Today's Friday. The so-called Black Friday.

Technically, it should just be a day like any other - but for years now, this day has been promoted to a day of wild consumerism, with deep discounts on many things. It's also being extended by quite a lot of companies or shops, mostly online shops, to a whole week, or at least several days.

I'll freely admit that in general I am happy, too, to get things for a reduced price. As a vendor myself, I also know that sometimes things have overstayed their welcome in your stock and should go, such as leftover bits or slightly damaged goods, and reducing their price is a good way to make everyone happy. I can absolutely get that, and I enjoy shopping "second-grade" or leftover stuff.

However, the price that is paid for the reduced prices on Black Friday? In most cases, I'd consider that it's too high. Someone, somewhere, has to pay for the discount, after all. Consider this: If a shop is able to give a discount of 50% on their goods, this means that either the shop owner will not make any profit anymore, or that the profit margin of the normal price is significantly more than 50%, or that the "normal price" never truly existed, but is just listed to make the discounted price more attractive. The first I'd consider kind of unfair, and it's not a sustainable strategy for the shop owner. In the third case, I don't really appreciate being lied to concerning the "normal" price. Both these do not exactly make me want to buy things at such a company, actually.

Selling a lot of things with a lower profit margin will generate profits, too, so I can see the appeal of catching people on a spending spree and selling them lots of stuff. For small vendors with limited stock and limited reach, that is not an option, though. So they might cut down on their profits hoping to gain new customers that will come back later.

Whatever is the case - joining in on the Black Friday madness means there has to be discounting, extra labelling, and advertisements. Local stationary shops are partly also joining in, and that means printed labels and printed ads and posters, also something with a rather significant cost and generating a good bit of waste, too.

So here we are, in a world racked by a pandemic, with a climate crisis on our hands that gets ignored by politicians everywhere; it's clear that the normal stationary shops that charge fair prices need our money to survive, and it's also clear that we need to consume less and repair and re-use more, unless we want this planet to become uninhabitable in the near future.

If you're reading this blog regularly, you have probably not expected me to join in on the Black Friday offers stuff - and no, I am not doing it. I try to set my prices so they are fair, and those who make things for me are paid a fair price as well. That in turn means that my possibilities of giving a discount are limited, and a deep discount would be impossible if I don't want to lose money.

So business will go on as usual here today, and the rest of the week. I will not do any more shopping than I would usually do on a week in November, and there will be no extra discounts in my own shop. I've seen quite a lot of people, and some shops, say outright that they won't do Black Friday, due to similar reasons - and I hope that this will spread, and eventually that day of discounts will be something of the past.

There's a National Championship in Science Slamming in our neighbouring country, Austria - and my dear colleague Karina Grömer has qualified for it, and will take part with a performance about prehistoric clothes (and textile archaeology).

The whole event will be livestreamed, and you can tune in after about 18:00 and enjoy some experiments in a show, before the event proper will start.

The title of Karina's performance (together with her co-slammer Andrea Krapf) is „Bronzezeitliche Unberührbare & Hallstattzeitliches It-girl mit Soundeffekt“ (Bronze Age Untouchables and Hallstatt Age It-girl with sound effect), and knowing Karina, who is a force of nature, it will be awesome. It's probably even worth watching if you don't speak German, just for the reconstructed garments and dress accessories.

[caption id="attachment_5678" align="alignnone" width="300"] During the Qualification Slam Performance in 2019 - Karina and her co-Slammer.


So - mark your calendar and watch the livestream on Friday evening, either at https://researchersnight.eu/european-science-slam/ or at http://www.scienceslam.at/ and enjoy some archaeological textile reconstructions!

Things currently happening here:

I'm writing a bit for a short little article about the Albecunde belt - it's more of just a better snippet, but it's still nice to revisit the thing again. It's a lovely piece of tablet weaving, and every time I look at the pictures I have of it, my fingers itch to sit down and make trials with different kinds of silk to find the perfect thread.

[caption id="attachment_5674" align="alignnone" width="300"] Detail from the "A(i)lbecunde" Belt from the Diözesanmuseum St. Ulrich & Afra, Augsburg. Tablet-woven from silk.


You can see in the picture that the angle of the individual cords in the weaving is very, very steep. There's also rather little difference iin apparent "looseness" in the looks of the cords twisted in S and twisted in Z direction - which points to very little, almost non-existant S-twist in the original threads.

The silk embroidery threads that I have already have too much of a twist in them, unfortunately. So I'd love to get my fingers on some gummy silk with almost indiscernable S-twist to give that a try, and that's certainly something that will be needed for the next stage of the project. (If you have a hint on where it's possible to get such silk, please do let me know!)

There's no time for that just now, though. The little piece needs to be written, and then there's some more prep to be done for a travelling exhibition organised under the wings of EXARC. That requires me to do two little snippets of a video, and this time I need a proper script, so I won't babble too much into the wrong directions.

Finally, more writing of some other kind - it's nearing the end of the month, which means, as usually, some newsletter writing. Before, you know, the month is over and I can't title it "November Newsletter" anymore...

Since 2020 gifted us with the curious thing that is the pandemic, I've been following the news. With mixed results - on the one hand, I am happy that I have more of a clue now of what's going on in the world; on the other hand, I sometimes get really depressed about all the bad news that are coming in from everywhere, from all areas of life.

A side effect of this is realising how little from the things happening in other countries actually arrive in the newsfeed of one's own one. Mostly because of international conferences - especially NESAT and the European Textile Forum - I have contacts in a handful of  other countries, and occasionally I get a snippet of news from there which is interesting, but not "important" enough to make it to German news.

So here's a current German thing that might make it to your newsfeed if you're outside the country, or it might not: the Sophie Scholl incident.

We're having troublesome protests against the anti-Corona measurements that the government is taking. These have been going on for months, and it's not troublesome per se that some people think all this pandemic is a scam (that is their right, as of German law) and say it out loud (also their right) and go stand and scream about it on the street in groups (also their right). The troublesome thing is that some fractions from the extreme Right have more or less appropriated these protests and are trying to undermine our democracy - the same one that protects, to great costs, their right to freely state their opinion. We're talking Nazis here. Fascists. And you find them right at the tip of the organisation that calls itself "Querdenker" (lateral thinkers).

Recent protests organised by these "Querdenker" have blatantly ignored the requirements for protests in the current situation (wearing masks and keeping distances, and a maximum of participants in a given area, and so on). These requirements are stated when you register for a protest - which you have to, in Germany, if you're planning a mass event. That is not new, by the way. People in these protests have also acted aggressively against the police, with several policepeople hurt in different protests. They are getting more and more violent, and those actually thinking (not laterally) are getting more and more concerned, and also a good bit scared. One of the big questions is also: Why do the people who are not right-wing fascist Nazi arseholes protest together with said arseholes, if they are trying to protest for peace and freedom? It's not like it would have been really hard to tell that there were lots of them present.

The latest thing, though, seems to have brought some people to actually re-think what is happening here. A 22-year-old woman from Kassel held a little speech that was caught on video, and has gone viral since. Young Jana told the people present who she is, what her age is, and that she feels like Sophie Scholl because she's been active protesting for months now, handing out flyers and is now even registering protests such as this one! Following that, one of the "Ordner" (a steward, usually someone from within or close to the organisation that runs the protest) came up to her, said "I'm not going to be steward for this bullshit any longer" and handed her his steward's vest. "This is belittling the Holocaust. It's bullshit." After that, Jana from Kassel rage-quit the stage.

This incident has inspired lots and lots of memes by now, and rightly so. Many people are making it clear that this is complete bullshit, indeed - Jana has been handing out some flyers and is protesting the necessity to wear a piece of cloth over her mouth and nose when she goes into a shop. Sophie Scholl tried to stop the Nazi dictator regime and lost her life for it. That she actually compared herself to Sophie shows that Jana has absolutely, absolutely nothing in common with Sophie Scholl, but that she is a petulant self-entitled stupid youngster.

It has, hopefully, at least shown a few more people that what is happening on those protests is not a good thing, and that there's too many too right-wing people in there, trying to use all the others for their own purposes. After some of the protests were rather violent, at least one that was planned (in Munich) has been forbidden, too.

So we'll see what will happen now, and how things will develop. Not least thanks to people disregarding the anti-Corona measurements and meeting up in huge groups, incidence numbers here in Germany are still way, way too high, and we're looking at increased restrictions through to the mid of January right now - probably with some special rules for Christmas, but nothing is settled yet.

Well. We do indeed live in interesting times...

Thank goodness it's Friday - somehow this week has both flown by and dragged out endlessly (probably because of the time spent editing...). Now it's the weekend, though. Hooray!

Fun fact: Because I needed the other computer for the editing, I had swapped work places with the Most Patient Husband. So now I know his workday homeoffice perspective... and I can tell you that I like my own desk much better. I can't tell you why exactly; probably a lot of it is just being used to, but it's nicer to sit here than there for me.

The cat probably agrees - she had her fave chair taken, then it stood in a different place even when it was not in use (and thus seemed far less attractive suddenly), and apparently my desk is much nicer to sleep on than the other one. Also my arm is in better position to serve as her pillow.

She'll have to wait a bit longer before I'm back properly at my workspace, though - there were remaining holidays still to be taken, and so we'll have next week off. Which also means there will be no blogging.

I'll see you after the break!

EXARC will host another textile chat, this time with the focus on spinning, on Saturday November 14! The chat will start at 15:00 CET.

It's free to join; you only need a discord account and then you can access the EXARC discord channel to chat with other people about spinning, spinning tools, and yarns. Find more information here on the EXARC page.

I'm still editing my video stuff - as usual, there's way more to say (and thus way more material) that I can actually fit into the time span that I have. Not that I'm surprised... at all.

The thing I'm making this video for? I'm one of the experts in Danièle Cybulskie's Medieval Masterclass, which will start this Friday. It's a six-week course intended for creators who wish to use the Middle Ages in their work, and are looking for input that is hard or impossible to get from the usual sources. So I've been dragging stuff into the living-room-gone-video-studio and waving them around, and talking about them.

Tomorrow will hopefully see me finishing the cutting and editing work. There will be lots and lots of cutting... but as my German teacher back in school used to tell us, when teaching us how to abridge an old German play (which would have been performed in about 3 hours, originally, and had to be shortened enough to take place in a bit more than one): "You can always cut down by a third.".

The funny thing about that? I had already cut a third or more from the text, which was clearly visible from all the red ink on the sheet. I told him so. His reply? "You can always cut down by a third." As in... just do it again.

I did. It worked. To this day, that's what I tell myself when I need to shorten things... and I still grin, remembering that day.