Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.
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So… apparently Hank Green tried to explain how knitting is only just now apparently relevant to STEM fields, and in true Green Brother fashion, he did it in the most condescending & casually insulting way possible. Deborah Knits has a good overview and actual scientist Kristine Vike has an even better takedown here.
Now, keep in mind, I am biased in a couple of ways. I am biased in that I am a femme-trending knitter & crocheter, and I am biased in that I think both Green Brothers are smug assholes unworthy of their public adoration. So Hank reducing a literally ancient art to “silly ladies using artsy trial & error that we can now apply REAL worth to as a scientific or mathematical exercise” isn’t surprising or upsetting to me at all. If he lived a hundred or so years ago, he’d be one of the dudes stealing credit for Mary Anning’s fossil findings and acting like he was doing the little lady a favor.
And the video gets into some of the things that made me love yarnwork. It’s a great way to keep myself focused when I’m doing things like meetings or trainings, since it gives me something to do with my hands and not to start nodding off from sheer boredom (it’s a major reason why I really don’t like doing in-person training anymore & prefer remote). And as much as I hate the whole “mindfulness” scene, there is a relaxing & meditative quality to both knitting & crochet that has been particularly helpful for me. That’s all on top of the fact that you’re making something practical or useful, too. There’s an interesting history of people using knitting as a way to send coded messages, since the two main stitches convert to Morse code dots & dashes quite easily, to say nothing of parallels to binary coding language. And if you’ve never experienced the… outcome of making a garment without swatching for gauge first, you’ll understand just how important math & measurement is to yarnwork.
However, I do personally find the whole “knitting is science and thus now Valid” thing rather… exhausting. Yes, there’s as much discipline & calculation to it as there is creativity, but removing the role of creativity from knitting feels like an insult to the artistry of so many designers. It feels part & parcel of the social tendency to downplay the “worthiness” of creative work, and if you wanna see where that leads, well, just look at the sheer volume of AI slop online. Also, this is only afforded to knitting out of all yarn crafts; crochet is still seen as “lesser” even though it’s just as complex & calculation-based as knitting. Never sure where that attitude came from, especially since it took me literally decades to finally “get” crochet compared to a couple years for knitting, and it’s always bothered me.
I know that I’m not in step with a lot of the knitting scene online - for starters, I like using colors when I make things, instead of the popular endless sea of beige. But I’m 100% on the same page with people who get annoyed at dudes like Hank Green who openly sneered at yarnwork and its rich history until he could find some way to apply it to HIS supposed field to give it “value”. Maybe he & his brother can do another “I’m totally not bothered people aren’t worshipping me, guys, don’t put it in the papers that I got mad” dance vid on TikTok. That or he’ll post a “correction” video that makes John’s idea of “ace rep” look considered & thorough.
(LATER-IN-THE-WEEK EDIT: Welp, the “response” came out, and it consisted of finding some random lady on his staff to try to explain it in the video description, failing to address the condescension & casual sexism that was at the heart of the complaints and paint the outrage over “we got the terms wrong”. At this point, the only people defending this are Green brother simps who would happily throw money at their scammy “faux-therapy tamagotchi” app, which I’ve discovered is another of Hank’s bullshit cash flows, and people who liked that he challenged RFKJ’s stupidity & ignore literally everything else. At the end of the day, this is on par with John’s “ace rep” footnote and exactly the kind of arrogance I’d expect from either of them, complete with idiotic fans who think Hank will pat their heads for defending him. So yeah… they can go fuck themselves and so can their fans.)
(SATURDAY EDIT: Apparently this has spread to Facebook, Reddit, etc, and you can tell cuz the Sexism Defense Squad is out in their full glory. Apparently, there was no sexism in the video, and actually WE'RE the sexists cuz some men knit too, and it doesn't matter cuz physics is more important. Not pictured - too many emojis, AI-generated PFPs, and every other post they've made being in another language. The only social media place not talking about Hank's fuckup is Bluesky, cuz of course not; their "knitting" feeds are 90% Hey Arnold fanfic stuff for some unknown reason. These guys are equally as annoying as the fangirls, or the pick-mes like WOOLNEEDLESHANDS & her absolute refusal to even acknowledge the obvious sexism in play, and it’s just reminding me that absolutely nothing of value will ever be attached to the Green brothers or anyone who capes for them.)
Anyway, time to keep practicing until I can make my dream project, the below sweater but in the High Energy gear color scheme. I’m not a Zillennial or Zoomer, and I’m not on Insta, so I still like to make stuff involving this wild concept called “color”.
Look, you can even make Koko’s parrot! Just gotta figure out where to work in the checkerboard…
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Time to celebrate one of the rarest events in the world: me finishing a knitting or crochet project.
I decided to make a granny triangle tree skirt for my parents, and to my shock, unlike the bunting, I actually got it done well before the decorating season for which it was made. It needs some steam blocking but is otherwise finished.
Detail of the border (Yarn from Joanns, RIP)
The wooden buttons I used were ones my grandmother salvaged from
one of my grandfather’s cardigans.
Now, back to working on my monthly subscription box project, which had been delayed for 4-5 months cuz the company’s site update managed to bork everything on their end.
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This week’s video recommendation might be hitting a few days after the event it’s referencing, but it’s the most appropriate that I can choose.
ABSTRACT is one of those channels that embodies “quality over quantity”. Every single one of her 10 videos is excellent, covering tragedies with careful research & genuine empathy. This is no different, reminding us that the handful of people who sacrificed themselves to save others were just… people. They weren’t trained for this; they just saw that if they didn’t do something, the end result would be much worse than just a crash, so they figured out a plan & did what they had to do.
Other channels I’ve watched emphasize this human role and its toll; one that looks at the histories behind seemingly mundane photographs keeps reminding people that pretty much every example he’s found of someone who died that day was just an everyday person, who had done everyday things. They were just people working on a weekday in an office job. Even in the years after, the toll kept rising, thanks to first responders & nearby residents/workers being adversely affected by the miasma. I still think about the father of one old college friend, who worked for a telecom company & spent weeks at a time at their HQ near the site to get phone lines up again, and wonder if he’s still alive, since so many in similar situations aren’t.
Maybe it’s because so much of my online circle has been infected by Twitch streamer brain worms in the past couple of years thanks to H*san & His Amazing(ly Awful) Friends, but sadly, this is the only place that I feel safe recommending anything to commemorate 9/11. They’ve decided that it’s a dark joke at best, a karmic hit that they want to see repeated at worst, and they’ll happily say as much or try to paint comments from their favorite streamer as somehow not being exactly what he said. They were already showing themselves to be prone to what’s been dubbed ZIP code based empathy, and I know that they’ll be loudly & proudly awful about today. For all that they talk about seeing others as people as being important, they tend to forget that when they’re prompted to do it by some talking head. It’s a smug casual cruelty that insists it’s not, and I don’t feel like dealing with it.
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Hopefully this week will be the last week that I complain about Bluesky, cuz I've decided that I'm done there.
I get zero traffic from there, not even people sharing the links, and today's “let's champion the honor of an arrogant hack who said that the Holocaust wasn't as bad as Gaza now & views bi/pan/ace people as a threat to her queerness cuz DC decided to fire her & pull a book she never should have been given” wave has been the absolute worst. I knew Thursday was gonna be ugly there, but everyone worked together to reach a new low. I guess I'm just too neurotypical for that place (that or diagnosed by actual people & not Dr Buzzfeed).
I deleted the app & locked responses, and unless it's a case like the autistic dude who sent me death threats over Lost (he tried to pick a fight when I said that the finale was “divisive”), I highly doubt I'll be seeing anyone from there. I know that the stats weren't the greatest, but even then, I knew y'all weren't visiting from there.
As I'm leaving, their way of breaking up the constant politically motivated shrieking is to post… nostalgic Tumblr posts. Most of which are just more political shrieking and/or “yeah, that totally happened” stories. I felt like posting the one that sums up Tumblr to me - TERFs straight up admitting that there’s an aphobe-to-TERF pipeline - but they'd probably agree with the aphobia. I matured past that point in life, so it's not for me. It’s for people who CAN'T do that or will refuse to if they absolutely had to, and I have truly run out of patience for 30somethings that still act like 10th graders.
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Lightning-squared round! Cuz the cats will only tolerate my ranting so much.
RIP, Haru Urara. May your heavenly fields have the sweetest ryegrass.
Oh shit, oh fuck, now I’m thinking of how to make a small-square crochet blanket in the checks & colors of the High Energy gear… actually have a pattern that would work too…
Animation is sincerely one of my favorite mediums of art, but damn if the animation fandom (and a generation of creators that came up through it into the field) hasn’t soured me on engaging with it anymore. Especially the indie scene, cuz it seems like the stuff that I do like (Punch Punch Forever & Wastelandia) gets ignored or attacked, while the stuff that gets a following winds up getting a fanbase that defends the weird fetish bootleg accounts on YT stealing the characters from them. Can’t wait for that to happen with Dana’s edgy tantrum show…
When you see someone sharing a post shocked about a tasteless 9/11 “tribute” cheerleading routine, but you know that they’ve become such a complete H*sanoid that they’re probably sharing cuz they have the same disrespect for that day’s dead as their favorite streamer & his orbit does… -___-
Reject emoji modernity, return to emoticon tradition.
Why the hell is Bluesky’s crochet feed full of accounts making the same joke about the lady in Australia who poisoned her in-laws with killer mushrooms? That’s more baffling than the baseball posts, cuz at least those are about a guy named “Crochet”.
Saw an ad for Taco Bell from the early 2000s, with tacos costing a mere 59¢ each. I now understand my grandparents’ sticker shock whenever they’d go shopping.
There’s a lot that I hate about modern fandom, but their tendency to basically harass people into coming out will always be the worst. People have a right to privacy, even when they’re “famous” in some way, and not every person wants to be an activist for their identity like y’all seem to demand. Also, as we’ve seen with an entire subreddit, sometimes these fans get it extremely obviously WRONG.
Man, I REALLY hope Punk didn't actually hurt his back on that misjudged rope flip… I can’t do this again, especially now that he & AJ are back in power couple form.
Randomly thought back to one of the more disappointing things I ever backed on Kickstarter. It sold itself as “girl heroes that are magical-girl-adjacent fight an alien invasion”, but in execution, it felt more like the dismal paranoid sci-fi shows my mom loves (stuff like Falling Skies or the bad recent V remake) where very very occasionally a character would use her powers to do something mundane. Given that the 2nd volume barely made funding & the 3rd failed entirely, I don’t think I was the only person who was disappointed with the end product versus the pitch.
Sucks that we just gotta accept that, at any moment, a YouTube channel you like will take a BetterHelp sponsorship despite the FTC report being the third search result, under the site itself and a SCATHING review of their services. The novelty land title thing got more pushback than this…
Horse daughter game update: Quit picking on Special Week’s hearty appetite, game! The phrase “hungry as a horse” exists for a reason!
Time for the annual seemingly impossible “Comics sites talk about mental health portrayals in their medium without at least half of the piece being a transcription of the writer gargling Tom King’s war crimin’ balls” challenge. At least they stopped shilling for Maggs “Slide into a depressed fan’s DMs to promote your pretentious-ass Vertigo reject book” Visaggio.
Huh. Caldor is back as a retro collector’s site. Cool, cool. Now, bring back Clover as something. Anything. Please, that’s MY local store nostalgia. I’ll even accept a Spring store selling logo stuff.
Remember the obsessive fan dude who won’t shut up about the power changes made from the comics to TV for Ms Marvel? Yep, he’s still going. At this point, I hope every comic and/or collector shop in his area has a warning poster not to let him in the store, cuz he’s really getting into “deface merchandise & pepper spray any employee who tries to stop you” territory. Not every mention of the TV show is your cue to complain again, dude.
The official song of every cat when they get the zoomies is the Benny Hill theme. This is not up for debate.
Another day, another “if this victim looked even a tiny bit like I do, no one would be losing their shit about this because it wouldn’t hit their racist & classist buttons the same way” example. Not elaborating, but if you’re smart, you can probably guess.
To borrow a quote from a long-ago MiSTing of a very bad & very long fanfic, my apathy about superhero movies has become so palpable that I should adopt it as a pet. (Honk if you know the reference btw.)
Oh no, the smug hack who said that the Holocaust “isn't as bad” as current events and mocked the very existence of bisexuals lost her Bluesky account AND her comic writing gig?! Gee, that's sure a shame, I'm sure it was the one singular post going around and not the well-documented history of her being a hateful shithead & hiding behind her transness when called on it.
Seriously, though, the outrage over Gretchen is a good example of why I'm getting sick of Bluesky. You can’t share her non-apology for saying Holocaust denialism rhetoric while getting pissed at JKR for hers. As much as they want to pretend that there isn't, there really is a culture of “it's okay when WE do it” deeply ingrained there.
Finally decided to mute the absolute worst of the moots who’s gone down the H*san pipeline too far. Responding to people memorializing actual friends & family they lost on 9/11 by smugly replying “well I’LL never forget how it was used to demonize a whole religion” is beyond being too autistic to read the room (yes, it’s in his bio because of course it is) and just being a straight-up asshole. And given how he has absolutely zero problem demonizing every other Abrahamic religion, especially in the past couple of years, it’s especially rich. He’s pretty much become the embodiment of everything punchable about leftist circles, in particular on Bluesky, and humoring the occasional good comics tweet isn’t worth tolerating him anymore. And yes, he’s the same guy as the “obsessed with complaining about Ms Marvel” dude.
This week feels like an exceptionally appropriate week for the discussion I saw about how the internet has basically killed the concept of “nuance” because the algorithm will only ever push extremes. Adding to that, it’s the people who insist that their extreme is the only correct one & that anyone still capable of seeing nuance is somehow evil that desperately need to have this drilled into their heads.
Important zucchini update: babby is forming!
If it stays yellow, I'll be even more confused, cuz I had been growing the green kind.
One more video recommendation. There have been a lot of videos lately calling out TikTok Zoomers for considering any attempt to learn something new or share a beloved hobby/interest “cringe”, many from their peers who have been victim to this treatment. This is a really good entry, sharing her own passions while eloquently addressing the topic.
Comics Beat leaving Gretchen’s victim narrative unquestioned and closing comments so people can’t point out her history of venomous biphobia or link to her recent “the Holocaust wasn’t THAT bad” Bluesky comments is knocking my opinion of them back to the era when every hype article for an indie book they ran was based solely around how many DSM-V categories they could apply to the stories. Kinda pathetic, really.
Honestly, the sheer rush I’ve seen to rally around, champion, & protect a person who clearly hates them solely cuz of one demographic box she checks is truly garbage. It’s “rules for thee, not for we”, cuz if a cis person was in this situation complete with the same history of shitty attitudes as her, they wouldn’t be so fucking outraged, and they damn well know it. But as is the online leftist motto, especially at Bluesky & especially in nerd circles, “It’s okay when WE do it.” Much like with similar reactions to a late night show none of them have ever watched getting canned, it’s probably more about the sweet sweet outrage-gasm than anything else. Just another thing they have in common with their ideological opposites that they refuse to accept.
Resumed painting my nails again after having stopped around the time work switched to mostly remote during COVID, and it’s really fun to do again. So far it’s mostly Sally Hansen Miracle Gel (cuz I’m not made of money), and I’m enjoying seeing how using the different top coats changes the look of the same base color. Unfortunately, I still can’t do the initial application without getting polish on my skin, especially my right hand, so I’ll never be photographing the results.
I know Mom is still pissed at them, but I really wanna buy another Annie's kit. The Moroccan kit in Midnight Mosaic, to be precise...
Please pardon any wonky formatting. Blogger decided to be a little shit about copying my images from my Goggle Doc working drafft this week.
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This week’s cat picture is all about inspecting the new Halloween decorations.
“... Mom…?”
See you next time! Unless you’re here to defend the honor of either Green brother or of Bluesky, in which case don’t come back and instead go outside.
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