Stella Lunardy

Leverage: Redemption 3x3- "The Scared Stiff Job"

#the thing is: most of eliot's cons lean heavily into his role as the muscle #OR they ride on his ability to retain weird errata and lean into having him be Extremely Strange #and sometimes that makes one forget that he has UNIMAGINABLE game as his regular self (@words-writ-in-starlight)

People joke about DS9 A and B plots but this cut was bonkers

Ds9 is full of cuts like this.

just saw the perforated baton rope making demonstration video for the first time and i 😲

none of you even give a fuck that weve found a possible use for one of the most mysterious ancient tools...?

YES ABSOLUTELY

so perforated batons are a type of paleolithic tool that was in use for THOUSANDS of years. weve found hundreds of examples across Europe and Asia of these. theyre typically made from antler or ivory, and are long batons with at least one hole thats been drilled through

at first they were called "batons of command" and the assumption was that these were ritualistic or symbolic items that represented strength or status in a group of individuals.

more modern interpretations include that they couldve been used as spear throwing tools, or that the holes couldve been used in spear or arrow making to pull them straight.

in a more recent study done on this mammoth ivory baton, which was found in Hohle Fels cave in Germany, they were specifically interested in the spiralized carvings feeding into each perforation

they studied small pieces of organic matter that were found inside the holes, and they were found to be FULL of plant fibres in way higher concentration than the other nearby soil, indicating that this baton at least was a tool used on plants. the idea came up that it could be a rope making tool

so they made a replica, and wove rope.

these tools were likely multipurpose, and we can never know the motivations of the ancient people who made them, but we have at least proven that these tools are capable of making rope very efficiently!

here you can watch a video demonstration of a group using a replica to make rope!

Oh this is FASCINATING! Mod A and I were recently on a conference on prehistoric clothing - this is one aspect of textile working in the broader sense that I definetely missed!

Fun fact, also: The specific finds that lead to this discovery were made at the Hohe Fels by Professor Nicholas Conrad and his team and published in 2016, in collaboration with Dr. Veerle Roots - here's a link to the original paper about ropemaking, and another one to the Archäologie Online article about the discovery. The Hohe Fels and neighboring Vogelherd caves are some of the most important prehistoric sites in all of Europe - you might be more familiar with them as the sites that turned up these ivory animal figurines, amongst others!

Experimental Archaeology is one of the most powerful tools in humanity's toolbox, because you can't know about some things until you try it for yourself.

And sometimes what you thought was the reason or purpose? Turns out to be a wild guess that was way off mark.

A lot, and I mean a lot of guesswork assigns ritualistic significance to archaeological finds (speaking of the objects, not any conclusions, here). "If it was important enough to bury with them, then it must have religious significance!" is a thought that sounds plausible, but a lot of what a person would need "in the next life" would be tools similar to what they used in this life. Making rope? Very important.

How important, you might ask?

Well, bushcrafters, survivalists, and so forth all have come to agree with what survivalist instructor Dave Canterbury calls "The 5Cs of Survival". These are the 5 tools you need to survive just about any situation (on land). They are: Cover (which starts with clothing, not just tarps, tents, etc), Cutting Tool (as sophisticated as steel, as simple as a sharp-edged stone), Combustion Device (matches, lighter, ferrorod, fresnel lens, magnifying lens, and any sort of friction or compression setup, such as a fire drill bow drill, and so forth), Container (for boiling and carrying water), and Cordage (threads, cords, ropes).

Cordage is absolutely a survival need. With it, you can tie things to your body, such as a gathering basket, wear a blanket as clothing, etc. You can tie up a tarp to serve as a rainfly. You can bundle together sticks to carry back to your camp for firewood. You can make netting for a fishing net, a net bag, a net basket, a hammock to sleep up off the ground where snakes and scorpions, etc, cannot get at you. You can lash together tripods for supporting the rain tarp or the hammock, and put together furniture to sit on, to process gathered materials on, and even a platform to build a fire on if the ground is too wet, or too dangerously peaty to build a fire. (It does require mud & stones for insulation, but it is doable! Some areas, you do NOT want to build a ground fire, because it'll lead to forest forest.)

In the modern era, we've come to rely heavily upon nails & screws, which thanks to industrialization are cheap and plentiful, but while we could also use wooden pegs and holes, it's difficult to drill the hole in a Stone Age setting. (Not impossible, just difficult and time-consuming.) Notching two sticks so they fit against each other a little more closely and then binding them with lashings--cordage!--is a valuable tool for constructing drying frames for preserving meat and plant-life, as well as crafting a nice chair to sit on. Cordage can be used to get your food high up off the ground, out of the reach of wild animals--a trick we still use to this day in bear country!

Cordage is incredibly useful, and absolutely, if our fellow humans from ages ago had invented a tool to aid in rope-making, you can absolutely bet they'd want to have a tool that helps them make evenly constructed rope that would be solid enough to be reliable. And they'd absolutely want this useful tool for making more consistently successful rope with them in the next life.

Why is it important to have well-made rope? If one strand in a ply of cordage is more tautly pulled than the others, then more of the load placed on that cordage will be placed on those specific fibers, while the other ply (2-ply, 3-ply, however many are involved) will not be taking up nearly as much of the load.

Cordage is only as strong as its weakest fibers, but that weakness can come not just from materials quality, but also from having too much stress applied to one set of fibers. A ropemaking tool like the one in the posts above absolutely will help even out the stresses applied to the fibers, redistributing the weight more evenly. After all, if one strand of a 3-ply cord is taking 80% of the weight and the other two are taking 10% of the weight each, then the moment that 80% snaps, the very abrupt shock of that part of the cord breaking will likely cause the other two to snap as well, because suddenly they're having to support 50% of the stress when the third section breaks. But if you can get all 3 cords close to each one sharing 33% of the weight, they have a lot more "cushion room" to share out the stresses involved.

Well-made cordage can save lives, whether it's keeping the parts of a hut lashed together, or a rope used to ascend and descent a cliff to go after honeycomb, or even just as the rotation string on a bow drill that is being used to start a friction fire that'll keep you warm and dry and scare off predators in the night.

Cordage is 100% a major survival tool, and well-made cordge will save your life. Badly made cordage won't.

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I was right, Dax. It is a good day to die.

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE – 2.19 "Blood Oath"

me when i recommend something to someone and they end up not liking it

ANOK YAI wearing Swarovski
Met Gala 2024 – Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion

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After three hundred fifty six years and seven lifetimes, I still lead with my heart. // You know, that is what I have always loved about you. And I think that's why Worf loves you, too.

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE – 6.07 "You Are Cordially Invited"

??? Sad mommy?

Haunting Ground (PS2, 2005)

inception is a decent movie but there's so much horror tragedy potential written into its premise and the implications of its worldbuilding and being able to see that and do nothing about it makes me feel deranged

dream technology was developed by the military "so soldiers could practice shooting, stabbing and strangling each other". the only way to escape a dream before it ends is by killing yourself or convincing someone to kill you. you can live entire lifetimes in a dream, only to wake up to the disorientation of realising that only hours have passed in the waking world. prolonged exposure to dream-sharing tech carries the high risk of inducing psychosis to the point that you can no longer tell the difference between dreams and reality. you can carry a "totem" that behaves differently in a dream to counter this, but if anyone else gets their hands on it and figures out how it works, it's game over. dreaming is so addictive that some people sacrifice their waking lives to keep dreaming for longer. people can be hired to break into your mind and take anything they want from it, down to your most intimate parts, and sell them for profit. if that's not paranoia-inducing enough, entering someone else's mind carries the risk of being hunted down and torn to pieces by manifestations of their own psyche in a subconscious act of self-defence that cannot be controlled, because what you are doing is invasive and violent. the premise of the film rests on a superrich man hiring a group of people to fundamentally alter a man's identity because inheriting his father's corporation has the potential to make him a BUSINESS COMPETITOR. the leader of said heist team is so haunted by the suicide of his wife that he (unintentionally) caused by violating her mind to the point of madness that he locks the rest of them into a labyrinth of his own guilt, stalked by the minotaur her vengeful ghost. oh, and on the right cocktail of drugs, you can't wake up from a nightmare, and will instead end up in pure unconstructed unreality, surrounded only by decaying structures built by those who inhabited it before you, whose intentions and regrets might still haunt the landscape like a malevolent physical presence.

and you still have to go to work in the morning!

apple blossomed trees / roots with the birds

the whole club was looking at worms

Tigers with a frozen milk brick on a hot day

needless to say they are hopelessly dependent on the ingot