fake relationship but its a king and his concubine that was once an amazing soldier but he couldn’t go up the ranks for whatever reason so the king was like listen. hear me out. you can be my strategy dude. u just gotta be okay w walking around shirtless a lot. and soldier dude is like man that’s an UPSIDE and yknow they end up falling in love
some idiot advisor: I can’t believe his majesty lets his boytoy attend these council meetings, it’s an insult to the noble institutions that uphold our nation, it’s an outrage—
a somewhat smarter advisor: you’re just mad bc he pointed out how dumb your naval attack strategy and no one laughed when you made a mean joke about him
Boytoy has gone from a top fighter who was well respected but in constant danger to wearing silks and eating grapes on daises. That fucked up rotator cuff was the best thing to ever happen to him
Bonus points: at least half the other concubines are experts in assorted fields, the monarch brings them to relevant meetings to both play up a reputation for frivolity, and make sure at least one person there doesn’t have an outside agenda.
my harem?
did you mean: my chief strategic advisors
The kingdom is an absolute monarchy but the harem has become a secret meritocracy. The nobles and official advisors kind of side-eye His Majesty because wow some of these consorts must have like…really good personalities. Kings of the past have had their own specific tastes of course; size, shape, age, color, et cetera. More than one ruler has interviewed consorts feet first and Ardwin the Adventurous’s obsession - God rest him - with snuffling armpits like a sow rooting for mushrooms is well known despite never being alluded to in polite company.
The worst part of it is that the new king takes at least part of his harem with him everywhere and it’s so embarrassing. The Counselors of War have never once met with His Divine Majesty without that hulking battle-scarred consort interrupting with muttered growls or scornful snorts. And the Ministers of Finance all flinch at the sight of that fox-faced one, rumored to have been rescued from the gallows because His Augustness took a fancy to his eyes or some such nonsense. General petition days are even worse, with practically the entire harem drifting in and out of the Grand Hall in turns, insouciant and smug like granary cats who know they’ve been given full run of the courtyards and barns.
It’s absolutely infuriating that the kingdom has never before known such a period of peace and prosperity under this ridiculous monarch.
Tag to this - the biggest secret is the Queen who runs the Kingdom’s spy network.
It’s the envy of all the other Kingdoms around, and not a few nobles!
Not ALL of the Kingdom’s Diplomats are spies. But many of their servants are.
The Queen grew up as a neglected child, and she learned how servants are ignored, but who always know everything that goes on.
Many of the spies are like the Queen - beautiful and seemingly vacuous.
The sp[ies tend to have great fun, and also work closely with the Concubines
You ever think about how unified humanity is by just everyday experiences? Tudor peasants had hangnails, nobles in the Qin dynasty had favorite foods, workers in the 1700s liked seeing flowers growing in pavement cracks, a cook in medieval Iran teared up cutting onions, a mom in 1300 told her son not to get grass stains on his clothes, some girl in the past loved staying up late to see the sun rise.
there are scriptures all over the world painstakingly crafted hundreds of years ago with paw prints and spelling mistakes or drawings covering up mistakes. a bunch of teenage girls 2000 years ago gathered to walk around their hometown, getting fast food and laughing with their friends. two friends shared blankets before people lived in houses. a mother ran a fine comb through her child’s hair and told it to stop squirming sometime in the 1000s. there are covered up sewing mistakes in couture dresses from the 1800s, some poor roman burnt their food so well past recognition that they just buried the entire pot. there are broken dishes hidden in gardens of people no one even remembers anymore
There’s a record of an emperor of Japan in the 9th century talking about his cat - how pretty it is, and how it stalks birds and curls up in a circle and meows mournfully for company and escaped its collar. All completely normal ordinary cat things. And then it ends with him saying “it is superior to all other cats”. I am delighted to be united across 1200 years with this fellow cat owner with exactly the same feelings about his cat that I have about mine.
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right.
With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY.
ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory.
Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet.
Here are the looms:
Here are the punch cards:
Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.
Here are some patterns:
How many punchcards per pattern?
This many:
Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.
I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.
I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).
genuinely fucked up that if i want to interact with someone online i have to say words and have a conversation instead of just mashing my face against them like a cat
