“You know mistletoe is important to Druids but do you know why people kiss under the mistletoe? It’s a Norse myth. Baldur the son of Odin was the most beloved by the other gods. So much that they wanted to protect him from all the dangers in the world. His mother, Frigg, took an oath from fire and water, metal, stone and every living thing, that they would never hurt Baldur. At a gathering, they tested him. Stones, arrows and flame were all hurled at him. Nothing worked. But there was one god that wasn’t so enamored of Baldur, the god of mischief, Loki. Loki discovered that Frigg had forgotten to ask mistletoe, a tiny, seemingly harmless plant and completely overlooked. Loki fashioned a dart out of mistletoe and it killed Baldur. Frigg was heartbroken. She decreed that mistletoe would never again be used as a weapon and that she would place a kiss on anyone who passed under it. So now we hang mistletoe underneath our door during the holidays so that we will never overlook it again.”
Reblogging again because SOMEONE ASK ME ABOUT WHERE SANTA CAME FROM AND WHY HE HAS EIGHT REINDEER DO IT.
Santa? Is Odin. With a bit of the Turkish Saint Nicholas plastered over top to make him more acceptable to Christianity.
Let’s wind this back a bit.
So. In Norse tradition, Odin rose with the wild hunt on Midwinter. Children would leave out offerings of hay or root vegetables in their shoes for Slepnir, Odin’s horse. In norse tradition, all gifts create an obligation that must be returned in kind, so if Odin found the offerings pleasing he would leave treats and sweets in return.
So. We have a magical bearded man riding through the sky on a winter feast day and leaving treats for children in footwear if they pleased him. Sound familiar? Yeah.
As for Slepnir, Odin’s mount? He has eight legs. So. Bearded man with powerful magic flying through the air on an eight-legged steed on a winter feast day and leaving treats for children in their footwear if they pleased him.
Yeah.
Enter Christianity. Now, the midwinter season is important to all cultures that live in cold climates. The passing of the worst of the hard times and the beginning of the longer days and the promise of the return of life and light and fertility is a powerful thing. There were Christian festival days around the same time as Midwinter was celebrated in many polytheistic faiths. Christians found that they couldn’t get people to stop celebrating the feast days they’d been celebrating for several thousand years, so opted instead to just absorb those traditions into their OWN midwinter festivals. It was a far easier and more effective way of convincing people to convert.
However, the idea of him flying through the sky, being associated with elves, possessing powerful magic, and the eight-legged steed stuck. (reindeer, incidentally, are an animal with a lot of symbol and power in Norse tales. Ullr, the god of the hunt, had ties to reindeer, and at some point the eight legged horse became eight reindeer.)
Incidentally the image of Santa as a chubby little jolly man didn’t come around until modern advertising began depicting him that way. Before that? A tall, strong man, usually with a staff (echoing Odin’s staff or spear).
So. There you have it. Santa, the jolly bearded old man of beloved childhood Christmas memories? If you ever wondered where he came from in a ‘Christian’ holiday, there’s your answer. He didn’t. He’s the amalgamation of an ancient Norse god and a Middle Eastern saint, filtered through the lens of pop culture.
Jim Butcher actually did this very well in the Dresden Files, where Odin makes several appearances, one wearing the mantle of Father Christmas.
Christianity never really managed to make the old gods vanish.
I love these omg origins of holidays fascinate me
confirmed
HOLY FUCKIN SHIT IT’S BEAUTIFUL
So pure.
Plus there is always the argument that the birth of Jesus happened sometime in spring anyway and not in winter, but that the Church just wanted to join all these holidays together so they put Christmas around Yule and the Norse holiday.
i wanna add my favorite Christianity Steals Holidays And Paints Over Them With BS story.
so gift-giving at midwinter has been a really popular concept for a long time, and it has moved up and down the month of december following whatever religion was in fashion at the time.
for a few centuries, it was popular to give gifts at new year. makes sense. new year, new stuff, may the whole year be as prosperous.
and this held over for a long time into the Christian era. too long, apparently. the church couldn’t get people to shake it. so they decided to make it all about them by creating a holy feast honoring the life of christ for new year’s day.
and what major life event did they attach? what wonderful thing that happens a few days after you get born? what thing that in particular happens to nww born jewish baby boys?
The passenger steamer SS Warrimoo was quietly knifing its way through the waters of the mid-Pacific on its way from Vancouver to Australia. The navigator had just finished working out a star fix and brought Captain John DS. Phillips, the result. The Warrimoo’s position was LAT 0º 31’ N and LONG 179 30’ W. The date was 31 December 1899. “Know what this means?” First Mate Payton broke in, “We’re only a few miles from the intersection of the Equator and the International Date Line”. Captain Phillips was prankish enough to take full advantage of the opportunity for achieving the navigational freak of a lifetime.
He called his navigators to the bridge to check & double check the ship’s position. He changed course slightly so as to bear directly on his mark. Then he adjusted the engine speed.
The calm weather & clear night worked in his favor. At mid-night the SS Warrimoo lay on the Equator at exactly the point where it crossed the International Date Line! The consequences of this bizarre position were many:
The forward part (bow) of the ship was in the Southern Hemisphere & in the middle of summer.
The rear (stern) was in the Northern Hemisphere & in the middle of winter.
The date in the aft part of the ship was 31 December 1899.
In the bow (forward) part it was 1 January 1900.
This ship was therefore not only in:
Two different days,
Two different months,
Two different years,
Two different seasons
But in two different centuries – all at the same time!
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
wow okay i’m crying now
“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable – she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever – and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator – one Harold Cottam – clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.
I dunno. That’s just really stuck with me.
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
Oh geez, this isn’t half the story. Buckle up kids. This is wild.
The inventor is Paul Winchell, who started off doing Dummy shows on the radio. His star rises, TV happens, and he enters a dancing contest where he WON AGAINST RICARDO MONTALBALN.
Mr. Montalbaln was SO IMPRESSED that he invited Paul Winchell to dinner. At dinner he was seated next to A PRE FAME DR HEIMLICH.
YES. OF THE HEIMLICH MANEUVER.
They hit it off and somehow Paul Winchell is invited to watch Heimlich and others do operations.
AGAIN, HE’S A VENTRILOQUIST AND A HOST OF THINGS. I DON’T KNOW HOW HE WON THE DANCE CONTEST THAT STARTED THIS THING.
Which leads to the following conversation.
Winchell: Hey, what if someone invented an artificial heart so someone can get blood pumped during surgery.
Heimlich: That would be a swell idea.
W: So, uh, as I make my own dummies, a heart can’t be too different.
H: I guess? It’s worth a shot.
W: And as I don’t know anything about, well, how hearts work. Can you answer any questions and help out to make sure it’s all correct?
H: I’d be delighted!
Cue a LONG time working on this. And while Winchell EVENTUALLY gets it patent-worthy (at Hemlich’s suggestion) it can’t actually, well, work. The battery it takes to run it was too large and burnt out easily.
But all modern artifical hearts are based on that design.
Again, this started when a VENTRILOQUIST BEAT AN ACCOMPLISHED DANCER IN A DANCE CONTEST.
(Paul Winchell has several other patents including: a disposable razor, a plasma defroster, and did a lot of work for the Leukemia Foundation and the red cross. He also did attempt to get a medical degree later and did some medical hypnosis)
This man had a wild life.
Also, he’s April “Regretsy, and crazy voice actress” Winchell’s dad.
LETS PLAY A GAME. It’s called: Who directed it TIM BURTON or HENRY SELICK
We’ll start with the 2009 Laika film Coraline based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. Do you know who directed it? Burton or Selick?
Did you guess yet?
If you guessed Henry Selick, you would be correct. Tim Burton actually had absolutely nothing to do with Coraline at all in anyway ever. Reminder: Tim Burton has NOTHING to do with Coraline. At all. But that was an easy one. Let’s go to the Walt Disney Pictures adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, James and the GiantPeach next.
Think you got it? Are you sure? Better double check…
Oh, look. It’s Henry Selick again! Tim Burton actually interacted with this project, though only as a producer. Bet that was tricky… Next one! Let’s go to the Disney/Touchstone Pictures film Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Have you guessed it correctly? Have you really?
Yep that’s right. Even Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was directed by Henry Selick. Though Burton wrote the poem and created the characters in which Nightmare was based he didn’t have much interaction with the project beyond that. At the time he had already signed off to direct the film Batman Returns and did not want to be involved with the “painstakingly slow process of stop-motion animation.”
Looks like it was a trick quiz. But now you know Henry Selick, whom people rarely know of is responsible for many of the most well known stop-motion animated films. The more you know!
This isn’t even being qeued. This is just being reblogged, because some of you still don’t understand who directed Coraline.
You guys don’t understand, Henry Selick was so happy and so incredibly nice and grateful that there was a festival solely dedicated to the art of Stop Motion and that he was an invited guest. He was treated like a superstar in his craft, and he was absolutely surprised.
All stop motion animators were actually. So please please please, appreciate this guy and his hard work in his key role at keeping stopmotion animation alive and well today.
Friendly reminder that the intro to Lion King….the non english bits leading up to the “circle of life” is not random yelling in *Africa voice* it is an actual language, Zulu, spoken by 10 million people, it is the most widely spoken language (out of 11) in the country of South Africa (1 out of the 54 countries in the continent of Africa, the continent home to somewhere between 1500-2000 languages and around 3000 distinct ethnic groups)
this isn’t to say that you have to friggin learn the language to sing along with a disney film, it just means that you should be mindful, respectful, appreciative and respectful. don’t be yelling out whatever noise comes in to your head when you hear it
Ok but someone knows what does this say?
The lyrics before the english comes in…in “circle of life”
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba [Here comes a lion, Father] Sithi uhm ingonyama [Oh yes, it’s a lion]
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba [Here comes a lion, Father] Sithi uhm ingonyama [Oh yes, it’s a lion] Ingonyama [It’s a lion]
Siyo Nqoba [We’re going to conquer]
Ingonyama Ingonyama nengw’ enamabala [A lion and a leopard come to this open place] (repeats)
[queue English lyrics]
I would like to further add that language has there own cultural nuances so something that can sound extremely meaningful in one languages may not sound as majestic when translated to another (I know this as someone who has an understanding of 5 languages and speaks 3 of them fluently) so if you are thinking “oh it ain’t that deep they are just yelling: the lion is coming!” dial it back
Worth noting that “lion” and especially the word Ingonyama is a very respectful word to talk about a Zulu king, especially in praise. It’s so heavily associated with royalty in isiZulu that a different word is used for an animal lion – Ibhubesi. This isn’t just announcing the arrival of an animal, it’s celebrating the arrival (or coronation?) of the king
Man found the stoplight cameras were activated during yellow lights and decided to cut the wires of it.
Florida Man: Chaotic evil. New York Man: Chaotic good.
Holy shit. Nah dude look up the entire story, it’s INSANE.
The dude got arrested once before this for using a painter’s extension rod to point the stoplight cameras into the sky instead of cutting the wires. He didn’t cut the wires until AFTER he got out after being arrested the first time–which he did after posting facebook videos that prove that the stoplights are intentionally rigged to trick drivers into citations–the yellow lights at intersections with cameras only last THREE SECONDS, as opposed to the five seconds they last at other stoplights without cameras in the same county.
When he cut the camera cords, he reported his deeds to the news -himself,- and then politicians pressured the local police force into arresting him. The local police and sheriff deputies actually SUPPORT him for his actions because the lights have been killing innocent people! During his most recent arrest, one of the Sheriff’s Deputies actually -offered to bail him out-.
When he got home again after these incidents, there was a surveillance camera planted at his house BY THE GOVERNMENT to watch him! His reaction to being surveilled? He painted over the camera in America’s flat out fucking ballsiest “fuck you” to the gubmint I’ve ever heard of.
And it gets EVEN CRAZIER. After painting over the camera, suddenly this guy–his name is Stephen Ruth by the way–started GETTING ATTEMPTS ON HIS LIFE. He reports that a car intentionally tried to hit him in a head-on collision, and after talking about the car to his neighbors, they confirmed that the car in question (Or at least, one that was visibly identical, its occupants included) had been staking out his house! Somebody was legitimately trying to MURDER HIM over his discovery and his actions!
As a final insult to injury, Ruth pointed out that the VAST majority of the cameras were found SPECIFICALLY in lower-to-middle-class neighborhoods. As well, the victims of these rigged stoplights tried to go to the local news station to talk about the deaths of their family members that occurred from the rigging. Aaaand… The local station, “News12″, never aired their interviews.
Remember how I said that, after cutting the cables and calling the local news station, Ruth was arrested because of pressure from politicians? Get this: News12 is actually owned by CableVision, who PROVIDES INTERNET SERVICE TO THE CAMERAS.
Whereas mister Ruth was only trying to help people and save lives, he’s been caught up in a full-blown fucking government conspiracy that’s out for his blood. This guy isn’t Robin Hood, he makes Robin Hood look like a -CHUMP-.
If I remember correctly, Poland’s secret is that the jews where being blamed all over europe (as usual) as scapegoats for the black plague. Poland was the only place that accepted Jewish refugees, so pretty much all of them moved there.
Now, one of the major causes of getting the plague was poor hygiene. This proved very effective for the plague because everyone threw their poop into the streets because there were no sewers, and literally no one bathed because it was against their religion. Unless they were jewish, who actually bathed relatively often. When all the jews moved to Poland, they brought bathing with them, and so the plague had little effect there.
Milan survived by quarantining its city and burning down the house of anyone showing early symptoms, with the entire family inside it.
I reblogged this tons of times, but the Milan info is new.
Damn Italy, you scary.
Poland:“Hey, feeling a bit down? Have a quick wash! There, you see? All better”
Milan: “Aw, feeling a bit sick are we? BURN MOTHERFUCKER, BURN!!!!!”
Also, this might have something to do with it: from what I understand, O blood type is uncommonly… common in Poland. Something to do with large families in small villages and a LOT of intermarriage. The black plague was caused by a bacterium that produced, in its waste in the human body, wastes that very closely mimic the “B” marker sugars on red blood cells that keep the body from attacking its own immune system. Anyone who has a B blood type had an immune system that was naturally desensitized to the presence of the bacterium, and therefore was more prone to developing the disease. Anyone who had an O type was doubly lucky because the O blood type means the total absence of ANY markers, A or B, meaning that their bodys’ immune system would react quickly and violently against the invaders, while someone with an A may show symptoms and recover more slowly, while someone with B would have just died. Because O is a recessive blood type, it shows in higher numbers when more people who carry the recessive genes marry other people who also carry the recessive gene. Poland, which has a nearly 700 year history of being conquered by or partnering with every other nation in the surrounding area, was primarily an agricultural country, focused around smaller, farming communities where people were legally tied to, and required to work, “their” land, and so historically never “spread” their genes across a large area. The economy was, and had been, unstable for a very long period of time leading up to the plague, the government had been ineffective and had very little reach in comparison to the armies of the other countries around for a very very long time, and so its people largely remained in small communities where multiple generations of cross-familial inbreeding could have allowed for this more recessive gene to show up more frequently. Thus, there could be a higher percentage of O blood types in any region of the country, guaranteeing less spread of the illness and moving slower when it did manage to travel. Combine this with the fact that there were very few large, urban centers where the disease would thrive, and with the above facts, and you’ve got a lovely recipe for avoiding the plague.
Interestingly enough, as a result from the plague, the entirety of Europe now has a higher percentage of people with O blood type than any other region of the world.
WHY IS THIS ALL SO COOL
When Tumblr teaches you more about the plague than 12 years of school ever did.
Just to throw a nod in, as a medieval historian, this is all credible, and is the leading theory as to the plagues effectiveness at this point. So. Enjoy your new knowledge!
Today I found out that yarners think crocheting socks is subversive and controversial and I just…on one hand, why the fuck not, I guess yarners are allowed to have their controversies, but on the other, how much time do you have in your FUCKIN DAY??
My main concern is how they would feel but Maggie u know yarn fandom gotta think about something while knitting five miles of stockingnette for a sweater
Look, you can’t just leave it at that, why is it subversive and controversial? *gets popcorn*
I mean, I’m taking this on good faith, and I’m not saying this is my own personal belief. I believe in all crafts.
But…the structure of the stitches and the resulting fabric is pretty different between crochet and knitting. You get different effects between them, which lends themselves to different crafts. And none of the effects of (most) crochet stitches lend themselves naturally to socks. You’re (usually) going to end up with something either stiff and bulky, or full of holes that will Not Feel Good to walk on. Whereas knitted socks will just…BE elastic and comfortable.
Sure you CAN do it. And there are people and patterns that do it well!!
But MOST crochet socks are a bit like calling this a bicycle
I mean… Okay? But people are going to Talk.
But this is BABY controversy, this is nothing. You haven’t even touched on the good shit like RHSS or that time the Olympic Committee dissed us.
Iiiinteresting. So one of those “just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD” things.
Also I know very little about the yarn fandom except for that bit where a woman had to fake her death and had a nervous breakdown over selling homespun/dyed yarn so like, I already have big expectations.
Was that the one that “died” of leukemia or the one that “died” of lupus, or the one that overdosed?
From what I know of the narrative as it was described to me, I want to say the one that overdosed, but I am intrigued and vaguely concerned that there are multiple distinct individuals the above situation could apply to.
hey umm, what the fuck
the fake deaths thing: indie yarn dyer gets popular, gets overwhelmed by orders, can’t refund money because of shitty bookkeeping, decides faking online death is the only way out.
i’m sure some of them are unintentional rather than premeditated scammers but they’re all still thieving assholes who shouldn’t be running businesses and need to give all the money back.
the olympics commitee: ravelry, well-known knitting (fiber arts in general) site, held a contest they called the ‘ravelympics’ to drum up olympic support then get a cease-and-desist letter for copyright infringement, and the letter said that calling it that ‘denigrates the true nature of the Olympic Games’ and was ‘disrespectful to our country’s finest athletes’
except, you know, ravelry had like 2 million users who all, by nature of ravelry being a website, have basic tech literacy. the social media backlash was so bad that the olympics board had to make 2 official apologies because the first wasn’t good enough.
RHSS: Red Heart Super Saver is cheap Walmart-level yarn. some people hate it because it used to be just really fucking awful and they haven’t bothered updating their opinions. some people hate it because they hate non-natural yarns. some people hate it because they’re yarn snobs(which, btw, comes in two flavors: the disdainful assholes and the people who just don’t see the point if you have the money and don’t indulge yourself). a lot of people defend it because it’s cheap and widely locally available and honestly not that bad after a wash and some fabric softener.
crocheted socks: exactly what kaitoukitty said. people who crochet socks tend to either be new crocheters who are not aware crochet is not the best medium for socks or experienced crocheters who are pushing the boundaries of the medium.
babies on fire: i can’t believe we’re talking about yarncraft controversies and no one mentioned babies on fire. that’s my favorite controversy.
so when deciding what material to make baby blankets out of, in addition to considerations like softness, ease of washing, and allergy concerns quite a lot of people like to consider what would happen to the baby if the blanket was set on fire. yes, really.
wool has the problem of hand-wash only blankets for a new mother (superwash wool exists but that’s a whole ‘nother paragraph), allergy concerns, and also
real fucking expensive if you want quality not-itchy-on-baby-skin wool. but pro-wool-blanket people insist that because wool actually resists being set on fire pretty well and also can self-extinguish, it’s the only sensible choice.
acrylic on the other hand is cheap and you can throw it in the washing machine, and while bad quality acrylics might be stiff and plastic-y they’re not itchy, but if it gets set on fire it will melt onto the baby’s skin. pro-acrylic people insist that if your blanket is on fire, you probably have bigger problems than what the blanket is made of.
wow I didn’t expect such a detailed response. thank you!
CaptainBubblebath 