⚙️n Repairing 🛠️

this weekend I got to tag along to pick up a 100 year old carding machine

a big blue beauty on wheels

carding is a step in fiber processing that’s kind of like brushing your hair when you wake up after a restless night tossing and turning

industrial machinery is an investment and the way the supply chain is looking (I mean we just got the car back from the shop from The Tree shennanigans in APRIL) and taking stock of the grotesque uniquely American desire to consume at all costs the repair revolution couldn’t have come any sooner

by its nature fiber processing relies on collaborating and cooperating - with the fauna that provide their fiber, the workers who lovingly hand pick and wash the bits of hay, dirt, rocks, and between generations to pass along this vital hard-won information.

this machine has a bit of a herstory - custom built by a man for his spouse then picked up by a couple with a 80 goat herd (at its peak) where it operated processing mohair for decades… then word ‘round the Inner Fiber Circle leaked of this bb hitting the market and the glimmers of a deal were made.

this machine has no instruction booklet, no other instances in existence and is set up to process a very different fiber profile than the merino/alpaca/angora rabbit at the mill.

getting it operational and processing is going to be another type of journey but with determination, insights from fiber friends, time and some elbow grease we will get there and like 5x our carding capacity.

while I mostly feel like ^^ this ^^ when attempting to fix things around the house I’ve def tapped into an affinity for the machines at the mill. I prefer a pet not cattle in every meaning of the phrase. I like to know what each part does, what to be aware of, attune to the clunky sounds and work with them. (it feels like with software and the web i’m fighting and losing a battle for just basic usability no matter how much effort I put in)

I also realized I am way more suited for tangible concrete work that I can set down at the end of the day vs the constant stressor drain of 9-5 knowledge worker stuff. The sooner my alpaca farm, contracting, writing and other ways to support myself start blossoming, the better.

in lieu of cat tax I will foist upon you (and everyone else in my life) something that’s been entertaining hubs and I the past several days

dall e mini - an AI art generator

which as most of the public AI apps I’ve played with posts a disclaimer

While the capabilities of image generation models are impressive, they may also reinforce or exacerbate societal biases. While the extent and nature of the biases of the DALL·E mini model have yet to be fully documented, given the fact that the model was trained on unfiltered data from the Internet, it may generate images that contain stereotypes against minority groups. Work to analyze the nature and extent of these limitations is ongoing, and will be documented in more detail in the DALL·E mini model card.

my prompts have mostly been things and animals and abstract concepts but a few have raised both eyebrows