elaisword - Tumblr blog

[elaisword]

ask a set theorist about the "real world applications" of their work

(and then run)

It's convenient to have a set theorist's number in case you ever get a non-principal ultrafilter stuck in your shower drain.

[elaisword]

Per amarmi bene

Per amarmi bene ci vuole un cuore

grande come un cranio, gonfio,

che risucchi i miei pensieri dalle tempie,

li filtri, e me l'immetta - più chiari - nel sangue.

Ci vuole un cervello pieno di contraddizioni

per comprendere i miei sproloqui di ore,

appassionati, vaghi, su cose ininfluenti,

e una bocca tagliente

per rispondermi a tono,

e dirmi che mi sbaglio, che ho torto.

Ci vogliono braccia generose per stringermi

se urlo di stanchezza e frustrazione,

arti pesanti, per schiacciarmi e

uno stomaco forte, che tolleri le spezie,

l'aglio in particolare, e il dolore.

Infine un petto, su cui possa dormire

comodo e sbavare, senza che ti disgusti.

Se sceglierai di amarmi, avrai bisogno

di fazzoletti di stoffa

per calmare i miei pianti,

mani gentili, non importa se spaccate,

per passare le tue dita fra i miei capelli,

dicendomi che sono al sicuro,

e sulla mi schiena per farmi gemere:

chiedimi di star fermo: che ti lasci continuare.

Ho bisogno che tu sappia,

prima di iniziare ad amarmi,

che non potrai cambiare il mio carattere,

che sono severo e duro,

che ho paura del buio,

e della solitudine.

Devi sapere che farmi guardare negli occhi

e ricambire il tuo sguardo senza tremare

è l'atto più intimo che posso darti.

Ti potrebbero servire inoltre:

empatia, tenacia, pazienza,

buona musica da cantare in macchina,

la patente, perché non so guidare,

pigrizia a sufficienza per star,

buttate a letto, le ore a scopare,

ridere, guardarci o guardarci un film.

Deve piacerti discutere,

dormire abbracciate, la mia risata,

la mia voce, se canto, e la mia vanità.

Devi capire il mio tono

anche quando non lo controllo,

devi odiare con passione, almeno

tanto quanto me, le ingiustizie,

uscire quando piove e i supermercati.

Devi desiderare la danza dell'usare

ed esser usate, la violenza nel sesso,

concepire il contatto e il dolore come ricerca

di me in te, e viceversa.

Ho bisogno di essere amato e,

per amarmi bene, devi essere

un pezzo di roccia grezza, come me,

piena di spigoli, brutture e infiltrazioni,

devi scontrarti coi miei angoli,

fronte a fronte guardandoci negli occhi,

o a parole e dirmi "è deprorevole"

e "non sono d'accordo" e "cattivo".

Se il tuo odore acre di sudore

(il picco dell'erotismo nel sapore, lo sguardo

languido e pesante, i baci umidi e

la consistenza del tuo collo, la lingua e

le tue mani su di me) mi inebrierà abbastanza,

desidererò con tutto me stesso il tuo piacere

e in una sfida scherzosa,

t'interromperò chiedendo:

"cosa c'è?", o "cosa ridi?"

[elaisword]

the universal college experience, no matter your major, is learning how remarkably fucked everything is. except business majors theyre having a great time learning to do basic arithmetic and and staring at that one supply and demand graph where the line goes up

[elaisword]

Explaining a beautiful mathematical concept and the person asks for the real world application like bitch first off the real world application is it makes me personally ecstatic and second it doesn't need one because it's my special little princess concept

[elaisword]

I’m an enjoyer of applied math. Hypothetically. The problem is half the time I do applied math they’re like “so first we’re going to make 25 assumptions” and my pure math brain immediately violently recoils

[elaisword]

Since people are arguing about whether 0 is a natural number again, instead of joining in I'm taking 0 out of the integers until you learn to get along. You don't get nice ring structure until you behave

[elaisword]

Math people are always saying shit like 'nontrivial', 'unsolved', and 'consecutive'. one of their many endearing qualities.

[elaisword]

theres so many fucking theorems

[elaisword]

Surface of revolution of a Reuleaux triangle

[elaisword]

[elaisword]

A friend: Can you mend this for me?

Me, frothing at the mouth like a rabid Hyena: Gimme

[elaisword]

It's so funny to me that people think of Math/Mathematicians as being hyper-logical and rational. Like, have you seen some of the wild things hiding in the Math?

Did you know there are non-computable numbers?? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant)

Did you know that there are things that are true, but we can't prove them??? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)

Did you know that we can prove that something exists, and yet never actually figure out what that thing is?? (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonconstructiveProof.html)

Math is crazy. Math is wild. Math hardly makes sense, and when you think you understand the weirdest parts of it, everyone who hears you explain it to thinks you're a gibbering lunatic.

"In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them." - von Neumann

(please share more unhinged math with me, i want to see more scary math)

[elaisword]

i love the complex plane i wish the y axis was real

[elaisword]

Avrei volentieri evitato le immagini

smielate degli ultimi mesi nella mia poesia;

ma ho la lingua coperta di uno strato

pungente sui lati e il fondo

di semini e dolce, acre e triste,

e agli angoli esterni dei miei occhi

lacrime per il tuo ingenuo

"avrei voluto portarti a raccogliere le more,

ma non era stagione".

Ha aperto un'altra ferita:

nel mio cuore ha risuonato

"come mi picerebbe farvi le tagliatelle!" e

"non sono pronto". Nemmeno per un attimo,

nemmeno per finta sono,

come credi, "normale a riguardo".

Era normale per te, normale quel gesto,

normale affetto, cura, attenzione.

(li chiamo amore, io: tu no.)

Ogni volta che apro il barattolo

e appoggio il cucchiaino sporco in bocca

ti allontani un po' di più, esaurendoti

piano piano, come la marmellata.

[elaisword]

#Tag yourself

[elaisword]

[elaisword]

Any tips on learning to make buttonholes? I've been putting it off for.... *checks notes* like three years.... but better late than never and all that. I don't have any fancy machines so I gotta do it by hand but that seems right up your alley.

Thanks!

It IS up my alley, yes, I do most of my buttonholes by hand!

I'm actually part way through filming an 18th century buttonhole tutorial, but I expect it'll be a few more weeks before I finish that and put it on the youtubes, so in the meantime here's the very very short version. (The long version is looking like it'll probably be about 40 minutes maybe, judging by how much script I've written compared to my last video?)

Mark your line, a bit longer than your button is wide. I usually use a graphite mechanical pencil on light fabrics, and a light coloured pencil crayon on dark ones. (I have fabric pencils too, but they're much softer and leave a thicker line.) You may want to baste the layers together around all the marked buttonholes if you're working on something big and the layers are shifty and slippery. I'm not basting here because this is just a pants placket.

Do a little running stitch (or perhaps a running backstitch) in fine thread around the line at the width you want the finished buttonhole to be. This holds the layers of fabric together and acts as a nice little guide for when you do the buttonhole stitches.

Cut along the marked line using a buttonhole cutter, or a woodworking chisel. Glossy magazines are the best surface to put underneath your work as you push down, and you can give it a little tap with a rubber mallet if it's not going through all the way.

I'm aware that there are some people who cut their buttonholes open using seam rippers, and if any of them are reading this please know that that is abhorrent behaviour and I need you to stop it immediately. Stop it.

Go get a buttonhole cutter for 10 bucks and your life will be better for it. Or go to the nearest hardware store and get a little woodworking chisel. This includes machine buttonholes, use the buttonhole cutter on them too. If you continue to cut open buttonholes with a seam ripper after reading this you are personally responsible for at least 3 of the grey hairs on my head.

Do a whipstitch around the cut edges, to help prevent fraying while you work and to keep all those threads out of the way. (For my everyday shirts I usually do a machine buttonhole instead of this step, and then just hand stitch over it, because it's a bit faster and a lot sturdier on the thin fabrics.)

I like to mark out my button locations at this point, because I can mark them through the holes without the buttonhole stitches getting in the way.

For the actual buttonhole stitches it's really nice if you have silk buttonhole twist, but I usually use those little balls of DMC cotton pearl/perle because it's cheap and a good weight. NOT stranded embroidery floss, no separate strands! It's got to be one smooth twisted thing!

Here's a comparison pic between silk buttonhole twist (left) and cotton pearl (right). Both can make nice looking buttonholes, but the silk is a bit nicer to work with and the knots line up more smoothly.

I've actually only used the silk for one garment ever, but am going to try to do it more often on my nicer things. I find the cotton holds up well enough to daily wear though, despite being not ideal. The buttonholes are never the first part of my garments to wear out.

I cut a piece of about one arm's length more or less, depending on the size of buttonhole. For any hole longer than about 4cm I use 2 threads, one to do each side, because the end gets very frayed and scruffy by the time you've put it through the fabric that many times.

I wax about 2cm of the tip (Not the entire thread. I wax the outlining/overcasting thread but not the buttonhole thread itself.) to make it stick in the fabric better when I start off the thread. I don't tend to tie it, I just do a couple of stabstitches or backstitches and it holds well. (I'm generally very thorough with tying off my threads when it comes to hand sewing, but a buttonhole is basically a long row of knots, so it's pretty sturdy.)

Put the needle through underneath, with the tip coming up right along that little outline you sewed earlier. And I personally like to take the ends that are already in my hand and wrap them around the tip of the needle like so, but a lot of people loop the other end up around the other way, so here's a link to a buttonhole video with that method. Try both and see which one you prefer, the resulting knot is the same either way.

Sometimes I can pull the thread from the end near the needle and have the stitch look nice, but often I grab it closer to the base and give it a little wiggle to nestle it into place. This is more necessary with the cotton than it is with the silk.

The knot should be on top of the cut edge of the fabric, not in front of it.

You can put your stitches further apart than I do if you want, they'll still work if they've got little gaps in between them.

Keep going up that edge and when you get to the end you can either flip immediately to the other side and start back down again, or you can do a bar tack. (You can also fan out the stitches around the end if you want, but I don't like to anymore because I think the rectangular ends look nicer.)

Here's a bar tack vs. no bar tack sample. They just make it look more sharp, and they reinforce the ends.

For a bar tack to a few long stitches across the entire end.

And then do buttonhole stitches on top of those long stitches. I also like to snag a tiny bit of the fabric underneath.

Then stick the needle down into the fabric right where you ended that last stitch on the corner of the bar tack, so you don't pull that corner out of shape, and then just go back to making buttonhole stitches down the other side. Then do the second bar tack once you get back to the end.

To finish off my thread I make it sticky with a bit more beeswax, waxing it as close to the fabric as I can get, and then bring it through to the back and pull it underneath the stitches down one side and trim it off.

In my experience it stays put perfectly well this way without tying it off.

Voila! An beautiful buttonholes!

If you want keyhole ones you can clip or punch a little rounded bit at one end of the cut and fan your stitches out around that and only do the bar tack at one end, like I did on my 1830's dressing gown.

(I won't do that style in my video though, because they're not 18th century.)

Do samples before doing them on a garment! Do as many practice ones as you need to, it takes a while for them to get good! Mine did not look this nice 10 years ago.

Your first one will probably look pretty bad, but your hundredth will be much better!