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Hurra, Wochenende – und damit mehr Zeit zum Hören und Sehen! In unserer Wochenendausgabe präsentieren wir Euch eine Auswahl empfehlenswerter Filme und Podcasts mit Medienbezug. Dieses Mal wegen der am Dienstag anstehenden Wahl in den USA mit einem Fokus auf den Einfluss von Medien auf den Wahlausgang. Viel Spaß bei Erkenntnisgewinn und Unterhaltung! *** 1. […]

1. Wie die Öffentlich-Rechtlichen aus der Krise kommen sollen (taz.de, Ann-Kathrin Leclère) Ann-Kathrin Leclère hat die wichtigsten Fragen und Antworten zur Rundfunkreform zusammengestellt, beispielsweise: Warum braucht es Reformen? Wer kümmert sich darum? Was wurde beschlossen? Wer hat Angst vor welchen Änderungen? Und was ist mit dem Rundfunkbeitrag? 2. Wie das insolvente Kreml-Medium Ruptly unter neuem […]

1. Automatisierte Bots auf X greifen in den US-Wahlkampf ein (zeit.de, Eva Wolfangel) “Die Sorge, dass das Internet von Bots zersetzt wird, gibt es schon lange. Jetzt gibt es erstmals klare Belege für solche KI-Accounts – manche machen Stimmung für Trump.” Eva Wolfangel gibt einen Einblick in die derzeitige Forschung zu Bot-Netzwerken. Weiterer Lesetipp: Elon […]

1. RSF verurteilt israelische Nachrichtenblockade (reporter-ohne-grenzen.de) Die Organisation Reporter ohne Grenzen (RSF) verurteilt den Umgang der israelischen Armee mit Medienschaffenden. “Aus dem Norden des Gazastreifens dringen immer weniger Informationen heraus, und gerade deshalb wird Journalismus immer wichtiger”, so RSF-Geschäftsführerin Anja Osterhaus: “Die israelischen Streitkräfte verhindern zunehmend Bilder und Stimmen von der Realität des Krieges und […]

1. Was das Ampel-Aus für die Medienbranche bedeutet (dwdl.de, Timo Niemeier) Timo Niemeier macht sich bei “DWDL” Gedanken darüber, wie sich das Ende der Ampel-Koalition auf die Medienbranche auswirken könnte. Die vorgesehene Reform der Filmförderung mit Elementen wie Steueranreizen und Investitionsverpflichtungen sei ohne FDP-Stimmen kaum durchsetzbar. Die geplante Reform des öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunks bleibe hingegen unberührt, […]

Hurra, Wochenende – und damit mehr Zeit zum Hören und Sehen! In unserer Wochenendausgabe präsentieren wir Euch eine Auswahl empfehlenswerter Filme und Podcasts mit Medienbezug. Viel Spaß bei Erkenntnisgewinn und Unterhaltung! *** 1. Welche Rolle haben Medien beim Ampel-Aus gespielt? (uebermedien.de, Holger Klein, Audio: 24:34 Minuten) Im “Übermedien”-Podcast hat sich Holger Klein mit Ann-Kathrin Büüsker […]

1. Euronews-Redaktionen protestieren gegen ihren neuen Chef Claus Strunz (uebermedien.de, Stefan Niggemeier) Stefan Niggemeier fasst die Diskussionen um den neuen Euronews-Chef Claus Strunz, Ex-Mitglied der “Bild”-Chefredaktion, zusammen. Mitarbeiterinnen, Mitarbeiter und Gewerkschaften in Lyon und Brüssel würfen Strunz vor, die Prinzipien der Neutralität und Unparteilichkeit zu verletzen, insbesondere durch öffentliche Pro-Trump-Äußerungen und politische Eingriffe in die […]

Research by Princeton scholars at the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration has culminated in a significant breakthrough in understanding the evolution of the universe.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $52.66 million grant to fund a major infrastructure upgrade to the Simons Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Upgrades are expected to take about five years; the resulting facility will be known as the Advanced Simons Observatory (ASO).

Two NASA telescopes helped an international team of astrophysicists peer far enough back in time to gain new insight on how black holes form.

Two projects — one that maps the function of the brain’s neuronal network in unprecedented detail and another that combines robotics and light-based computer circuits to create safe self-driving vehicles — have been awarded funding through Princeton’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund.

The expansion will allow other national laboratories to join PPPL in supporting the growth of the next generation of innovators and technicians.

An international team of researchers and gamers, led by Princeton’s Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung, mapped every neuron and every synaptic connection in an adult fruit fly's brain, building a comprehensive “connectome” that represents a massive step toward understanding the human brain.

Stone is a leading engineering scholar and pioneer in fluid dynamics research. University Professor is Princeton’s highest honor for faculty.

In the Class of 2028, 71.5% of students qualify for financial aid and 21.7% of the class are lower-income students eligible for federal Pell grants.

The 9 a.m. service on Monday, Nov. 11, will also be livestreamed.

Download links (Spotify, YouTube, Apple) here. Learn more about the Pagan History Project here.

The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is a partnership between the Open Doors committee and fan-run preservation project Zinedom through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to the Archive of Our Own. Fanworks can be imported to AO3 with the consent of either the creators of the works or the publisher of the fanzine in which the fanworks were published.

Today, Open Doors is pleased to announce a list of collections that it has created since September 2023 to house fanworks imported through the FSHP. A collection has been created for each fanzine from which one or more fanworks have been imported, but these collections do not contain every work from each of these zines, and many so far only include one work each in cases where Open Doors only has permission to import that particular work. For full transparency, Open Doors plans to continue to announce collections as they are created that may or may not grow with additional fanworks as additional permissions are obtained from more creators in the future.

As of August 2024, Open Doors has created the following collections to represent fanzines from which it has imported works:

• A Portfolio of Poetry and Portraits
• Amazing Grace
• Astray in the Wilderness
• Beyond Dreams
• Broken Images
• California K/S
• Contact
• CrosSignals
• Daring Attempt
• Enter-comm
• First Time
• Gateway
• Guardian
• Happy Tails
• IDIC
• In the Wilderness
• KaleidoScope
• KisMet
• KSX
• Legacy
• Legends
• Naked Times
• Nightvisions
• Nome
• On the Edge
• One Shot
• Partners
• Potpourri
• Pushin' the Odds
• Quantum Chain
• Scattered Stars
• Sehlat's Roar
• Southern Star
• Spock's Arthropods
• Strange Justice
• The Complete Rack
• The K/S Press
• The Rack & All the King's Horses All the King's Men
• Three Eleven
• Universe Beyond
• Whalesong
• Within the Mirror

For answers to frequently asked questions, please see the FSHP page on the Open Doors website. If you'd like to give Open Doors permission to import any of your fanworks that have been previously published in print fanzines, or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors Committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

Thanks for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers!

- The Open Doors team

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days, on 18 November. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.

This fabric is called Kékfestö in Hungarian, a word that roughly translates as blue-dyed or blue-dying. Producing these fabrics is a cottage industry in Hungary, which dates back several centuries. The dye is indigo; the cloth is cotton; and the long, arduous process results in a type of batik fabric. The photo above shows a small fold of each of the fabrics I bought at the blue-dyed studio shown below. (As always, please click on the photos if you'd like to see more detail.)

When in Hungary in October, 2016, my quilting/travel friend (Lunnette) and I, as guests of my Hungarian bead sister, Anna Fehér, had the very exciting experience of visiting the hand-dying studio of Miklós Kovács in the little village of Tiszakécske, SE of Budapest. The studio, located behind his home, includes two rooms, one for printing the raw cloth with a wax resist, and the second for dying the printed cloth with indigo. In front of the building, you can see rods above the deck, which are used for hanging the fabric to dry after it is dyed, and a wagon loaded with printed cloth ready to be dyed.

Meet Mr. Miklós Kovács, now in his 80s! Charming and animated, he is explaining his traditional, hand-dying process to Anna. Blue-dying has been the Kovács family's livelihood since 1878, each new generation being trained by the previous Master. It is strictly a family affair. Miklós, his wife, Margit, and their two daughters, Gabriella and Mária, currently produce about 10,000 meters of Kékfestö (blue-dyed) fabric every year. When Mr. and Mrs. Kovács retire, the business will pass to their daughters. This post shows how they turn plain white cloth into beautiful fabrics with white motifs on an indigo background.

First, they need thousands of meters of fine-quality, tightly-woven, raw cotton cloth, which is rinsed to remove impurities, then carefully ironed and rolled onto wooden rods which fit onto the printing machine. This pile of untreated cotton cloth, manufactured in Turkey, is the remainder of a big shipment purchased at the start of the year.

Next they need a print block or plate. These are made with wire pins of various diameters, which are pounded into blocks of dense wood. Here you see the many plate choices available in the Kovács studio, each yielding a different motif on the fabric. The length of each print block is the same as the width of the fabric; the width is the width of the pattern repeat, generally designed to be about 4.5 inches..

This is the end of one of the print blocks, showing how the design is formed by setting metal pins of different diameters into the wooden block.

And here is the fabric (after dying it with indigo, and removing the wax resist), which was printed with the block in the photo above it. Naturally, a half-meter of this one came home with me!

This is the machine which is used to print the motif on the raw cotton cloth with a wax resist. Mr. Kovács keeps his printing machine, built in Germany 120 years ago, in good running condition with machinist skills he learned alongside his father.

You can see the sprocket, lower right, which is adjusted to advance the fabric through the machine in increments exactly the length of the pattern repeat. For most motifs, the fabric advances 4 to 5 inches after each time the print block is applied to the fabric, thus revealing the next short stretch of un-printed cloth.

Here you can see many meters of raw cotton cloth, suspended on a metal rod at the back of the printing press. There is a leader of waste cloth stitched to the end of the roll which has been fed through the rollers of the machine to get the process started.

At the front of the printing machine, a worker swipes a tray with wax resist, which is tinted green so that it will be visible on the printed cloth. The printing block touches down on the waxed tray, picks up a coating of was, and then presses firmly against the fabric.

After being imprinted with wax resist, the fabric is wound up and down through a drying rack located behind the printing machine.

When it is dry, the printed fabric is folded and stacked until there is a sufficient quantity to begin the dying process. You can see that some of the raw cloth in this pile was pre-dyed pink, blue, or beige. After over-dying with indigo and removing the resist, the motif on these pieces will be pink, blue or beige with an indigo background, rather than the much more common white motif with an indigo background.

This close-up photo shows how the fabric looks after the wax resist (tinted green so that is shows on white cloth) is dry. This is the motif being printed while we were there. Liking the design a lot, I was very pleased to find finished fabric in this pattern available to purchase.

And this is how the cloth will look after it is dyed with indigo, the wax resist removed, and the fabric washed and ironed. As you might have already guessed, a half-meter of this one came home with me!

As we watch the cloth passing slowly through the rollers of the printing machine, Lunnette holds a scrap of dyed fabric which was tied to the machine, indicating the motif currently being printed.

At last, we get to the dye pot!  Here on the burner, a concentrated indigo dye formula is being readied to pour into the dye vat.

Don't forget to wear those heavy rubber gloves, or the skin on your hands will be tinged with blue for a long time.
Mr. Kovács gave a long, animated talk (all in Hungarian, which I only slightly comprehend) about the whole process of blue dying. You've already seen how the cloth is printed with wax resist. The next step is to dye the background.

The cloth is dyed in a vat with the indigo dye-bath at 85 degrees C., then washed to remove the wax and rinsed to remove the excess dye. After rinsing, the cloth is looped over racks to dry outdoors, which completes the dying process. Sadly, he did no dying while we were there, so I don't have pictures or first-hand experience with precisely how it is done to share with you.

However the fabric is not yet ready to use. It must be starched, dried, and then pressed using both steam and steel rollers with heavy pressure, in order to create the traditionally desirable shiny finish on the cloth. Finally, the fabric is folded onto bolts for distribution to shops and end-users.

We learned how they hand-print motifs on cloth using a template, such that after dying, the fabric can be cut out and hemmed as a finished table cloth. You can see the templates hanging on the wall. The desired template is placed over the fabric, and a pencil used to mark the registration points for lining up the printing block. Fabrics which have already been printed are stacked in front of the templates. After being dyed, this fabric will be made into table cloths and runners of various sizes.

This is a section of cloth which as been marked with a template, and hand-stamped with wax resist. After dying with indigo and removing the wax, it will be made into a rectangular table cloth with a lovely double border all the way around.

Mrs. Kovács demonstrates for us how she lines up the print block with the penciled registration marks, and then lowers it onto the fabric. With the stamp resting on the cloth, she lightly pounds it with her fist to set the wax into the fabric. It was obvious to us that carefully making each wax impression all the way around the cloth takes a lot of time and concentration. As you an see below, the results of her hand-printing are stunning!.

Here is an example of a hand-stamped, indigo-dyed fabric made into a round table cloth. Obviously, it came home with me, and is perfect for my kitchen table!  This fabric is quite wide, and takes a great deal of space and time to print. Yet, the prices were very reasonable!

After spending several hours in the studio, we were invited to the house for a shopping bonanza! Fortunately, hoping ahead of time that we would be visiting a Kékfestö studio when we got to Hungary, we had saved our allowances for some months, and were prepared to shop for future quilting and sewing projects. The prices, ranging $10 to $15 per meter depending on the width, seemed very reasonable considering the quality of the fabric, and the extreme amount of work that goes into producing it.

In addition to yardage, both of us bought a table cloth and an apron. Mine is shown above.

What a totally delightful experience we had! Mr. and Mrs. Kovács are as friendly and nice as can be!  If you ever get to Hungary, you can find their fabrics and finished products in the picturesque town of Szentendre, just a short drive or train ride north of Budapest on the Danube River. Here is a website link.

To end our visit at the Kovács studio, here is a tribute photo of the elder Mr. Kovács, who during his boyhood in the 1920's was immersed in the world of his family's blue-dying business, and who continued producing Kékfestö indigo-dyed fabrics for his entire life, while training his own son to continue the trade.

Like his father, the younger Mr. Kovács has trained his daughters to continue when he retires, although I'm sure he has many more years to go, probably well into his 90s..

My last two photos in this post are a little surprise for you. Before falling in love with beading and quilting, my main passion was Hungarian folk dancing. I danced in a performance group for 10 years (and later became one of the group's choreographers), performing at many events in the Seattle area, including Bumbershoot and the Folklife Festival. We also performed at the World's Fair when it was in Vancouver, British Columbia. I and several of the other dancers in the group made most of our costumes using Hungarian fabrics and original costumes as patterns.

It was folk music and dance that first called my heart and soul into Hungary, where I have since spent a cumulative total of well over a year of my life, spaced over 14 different visits so far.

So, here you go. This is me, wearing a costume I made with Kékfestö fabric for performing the dances of the Szatmár region, located in northeastern Hungary. This photo was taken in September, 1986 at the World's Fair in Vancouver, Canada, where we performed on two separate occasions.

And this is me on stage at a festival in Redmond, WA, happy as can be, Hungarian folk music, song and dance, filling me with joy!  Michael Kappleman and I are the second couple from the left.

So you see...  Kékfestö and I go back a long way. Next, I'll be quilting with it!

*****
My apologies to Hungarians for not using the correct accent mark for the last letter of the Hungarian word Kékfestö. I spent 4 hours trying to do it, but could not get Blogger to accept anything I tried.

 

It All Started with Hexie-lust!

Getting Hooked on Crochet

Original Crochet-Along, Frida's Flowers

Bored with making 6 identical flowers - Colors calling us!

Designing Our Afghans

Entering at the San Juan County Fair

Alban Forcione, an internationally renowned scholar of 17th-century literature of “Golden Age” Spain, the Walter S. Carpenter Jr., Professor of Language, Literature and Civilization of Spain, Emeritus, and Princeton alumnus, died Sept. 14 at age 82.

Gilbert Harman, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, died at his home in Princeton on Nov. 13 after a long illness with Alzheimer’s. He was 83.

In honor of his parents, Chemistry Nobel Laureate David MacMillan has founded The May and Billy MacMillan Foundation to provide educational opportunities for financially disadvantaged students in Scotland.

The book joins others by Princeton faculty on The New Yorker list of the year’s best. Jarrett gives a talk at Labyrinth Books on Thursday, Nov. 3.

“His mathematical legacy is enormous,” said John D’Angelo *76. “Joe was among the most friendly, popular and influential mathematicians of his generation.”

Young Democratic Socialists of America - General Meeting

All are welcome to this treasured annual community gathering, the Interfaith Thanksgiving Worship Service, in the University Chapel. Sponsored by Princeton University’s Office of Religious Life and the Princeton Clergy Association.

About the Event Our resident ensemble of Princeton University performance faculty and talented students presents a Sunday-afternoon program of songs with and without words written by female composers on both sides of the Atlantic. Songs for mezzo-soprano and piano by prolific lieder composer Josephine Lang and for mezzo-soprano and mixed chamber ensemble by Dame Ethel Smyth bookend the program, with works for string quartet, solo piano, and flute, viola, and harp, that reference American, Jamaican, and European song and poetry in between. This event is presented by Princeton University Concerts. For a full event listing and tickets, please visit this link.

Music of Duke Ellington (The River) and Gustav Mahler (Symphony No. 4). Soprano soloist for Mahler will be Sara Shiff '25.

Music of Duke Ellington (The River) and Gustav Mahler (Symphony No. 4). Soprano soloist for Mahler will be Sara Shiff '25.

In this talk, Graham Neubig will discuss a new frontier in AI models, vision-language models that understand the world's cultures. The talk will be in two parts. First, Neubig will discuss training of multilingual multimodal multicultural models that understand images and text, and have increased ability to answer culture-specific questions about multimodal data. Second, he will discuss work on "image transcreation", where models have been developed that can transform images to make them more relevant to a particular culture. This work has applications in a number of areas, such as cultural localization of educational materials (to accompany translated text). While these methods cover many languages, African and not, the talk will focus on examples specifically from the African context, and challenges we currently face therein.

About the Event Part of the Princeton University Concerts (PUC) Performances Up Close series, audience is seated onstage alongside the musicians in an hour-long program. Winners of a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022, the New York City-based Isidore String Quartet was formed in 2019 with a vision to revisit, rediscover, and reinvigorate the repertory. The young ensemble will do just that when they make their Princeton debuts in a program featuring a recent string quartet by multiple GRAMMY-winner Billy Childs; Henri Dutilleux’s fascinating Ainsi la nuit (“Thus the Night”); and W.A. Mozart’s forward-thinking “Dissonance” quartet. This event is presented by Princeton University Concerts. For a full event listing and tickets, please visit this link.

Young Democratic Socialists of America - General Meeting

"When the first notes of [the music] threaded their way into my consciousness, they seemed to come from inside me…music wound its way through me as sound turned pure sensation." —The New York Times on PUC's Live Music Meditation About the Event Breathe in sound and silence through guided meditation as you listen to music more viscerally than ever before, meditating to the playing of the Isidore String Quartet, guided by Matthew Weiner, Associate Dean in the Princeton University Office of Religious Life. This is a FREE, unticketed opportunity to indulge in attentive, focused, and mindful listening. No prior experience with meditation necessary. Capacity is limited, and we advise participants to arrive early—although the event officially begins at 12:30PM, doors to the hall will open and meditation instruction will begin at 12:00PM (noon). The event will conclude by 1:30PM. If desired, attendees may bring floor seating (mat/cushion/etc); seating will be on stage, with chairs provided. For more information about the Live Music Meditation experience, check out this New York Times feature and Performance Today segment. About the Musicians: Winners of a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022, the New York City-based Isidore String Quartet was formed in 2019 with a vision to revisit, rediscover, and reinvigorate the repertory. The quartet is heavily influenced by the Juilliard String Quartet and the idea of ‘approaching the established as if it were brand new, and the new as if it were firmly established.’ The quartet began as an ensemble at the Juilliard School. They are currently completing their final year as Peak Fellowship Ensemble-in-Residence at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Additional Evening Concerts: The Isidore Quartet will also perform in the evening as part of the Performances Up Close series at 6PM & 9PM, with audience seated onstage. Concert info & tickets This event is presented by Princeton University Concerts. For a full event listing and tickets, please visit this link.

Gemma Peacocke’s ‘A Strange Power’ is a 45-minute cantata about the tangled web of romance, free love, creation, and death in the early lives of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont. Scored for two sopranos, clarinet, piano, percussion, and cello, the work will be performed by Sputter Box with guest vocalist Charlotte Mundy. The program also features new works for the performers by other Princeton University graduate student composers Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, Devin Greenwood, Gemma Peacocke, and Onche Rajesh Ugbabe.

Join us for a conversation with two of the nation’s leading election scholars about the county line, preserving free and fair elections in New Jersey, and the future of elections in the United States.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ‘21 University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Creative Writing, offers a brief survey of Irish history from earliest times to the present day through the prism of his own poems. No tickets required.

Ever wanted to try a sound healing meditation? Come join GSG and CPS for a mindfulness hour, guided by a certified sound healer.

Are you curious to learn more about Excel? Interested in refining your Excel skills? Wondering if you can use it more effectively? Join us for this introduction to Excel functions workshop. We will discuss using Excel functions, as well as working with text and dates. No previous knowledge required.

About the Event Two of today’s finest string quartets become even more than the sum of their parts in octets by Felix Mendelssohn and George Enescu as they return to Princeton University Concerts the evening prior to heading to Carnegie Hall. These monumental works—each, incredibly, written by the prodigious composers in their teens—are quintessential representations of the form, showcasing the sonic power and rich, multilayered possibilities of an octet configuration. This event is presented by Princeton University Concerts. For a full event listing and tickets, please visit this link.

Young Democratic Socialists of America - General Meeting