Fun Fact: Falling Fruit Has A Worldwide Map Where You Can Look To See If Anyone Has Noted Any Fruit Trees

Fun fact: Falling Fruit has a worldwide map where you can look to see if anyone has noted any fruit trees you can harvest near your location for free 🍎

I'd like to introduce everyone to this horrid thing I created about a year ago but haven't shown many people yet (probably for the best).

This is Baby. AKA The Monster. AKA Sight Tremendous and Abhorred, AKA Vile Insect, AKA A Thing Such As Even Dante Could Not Have Conceived, etc, etc. It's made from bits of scrap fabric I scrounged from various sources and is roughly the size of a human toddler. Its design is based on Mary Shelly's original descriptions of Frankenstein's creature.

But that's not all! Behold!

You can dissect this little abomination to reveal a full set of crocheted, knitted, and scrap fabric organs, all hand-stitched by yours truly!

It has a heart, stomach, lungs, liver, small and large intestine, kidneys, bladder, and, of course, a brain! So it can ponder the horrors of its own existence!

I used this pattern by Less Than Three for the heart. I ended up felting it because I screwed up most of the stitches (I was relatively new to crochet at the time). The result was a bit of a blobby mess, but oh well.

So yeah. This thing lives in my house now (my family hates it). I have yet to reap the full consequences of my hubris.

OMG OMG IF YOU DO IT FOR A FULL MINUTE YOU GET A HYPER BOOP!!!!

YALL THERE'S AN EVIL BOOP IF YOU HOVER OVER ON THE BOOP LINK LONG ENOUGH at least like three spins long and it'll give you the prompt

I used to think of braille like it's a digital text encoding scheme (if you know a little bit about how braille works and a lot about how computers store text, it feels "obvious" that braille dot patters are six-bit binary encodings of characters) but the more I've learned about it the more I've understood how wrong that is.

for one, braille is not an encoding of the latin alphabet. you can transliterate between the latin alphabet and braille the same way as you can transliterate between any two writing systems, but they really are completely separate scripts that follow completely different rules. converting to and from braille is a hard problem that depends on the specific orthography of the language being used, and within individual languages still is often very context sensitive.

for example, english braille (in some standards) spells the word "a" differently from the letter "a": they both use the same character that's used when the vowel appears within longer words, but when the letter "a" is used as a letter and not as the word, it (in some standards) requires an additional character to specify that you mean the letter.

also, braille isn't digital at all. it's designed for people, not computers. the earliest version of braille is from 1824, decades before the earliest machines you could reasonably describe as computers. braille was designed for humans, and it follows conventions that are reasonable for people but make no sense for computers. it's rare for two related dot patterns to be differentiated by "flipping one of the bits" like you'd do with a binary text encoding; instead you get things like rotating flipping or moving the pattern, which certainly feels a lot more like a writing system than an encoding of a writing system.

Will you someday make a dusk album to complete the incredible Cicada/Astral/Crocus cycle?

yeah, it's getting to be about time. I like how sparse and far apart all these entries are, haha. I'm struggling to think of a fitting 6 letter title, though. preferably one that begins with A

"I am a human being, damnit! You can deny me all you want but you can't deny Ben Sisko – He exists!"