ALTWIKIPEDIA IS 25 TODAY MAKE SOME NOISE!!!!!!!!!!!! [Their celebration article here]
there is not NEARLY enough noise on this post !!! CELEBRATE ITS BIRTHDAYYYYYY
30 years ago today, Paul was announced as the Eighth Doctor at the Longleat Doctor Who exhibition.
Pet peeve of the day is the way many fiber artists use "carpet wool" as a catchall derogatory term for any wool that is coarse and scratchy, with the implied meaning carpet wool=garbage wool. That is not what carpet wool is.
Carpet wool, as the name implies, is a term for the wool from sheep specifically, intentionally bred for centuries to produce wool that is ideal for carpets (historically meaning rugs or, less often, heavy outer blankets, not just carpet like the modern stretched kind stapled to the floor.)
The ideal fiber for an item that is going to be put on the floor and walked on needs to be durable and easy to clean, therefore each strand needs to be long, relatively thick (yes, that means coarse,) and not prone to easily felting.
What it DOESN'T need to be is particularly "soft." The long fibers will make a smooth enough surface to not irritate the soles of your feet and you're not generally going to be wearing a rug right against very sensitive skin all day where you can feel the prickly ends. "Carpet wool" breeds, also known as longwool breeds, have wool fibers that perfectly meet those criteria.
A rug made from wool from a hair sheep or some meat sheep that is coarse but also brittle and short is going to wear out and fall apart ao quickly it's not worth the effort to make it. Therefore, despite being coarse and "scratchy," it is NOT CARPET WOOL. Use that for stuffing pillows or compost it for fertilizer.
A fine, soft, Merino rug is also going to be a felted, pilled, worn-out mess in such a short time it's not going to be worth the effort to make. Save that for a beautiful lace scarf that's going to be directly against the skin of your neck all day. Judging by what's best for rugs, Merino is actually the "garbage" wool.
Anyway, humans spent millenia developing different fibers for different applications, and also words mean things and don't mean other things. Can we please stop calling Lincoln or Wensleydale wool "garbage" because it makes scratchy socks and can we also stop calling Katahdin or Dorper hair "carpet wool" please.
Also, the sheep that grow the wool are absolutely rocking the look.
Imagine telling these lovely Wensleydale ladies their hair isn't glam!
Begging on my knees for the non-jews who follow me to 1)read this and 2)reblog this without removing me from the reblog. Please. The Jewish people in your life are not okay. They are in danger. I LEFT AMERICA because I saw this coming. And I was RIGHT. I'm asking you please reblog and read it, non-Jews. Please. Just this once. Take the time. It's not accusing you of anything. It's just asking you to consider opening your heart to us. We are telling the truth about how bad things are. We really are.
I know I haven't posted regularly on this blog in years but I'm not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what's happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I'm genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I'm making a post about it.
A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:
2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.
2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.
November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.
December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)
Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.
1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)
Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.
The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.
ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.
It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.
Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.
And from today.
They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.
And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.
So that's a brief history.
Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.
It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.
I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.
Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.
I've been monitoring this closely because I have friends in the area, and because I think every city in the country is at risk of having the feds come to do what they're doing in Minnesota, and we all need to get ready.
There are some Twin Cities activists who have been very clearly laying out what they're doing, and why it's effective at slowing down ICE. It sounds like all you really need, is neighborhood group chats where people can let one another know when and where ICE is present, and then people show up, start recording, and blowing whistles, and then ICE will leave again more often than not. This VERY SHORT thread by a Twin Cities activist outlines what to do and how it works.
Also: Minnesota Public Radio has been doing great coverage of what's happening, and the local NBC affiliate has some excellent interviews with activists who were arrested and detained for hours.
And finally, some good news: the courts restored SNAP funding.
The reasons for climate change are more about the way society structures our industries, supply chains, energy infrastructure, farming methods, etc. Theoretically we could change them all to be much better & less harmful to the planet we rely on to survive.
But billionaires & corporations are obviously also the most major blockade to changing all of that, so, yeah.
ALTThis week’s Featured Article is all about the Cease and Desist by Fox Against Fan Sites. In the mid-1990s, the rise of the internet meant a surge in online fan websites. 20th Century Fox launched an aggressive legal offensive against those fan websites, targeting the use of official images, sounds, and logos from shows like The Simpsons, The X-Files, Millennium, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Fox’s campaign began in October 1995, when their legal team sent Simpsons fan Jeanette Foshee a cease and desist letter, demanding she remove hundreds of Simpsons character icons she had created and shared freely with other fans for personal use. That kicked off a string of escalating cease and desist letters, which resulted in the takedown of a Millennium fan site a year later. Not all sites were forced down by Fox, and fanfiction and fan art were not targets; however, some fans took down or abandoned their websites and fanworks out of fear of being targeted. By 1997, the verb “Foxed” had become the catchall term for being threatened with legal action for copyright infringement.
The majority of fans did not support Fox’s aggressive tactics, feeling betrayed and villianized, and when Lucasfilm began targeting Star Wars fan sites, fans began organizing in protest, creating pro-fandom banners and spearheading campaigns to protect fan websites, some of which caught mainstream media attention.
Want to further explore this pivotal moment in fandom history? Dive into the controversy on Fanlore!
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Three times in the last week I’ve gotten inquiries from authors, about email from an account purporting to be me. This account praised their book in a very “AI” fashion and tried to get them to write back to the account, with the end goal, no doubt, of scamming them out of money via “marketing services” or some such. These authors, quite reasonably, wanted to confirm that the email they got sent…
