When I got started in this hobby it was mainly quirky older ladies who were more than happy to teach any young person who expressed interest in it. The term ‘spinster’ comes from fiber spinners after all! They were some of the most lovely women I’ve ever met took me under their wing and I’m indebted to them for helping further my passion for it. The old guard is still around but they’re dying off. I’ve since been partaking in a women’s fiber group made up of Eastern European women and ofc you will not find identity politics there.
Every artistic hobby has been infected in some way, you just gotta be willing to be a persistant sperg and find your people.
I'd been attending a community knitting circle for the past two months because I wanted to learn how to make simple stuff for newborns. Three weeks ago a foreign troon appeared. This caused... a stir, to say the least. Japanese grandmas do not fuck with troons. Last week, attendance was down 75%. I just wanna make really awful attempts at booties and mittens and eat grandma snacks in peace, man.
I'd been attending a community knitting circle for the past two months because I wanted to learn how to make simple stuff for newborns. Three weeks ago a foreign troon appeared. This caused... a stir, to say the least. Japanese grandmas do not fuck with troons. Last week, attendance was down 75%. I just wanna make really awful attempts at booties and mittens and eat grandma snacks in peace, man.
I'm always curious about the details of this kind of thing. Was there any one thing that set off the alarm for everyone, or a bunch of little things? Like, what's bad behaviour at a knitting group?
Japanese grandmas do not fuck with troons. Last week, attendance was down 75%. I just wanna make really awful attempts at booties and mittens and eat grandma snacks in peace, man.
Between this and them recently laying off most (or all) of their social media department, some are calling for boycotts
Redditors are particularly panicking over alternatives to Hobbii’s cotton offerings, as others are rejecting other popular brands like Ice Yarns and Scheepjes over AI use or pattern theft
I'm always curious about the details of this kind of thing. Was there any one thing that set off the alarm for everyone, or a bunch of little things? Like, what's bad behaviour at a knitting group?
Well, there are trans people who radiate awkward energy in female spaces, right? Which is uncomfortable in its own way. And then there are those that invade that space with overly masculine energy. This was the second kind. Interjecting into conversations with barely related commentary, over-sharing personal information, stuff spread out excessively. Personally, I think the over-sharing was the main turn-off. People in Japan don't care what you do... As long as they don't know about it.
The second turn-off was probably the fact that they exclusively made stuff for their anime dolls. So typical weeb shit definitely plays a part here.
Derailing but has anyone ever hoard/archived older patterns from really dated websites or blog pages like wordpress and stuff?
I've been planning on dedicating a month or two to rewrite them for easy printing for personal use since I don't know if it would be alright to reupload them somewhere.
Derailing but has anyone ever hoard/archived older patterns from really dated websites or blog pages like wordpress and stuff?
I've been planning on dedicating a month or two to rewrite them for easy printing for personal use since I don't know if it would be alright to reupload them somewhere.
I do. A couple of years ago, I started a project to locate free patterns offered by yarn companies that are no longer in business. Since most of the websites were gone, I would try to find the original link to the pattern in Ravelry and then find it on the Wayback Machine. I save a copy of the webpage and also create a printable PDF. So far, I have just been storing them on my computer with a mirrored backup.
It's not just closed companies that have lost patterns. When Yarnspirations bought Red Heart, Patons, Caron and others, a lot of those old patterns are now gone. That is a much bigger project that I don’t have the heart to tackle. Especially since there are going to be like 75 different patterns for basically the same granny square.
As far as where to upload them, I don’t know. You could try the Internet Archive, but I have heard of stuff getting taken down. The most recent example is someone posted a copy of a knitting magazine from the 1970’s that is long out of business. It got taken down in a few days. I really hate how most Internet knitters are really smug about copyright and say things like, “it doesn’t matter if the pattern is discontinued, the owner still has rights to the pattern!” Instead of being cool and saying, “That pattern? I have a copy, here you go.”
It really saddens me that a large part of the early knitting Internet is gone. Those patterns from blogs should be preserved. It doesn’t help that Ravelry now marks a lot of patterns that were published on blogs as discontinued. Even if the page is still up. Even if the person still regularly updates their blog.
I do agree that AI patterns and AI photos of “finished” patterns that are impossible in reality are real problems. I would be uncomfortable with swatch photos for colorways too, because how does the AI know what a skein will look like knitted up?
Using AI to polish your marketing verbiage? Very benign, and can get some really great copy that phrases things in ways even a good writer won’t think of.
Enhancing photos? That could mean anything from using Lightroom to tweak settings, all the way to creating photos out of thin air. If you go by technical terms, AI is just an algorithm written by humans. Using the “auto” function in Lightroom to correct light balance or other tweaks is also an algorithm. Yet no one bats an eye at auto adjustments, even though it’s a much simpler version of the same thing!
Not all “AI” is the same thing. Not all AI is harmful to the planet (says the same people who consoooooom to SABLE levels of stash and use shipping from around the world because it’s convenient, drive big cars, fills their house with “landfillcore” trash decor, etc).
I think a lot of anti AI hysteria is a little overblown, but I base a lot of that opinion in the fact that people still make things with our hands. I don't really care that much about yarn drama, but the idea of a yarn brand of all things doing AI photos and gauge swatches is fucking insane. These were not issues for any yarn brand until the past few years. Jesus christ
Hunter Hammersen. Some of you know what her deal is, but basically she’s a very prolific designer, who removed all of her patterns from Ravelry over to Patreon so she can make more money have the freedom to create new patterns at a less frantic pace, and not have to maintain her back catalog.
(Unless you’re going back to edit your patterns, there is no maintenance (which she never did). Ravelry is super retarded about advertising sales though, if you set a pattern on sale you have to manually edit each pattern to tell people about it. I emailed them to say this is retarded, and the response was “oh. What a great idea, we’ve never thought about that” and almost a year later crickets. Idiots.)
I’m still on her free mailing list, because idiocy and greed aside, she really does do a fantastic job at designing and formatting her patterns. I haven’t bought anything since she left Ravelry though. Mostly because it’s just stupid stuff like the below now,
Got this in my email this morning. It’s only available to paid Patreon subscribers.
It’s a cute craft, but if you can’t look at that photo and figure out how it’s done in less than 30 seconds, just do a flip.
You know, Null realized his ladies-only forum idea was untenable due to the photo ID thing, but you could probably sell him on hosting the #1 knitting archive of the Old Internet. That and being able to misgender freely are pretty big draws for women.
