Needles & Nilbogs

 A list: - *everything* is green here and there’s so much water and so many trees - everything is named after a person or a place in England. There’s no saints, no “beautiful views” or “snowy mountains,” no religious names at all. - turnpikes are a real thing and not just something that shows up in a history textbook  - ITS SUMMER WHY IS IT WET WHY IS IT RAINING I DONT LIKE IT - low flow toilets are less of a thing here because, according to my father, “water is basically free” - SERIOUSLY WHY SO GREEN WHY SO MUCH WATER - wet season is all year? All roofs are peaked? Everything’s so old????? What is UP with this place????!!! - no earthquakes what the HECK - why is there farmland right outside town??? - I apparently know nothing about water. This has been told to me multiple times. 

 Here I go off to college, time zone is changing, but as always this blog will be updated… whenever I feel like it which is often never.  [ID: an open plastic box with much yarn in it.] This is the Yarn I Am Taking, parentally limited to one box (a tragedy , I tell you)  The girls (gendered) about to be stored [ID: a Snow White large doll and two American girl dolls, original josefina and beforever kaya, sitting in front of a bed.] The other set of girls (nongendered bc trans/non-binary supremacy) about to be stored [ID: all of the Ever After High dolls I own sitting on boxes.]

To: My Family From: Me Subject: The Dye Jar That Has Apparently Been Molding On The Windowsill For Some Time Dear Family, Dye jar molded. So sorry about the smell and the fact that I didn’t notice for a couple months. <3 *penitent emojis* Love, Me. 

Sorry it’s been a while, college apps and finals and whatever, blah blah blah, okay time to YELL EXCITEDLY ABOUT CITY SPIES AGAIN (spoilers ahead I’m not gonna mark anything except the big stuff). You can find my last round of yelling about book 4 here . Okay! So!! In the last few weeks we’ve gotten a lot of news about book 4, City of the Dead (CotD), and it’s all been absolutely fascinating. From Instagram, we have: slide 8 of this Instagram post   about Ponti’s year in review [slide 8 ID: a picture of Ponti’s computer screen with the prologue for book 4 partially visible and marked up], the book trailer  and the previous trailer  [video IDs: various pictures of Egypt intermixed with pictures of the city spies doing their thing], a p iece of trivia from November 4  [ID: a slide with a picture of an Egyptian boy and a pyramid, saying “100 years ago today, King Tut’s tomb was discovered by this 12-year old boy”], and the cover announcement which is what the fir...

 Tech week happened, sorry. Brief photodump today, but I’ll probably be better able to blog starting in January after all my college apps are in — I’m thinking about maybe dumping the “only posting on thursdays” thing at least until then and probably after too, cause that’s really feeling constricting. I wanted a schedule to force me to do stuff but now I’ve gotten really busy and I should probably at least reevaluate the schedule situation.  Anyways these are all my recent projects most of which speak for themselves.

 So I came home from retreat with strep throat. I’ve been sick all week and so today is just a photodump from retreat so have fun with that. Lots of redwoods! 

 I will have a photodump from the trip we went on next week, once I’ve had a bit to process, and I’ll talk about some fun yarn stuff and game stuff soon (it’s been a while, I know, I’ve had a weird summer), but this week is all about poetry, specifically a whole bunch of poem snippets I wrote over the last few days. (Thursday’s note: This was supposed to go out yesterday, to make up for absolutely nothing last week and in celebration of my birthday, but the beach happened so I didn’t write.) This is mostly a loose celebration, in an odd way, that it’s my birthday and as such I can do whatever I want here (still true even when it isn’t my birthday. Let me have my moment of oddity though), so I’m posting poetry.  Something There is something very poetic about all this — late afternoon sun in my eyes hair and skirt flowing, swirling in the wind  strings streaming from my hands while I weave  Weaving I am  Weaving a poem As I am knotting this bracelet Because There ...

 Today went badly. Here. Dog picture courtesy of my awesome honorary aunt. He’s very cute and just as sweet as her. That’s it that’s all I have to say.

 I’ve been writing a lot of new/adapted lyrics to protest songs straight from the Little Red Songbook (I have the really big anthology edition. It’s awesome), and I’m just fed up enough with America right now that I’m sharing them. Disclaimer: these are probably originally public domain songs? Most of them are old enough, I think. Anyways, I’m not the original composer and half the lyrics are nearly the same, so just take this as my contribution to the time honored musical protest tradition. The Anawim Anthem — Tune: Dump The Bosses Off Your Back (Brill)  We are poor, forlorn and hungry, There are lots of things we lack; And our lives, made up of misery, So dump the gov'ment off our backs. All the agonies we suffer, We can end with some good whacks— This cannot keep on a-happening, So dump the gov'ment off our backs! Teachers’ Strike (Tune: Solidarity Forever) Aguilar took the money that he never toiled to earn, But without their brains and teaching not a single class will run...

I had all these ideas, but somehow I just have no motivation to write this week. I have a thing, a gaming thing. It is almost done, but I don’t know how to get to the point where it’s done. I am so close. It just doesn’t want to be finished. So today, I’m going to whine about discuss the DMC numbering system for floss colors, and complain about all the better options explore ways that it could be easier to remember.  First, the DMC numbering system is a means of organizing their vast array of colors. They have at least a thousand color codes, all of which define a very specific color and shade. These codes don’t have any relation to the colors they represent, and there’s no rhyme or reason to the codes. Some related colors are near each other, like 971 Pumpkin and 970 Pumpkin Light, or 796 and 797, both dark blues. But 815 is a dark red and 818 is light pink, and some shades (mostly ecru) don’t have a number even. It’s frustrating, hard to remember, and usually easy to mix up the...

 Too busy to write, studying for APUSH, scribbled this out last week and meant to get this out earlier but forgot.  I wrote myself a calc practice problem or two, all yarn related. How many can you solve? 1. The circumference C (in stitches) of a Pi Shawl is defined as a function of its radius r (in rounds); C = 2r. The area of a circle is pi*r^2. At the point where the circumference is 4, the radius is increasing by 3 rounds/hr. What is the rate of change of the area with respect to time? (Area is measured in rounds^2)  2. The rate at which a knitter adds stitches to a blanket, in stitches per hour, can be modeled in terms of the number of stitches in the blanket (unrealistic, but still): dS/dt = 1/5(500 - S), for 0 ≤ t ≤ 25 . At time t=0, there are 10 stitches in the blanket. a) Find the rate at which the knitter adds stitches when there are 250 stitches in the blanket. b) Find S(t). c) Will the blanket be completely done (S=500) after 25 hours? How many stitches did th...

Shut up, it’s still Thursday. I really like historical textiles, and I like fantasy worlds, and I like world building. So let’s talk fantasy textile traditions, for your default fantasy d&d-ish world. I have a bunch of ideas, and so I’m going to present a guide to developing a complete textile tradition for a fantasy culture, using examples, and also a list of things I’ve done that anyone can steal and drop into a game, because I have a lot of those. That’ll be the end of this three part series. This first bit is mostly about researching and coming up with general ideas, next week will be about making specific traditions, and the last week will be a list of ideas that you can use to build on.  I want to note that this is going into a lot of detail, and most people aren’t going to use this level of detail. I actually often start with specific traditions rather than a general thing, but I have a lot of preexisting knowledge that I can use to develop the general ideas more quickly...

 I start a lot of blog entries with “I’ve been really busy this week”, and this is another case where that’s true. Instead of actual anything, this is a snippet of backstory for one of my D&D characters: Fia, who I’ve definitely mentioned before. This is just a moment from her backstory as a rebel in a cell of the sorcerous underground, fighting against the establishment, except this bit is her and her best friend talking. (I haven’t slept enough this week, this is not eloquent, but I’m putting this out there because otherwise there shalt not be anything here.)  Fia and JWW — — —  It had been a stressful mission, and Fia was curled up in the corner of the safehouse's broom closet in the comfortable dark. She was enjoying the quiet and playing with a bit of her hair when someone opened the door.  "Go away," she said. "I don't want to talk." "I just need a broom, don't worry," a voice with a thick British accent said. "I'll be out of...

Yeah. I got sick. I’m too behind and also too grouchy to put anything together. I can offer either nothing (in that case stop here) or really really old (January 2021) murderbot diaries fanfic I wrote that’s not horribly embarrassing hopefully, only cause that’s what I’ve got hanging around my local storage. It’s based off of opera (le nozze de figaro), written because I could, and from back when I had something like free time. Written in markdown, but it doesn’t seem to transfer from drafts very well. Stuff in underscores is supposed to be in italics.

This is the first part of a complex project I’m working on for a number of unrelated reasons (sort of a bet, sort of a dare, and then I got really intrigued…) that has to do with the real-world physics of D&D5e magic, and translating magic to physics equations. The goal is to be able to write something that looks like it could be a chapter out of a physics textbook, but for D&D magic-users. The first step, though, is to be able to come up with a way of representing magical power (in game terms, spell slots) as something that can be worked with (an equation or a constant or something).  I started with a simple method that took the number and level of spell slots for a given character level and produces a single measure of magical power. I used the table for multiclass character spell slots by level (PH 165) for all my work, because I wanted something that did not require a specific class. This method should work for providing a measure of power for any class that can cast sp...

 I woke up this morning to a bunch of texts from one of my group chats buzzing. Two people had spent about half the night swapping drabbles (in case that’s a new term for you — they’re a term for stories, usually fanfics, that are exactly a hundred words long and a complete story) about any number of things (it started as d&d character drabbles, then switched to actual fanfics). Towards the time I woke up, they had switched to shorter stories, challenging each other to get shorter and shorter but still tell a good story. The last one was only 10 words! I’m also reading some vintage crochet and knitting patterns that were written when space was at a premium. They tend toward, well, short and concise don’t even begin to describe them. More like incomplete (sometimes) and requiring interpretation (always).  So I got inspired. Here are a bunch of really short rpgs and patterns. Each paragraph is a new one, and I’ll give a word count for each, based on the word processor I use....

 I’m busy this week so here’s pictures. Mostly spinning. Haven’t done Christmas presents as much as I should. I’m missing materials anyways. Roving I loosely put together and spun. Wool.  White cotton-ball cotton (more on that at a later time) and the roving above. Both about fingering weight, chainplied.  Chainplied cotton from a ball I dyed a while ago  Wider shot of the dyed cotton More pictures of finished things Cotton on the spindle Wool ready to be plied

Happy Chanukah! Happy Advent! I had a Chanukah gaming thing that I was going to do, but I didn’t finish it in time, so I’ll either post it next week or next year. Instead, I’m going to share my writing project. I seem to get these ideas every year, so I write them down.  Meet… the Yarn-, Math-, RPG-, and Book-Related Christmas carols (not all of these may be present, this is just a few things)! Some of these people have probably seen before; heard before, more likely, actually because I was singing in the shower when I came up with several of these. And not all of these are complete or good parodies. I write them when I think of them.  O Crochet Tree (O Tannebaum) Oh crochet tree, oh crochet tree, how lovely are your stitches. You stand so soft and cuddly, you are so warm and snuggly. Oh crochet tree, oh crochet tree, how lovely are your stitches.  We wish you a merry knit-mas (we wish you a merry Christmas) We wish you a merry knit-mas, we wish you a merry knit-mas, we w...

 The title says most of it. I’m down with what’s either a cold or (quite possibly) the flu — not COVID, I think, but I’ve got a crazy cough and a mild fever, and I’ve been out since Tuesday. This should tell you how bad I’m feeling: I haven’t crocheted more than half a round on the Current Shawl Project (no, you haven’t missed anything, I haven’t talked about it much) since I woke up Tuesday. That’s bad, for me.  So I’m just going to put random stuff here and not bother making anything coherent. Sorry, but I don’t feel well enough for anything else and if I did, I’d make up the work I’m not doing.  No pictures today. I haven’t taken anything for a while. No gaming stuff. I can’t be bothered to do anything right now. And no buffer to use to fill this week cause I used the last one a few weeks ago when I was swamped.  Here, have stuff I’m reading. I’m reading Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, 14th edition (cause it ties into something I’m doing); City Spies (a middle gr...

 So I was up late last night (we went to see the musical Hamilton [!!!], which is playing around here) and don’t have anything to talk about really, and I’m just going to dump a whole list of ideas I had a while ago for role playing games (both actual game-games and story ideas or campaigns, also characters), because I’m running on not enough sleep and I just don’t have the will to write anything more. If you want to use any of these game ideas, feel free to do whatever with them; I’d appreciate credit for them but honestly nobody really reads this anyways so I doubt anyone would use them and it really doesn’t matter.