them from wear (seal hunters made their own boats and equipment). In addition to a paddle, the hunter would also carry a harpoon and a short paddle (perhaps 15 or so inches) for launching the harpoon called a norsaq.

Basic rolls take advantage of the paddle length as the kayaker sweeps it for lift to assist rolling; a traditional qajaq paddler, however, might use his (seal hunters were usually men) norsaq or even hands if both paddle and norsaq were unavailable to roll himself back up. Needless to say, these techniques required even more skill.

As powerboats came in, Greenlanders switched to this faster, more efficient and much safer mode of transportation, and kayaks nearly died out. They were a hunting tool, after all, like bows and arrows. As is so often the case with traditional practices, it was outsiders (Brits, I believe) who documented kayaking, turning it to a recreational way to explore the British Isles’ extensive coastlines: UK level 5 certification is, at least amongst the folks with whom I paddle, considered a point of excellence.

But the people of Greenland have recaptured their traditional practise; they have an annual contest for rolls, with points assigned for levels of difficulty, rather like Olympic ice skating. Though once limited to natives, anyone (who qualifies?) can now join in. Qajaq has branched into all sorts of boats and water sports to go with—sea kayaks like mine can be used for paddling around rivers and lakes, of course, but also (kayak) surfing, rock gardening, and touring; whitewater boats, which to my eyes are stubby little weird looking plastic boats for, you guessed it, whitewater, are popular out west; the wide, open ‘recreational kayaks’ are favoured for fishing or photography (kayaking is great for photographing wildlife because it's so quiet). Often considered ‘entry-level’ they're an inexpensive way to spend time on the water.

Qajaq (it's pronounced kayak, btw) is just one aspect of Greenland, but I thought I'd try to illuminate a bit of this country's culture—not least because some day, I'd like to go there!

In the meantime, have a picture of some colourful qayaqs.