alexiphanic

[alexiphanic]

Beautiful

[alexiphanic]

I love learning about history 💚

Plants. Although they might seem at first to be weird animals that don't move very fast, plants actually serve many useful purposes for humanity. And until we figure out what those are, some of them are pretty delicious.

When I was a kid, I remember there was a big garlic shortage. Now, we all know in our modern enlightened times that garlic is really easy to raise. You shove the garlic that you didn't eat into the ground, forget about it for a few months, and then go "what's that weird shit over there?" in the spring. When you pull it up, you have more delicious garlic to eat.

Thing is, we forgot that middle part. We forgot to leave some garlic for the ground. Ate it all up, and then there was none left for the farmers to plant. Didn't even have little bits of root left. That meant no garlic in the spring, which meant no garlic bread in the spring. People went fucking nuts, I'll tell you that much.

One of my earliest memories is watching in horror as my mom beat the living shit out of some other mom with chains, because she tried to steal our garlic out of the trunk at the grocery store. It wasn't even actual garlic, but a can of seasoning. "Ms. Dash," if that is even her real name. She's got a lot to answer for. Eventually, the military brought us some garlic from Ontario, and they were able to relieve the survivors of the Great Olive Garden Standoff.

So when you get garlic bread with your loved ones tonight, remember that you're lucky to have it. Some farmer resisted the temptation to eat literally every piece of garlic in front of them long enough to throw it in the ground.

[alexiphanic]

Refuse

Reduce

Reuse

Repair

Repurpose

Rot (compost or otherwise reclaim the materials)

Recycle

... In that order

Remember "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" ? I feel like there's been a distancing from the "reduce" and "reuse" part and a favoritism towards "recycle" by corporate American.

Capitalism can still thrive with recycling in the mix. You buy Plastic Thing 1, throw it away after one use, and they take that and recycle it into Plastic Thing 2 and sell it back to you. All while continuing to harm the environment.

Reusing puts a damper on things. They can't sell you Plastic Thing 2 when you're still using Plastic Thing 1. Plastic forks, for example- there is literally no reason why you can't reuse plastic forks more than once (aside from maybe microplastics, but it's too late for that)

Reducing is the one everyone wants to ignore. Just don't buy Plastic Thing 1. You don't need Plastic Thing 1. Pick up a set of metal forks and use those for years. Convenience is killing the planet

[alexiphanic]

A cockatoo broke their rocket

A cockatoo broke our rocket. :(

Gonna need a tiny bit more context here bud

[alexiphanic]

[alexiphanic]

I've been stitching on this cotton reusable bag today.

Side panel, stitched with the design Hishi Seigaiha (diamond shaped blue ocean waves)

The colours are pretty flat in this picture, but the different-coloured stitching in the middle is green, matching the design panel below.

Some of the stitching will be covered up when the panels are sewn back together. Not sure how I'm going to do that yet.

I love this penguin. Yellow Eyed Penguin Trust is based in Dunedin and I expect there was some connection with producing these bags.

Sometimes when I mend things I think about the way the damage happened. Stitching like this doesn't undamage my items or make the past 19 years unhappen.

But it does mean the damage stops and the bag will become functional again. It's time consuming - there are easier ways to repair an old cotton tote bag for sure, and there are so many in the world it's barely worth doing. I'm a sentimental idiot, I know. I don't know why I'm bothering to do this. But somehow it feels healing.

Reduce waste - save costs.

More than 19 years ago, I moved cities to start university. My mum gifted me these two cotton reusable shopping bags.

This was 2006 and even in Aotearoa this was ahead of the curve for sustainability (or greenwashing, if you like). There were earnest columns about them in the Listener. I am old enough to remember when sustainability was about putting 7 items in each plastic single-use supermarket bag...

Anyway, many years later. The previous government banned single-use plastic shopping bags. We're now doing meta analysis studies on whether it's better for The Environment to use paper, heavy duty plastic, cotton or single-use plastic. I keep seeing people grieving their cotton bags because they are unsustainable. - Like no your forty-eight cotton bags are not inherently a problem, the issue is you have that many. Newsflash, overconsumption of anything is unsustainable, if you never change your consumer habits!

All these commentaries paint cotton bags in a negative light stating you'd have to use the bags hundreds of times to outweigh the damage done by it over its lifetime, vs the single-use plastic bag. 173 times seems to be the current thing. I saw one study claiming you'd need to use it a thousand times.

As if that's impossible? As if that's even somewhat unlikely??

I've had these things for almost 2 decades! Even if I only used them only once a week, it's literally been one thousand weeks. (and I've definitely used them more often than that: I wore them instead of handbags for a year, circa 2011, telling everyone I was into reusable bags before it was cool).

I've fixed them each multiple times already. I just went to remove the handles off this one for yet another fix and accidentally ripped the front panel. I thought "had a good run ig"... But nah i have only used this bag a thousand times, it hasn't outweighed enough plastic fucking bags yet eh!

I'm going to fix it again. I'm going to get weird about it.

[alexiphanic]

I love her and I love everyone learning about emery strawberries from this post 😍

How do we care for our sewing kit dragons please? How can we feed and keep them happy?

guardian of the sewing kit

[alexiphanic]

Made about 13 ft / 4 meters of dandelion stem cordage because... uhhhhh... I don't know. Had to do something with my hands or go insane I guess.

[alexiphanic]

dandelion leaves contain a really good amount of vitamins A, C, & K, as well as good iron and calcium. as long as you're in a clean area where you know pesticides haven't been used & is free of pollutants, ie away from roads, you can harvest however much you'd like!

black walnut & dandelion pesto

cheesy dandelion spirals

cicoria in padella (italian greens with garlic & chili)

dandelion leaf egg noodles

dandelion tortellini soup

erbazzone (italian wild greens pie)

hindbeh b'ziet (lebanese greens with oil & carmelized onions)

[alexiphanic]

Reblog to hug prev poster (they need a hug)

[alexiphanic]

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

[alexiphanic]

Fantastic

“The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema — and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.” (I was slack-jawed by the end of this.)

[alexiphanic]

I've put some denim in to support the base, and lined it with a strip from an old sheet.

I am using sashiko threads here, and the pattern right on the bottom is by Green Wrapper from her paid patreon. Since taking this picture I have finished stitching the pattern and chosen more for the side panels.

I think on the design panels I'm going to go over it with green running stitches until it looks good and then

and then do something else I suppose

More than 19 years ago, I moved cities to start university. My mum gifted me these two cotton reusable shopping bags.

This was 2006 and even in Aotearoa this was ahead of the curve for sustainability (or greenwashing, if you like). There were earnest columns about them in the Listener. I am old enough to remember when sustainability was about putting 7 items in each plastic single-use supermarket bag...

Anyway, many years later. The previous government banned single-use plastic shopping bags. We're now doing meta analysis studies on whether it's better for The Environment to use paper, heavy duty plastic, cotton or single-use plastic. I keep seeing people grieving their cotton bags because they are unsustainable. - Like no your forty-eight cotton bags are not inherently a problem, the issue is you have that many. Newsflash, overconsumption of anything is unsustainable, if you never change your consumer habits!

All these commentaries paint cotton bags in a negative light stating you'd have to use the bags hundreds of times to outweigh the damage done by it over its lifetime, vs the single-use plastic bag. 173 times seems to be the current thing. I saw one study claiming you'd need to use it a thousand times.

As if that's impossible? As if that's even somewhat unlikely??

I've had these things for almost 2 decades! Even if I only used them only once a week, it's literally been one thousand weeks. (and I've definitely used them more often than that: I wore them instead of handbags for a year, circa 2011, telling everyone I was into reusable bags before it was cool).

I've fixed them each multiple times already. I just went to remove the handles off this one for yet another fix and accidentally ripped the front panel. I thought "had a good run ig"... But nah i have only used this bag a thousand times, it hasn't outweighed enough plastic fucking bags yet eh!

I'm going to fix it again. I'm going to get weird about it.

[alexiphanic]

Circle skirts

Converting imperial to metric

fiber arts is really a laundering scheme for mathematics.

[alexiphanic]

Alone Together

Every now and then, someone will ask, "why is it still called first contact?" They think they are clever, apparently, by pointing out that we already know intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, and so it should simply be called 'contact.'

But it is clear that they do not understand the weight these words carry.

Far back in 2145, humankind made first contact on a small, airless, inner moon of Uranus. Except... no one was there to greet us. All we found were the remains. Within a week, our understanding of life in the universe had gone from hopeful optimism to somber concern: had we really been so close to contact, only for our elder and only counterparts to vanish? Research on the ruins revealed that the ancient starfarers had wiped themselves out in a catastrophic civil conflict, and we feared what that meant for us. We resolved, then, that we would do better, not only for ourselves but for the ones who had come before us and lost their way. We had given up one kind of loneliness -that of simple ignorance- for another, far worse kind of loneliness: that of the sole survivor.

Our loneliness was not to last, fortunately. In 2191, the crew of the Arete mission to Proxima Centauri encountered a species of lifeform on the frigid moon Calypso which exhibited unusual intelligence, and in time discovered the great settlements they inhabited. After two years of study, the Arete explorers established rudimentary two-way communication with the Calypsians and grew a conversational relationship with the people of one nearby settlement. Humankind was overjoyed: here, at last, were the interstellar neighbors we had longed for.

But eventually the Arete mission had to return to Earth, and the Calypsians would not achieve interstellar radio transmission for a hundred more years. Even once they were able to commune with us across the great void, we found that our species were too different to have much in common aside from scientific interest. Thus, we were faced once more with a new and uniquely tragic kind of loneliness -almost that of estranged cousins.

In 2220, our prayers seemed to be answered at last by a stray radio signal from Tau Ceti. Though it took time, we were able to decipher its meaning and sent a return message, followed by a probe. The initial course of contact was slow, as is always the case with remote contact from across the emptiness. Over patient years of interaction, we learned how to communicate with the skae, and eventually sent a crewed mission to their homeworld of Ra'na: Andromeda One, the first of many.

We discovered the skae were a younger civilization than us, by several centuries, and so took responsibility for teaching them to be more like us. We taught them the secrets of nature and technology that they had not yet uncovered- of black holes and quarks, of the microchip and the fusion reactor. They accepted our gifts with wonder and gratitude, and in turn taught us their ways of terraformation- new methods to accelerate the healing of our own world and transform others from dead waste to bountiful gardens. Together we founded a coalition, to unite all civilizations seeking starflight under the common purposes of curiosity and betterment. But although this was everything humanity had ever wanted, we still felt the pangs of loneliness: the burden of the elder and mentor.

It was our good fortune, then, that elder civilizations were watching us. Just a decade after founding the USSC, Earth received a radio message from the star Epsilon Indi. It was a direct greeting, excited and hopeful. "We are shyxaure of Delvasi and ziirpu of Virvv. We saw you," they said, "and you have done well. We have ached to reach out for centuries, but worried over what would follow if we did. The alliance you have forged with the people of Tau Ceti is assurance that we are, truly, alike in thought. We are proud to call you neighbors, and hope to soon call you friends."

While we waited for their embassy ship to arrive as promised, humanity reveled in passing a test we had not known was ongoing. We had proven ourselves worthy of contact, worthy of inclusion into the interstellar community... and yet, a new loneliness seeped through the cracks of our joy. We had anguished in isolation for so long, all the while our cosmic seniors watched from not so far away. For hundreds of years, we had not realized there were new friends just beyond the horizon. And so, in secret, we mourned this loneliness: that of what could have been.

In the centuries that have followed we have discovered even more sapient beings around us: the rimor of the Eridani Network, the Xib Zjhar of Xiilu Qam, the pluunima of Niima. We are connected to each other in many ways, but the most important of these is simply that we share the gift of sapience. In this vast and quiet universe, any fellow intelligence is infinitely precious because we are the only ones, as far as we know. Every contact event is first contact, all over again, ​because every new civilization that we encounter will expand our horizons just enough for us to wonder: "was that last contact? Is there still someone else out there, or is that the end of roll call? Are we alone together, now?"

This, the grandest and most poignant of all mysteries, is why the motto of the Coalition is "solum habemus invicem et stellas" – "we only have each other and the stars."

[alexiphanic]

More than 19 years ago, I moved cities to start university. My mum gifted me these two cotton reusable shopping bags.

This was 2006 and even in Aotearoa this was ahead of the curve for sustainability (or greenwashing, if you like). There were earnest columns about them in the Listener. I am old enough to remember when sustainability was about putting 7 items in each plastic single-use supermarket bag...

Anyway, many years later. The previous government banned single-use plastic shopping bags. We're now doing meta analysis studies on whether it's better for The Environment to use paper, heavy duty plastic, cotton or single-use plastic. I keep seeing people grieving their cotton bags because they are unsustainable. - Like no your forty-eight cotton bags are not inherently a problem, the issue is you have that many. Newsflash, overconsumption of anything is unsustainable, if you never change your consumer habits!

All these commentaries paint cotton bags in a negative light stating you'd have to use the bags hundreds of times to outweigh the damage done by it over its lifetime, vs the single-use plastic bag. 173 times seems to be the current thing. I saw one study claiming you'd need to use it a thousand times.

As if that's impossible? As if that's even somewhat unlikely??

I've had these things for almost 2 decades! Even if I only used them only once a week, it's literally been one thousand weeks. (and I've definitely used them more often than that: I wore them instead of handbags for a year, circa 2011, telling everyone I was into reusable bags before it was cool).

I've fixed them each multiple times already. I just went to remove the handles off this one for yet another fix and accidentally ripped the front panel. I thought "had a good run ig"... But nah i have only used this bag a thousand times, it hasn't outweighed enough plastic fucking bags yet eh!

I'm going to fix it again. I'm going to get weird about it.

[alexiphanic]

Ooh I'm in the minority on this one but I stand by my vote!