Everyone is new here

There's an odd feeling associated with getting into sewing. A lot of my entry point has been the /r/myog (make your own gear) community on Reddit and elsewhere, which is composed of people making bags and gear for camping. The community is majority men.

Sewing in the modern era is mostly done by women, and is devalued, just like other women-dominated fields.

It's weird to write about sewing machine tension settings and the usefulness of rotary cutters for trimming fabric, on a blog that's mostly about technology. This stuff is common knowledge, it just isn't common knowledge for my demographic. The risk of Columbusing - discovering something that is not new and telling all your friends about it - is dangerously high.

Hopefully writing about sewing on a blog doesn't imply that I invented it or am doing anything new: I'm not, and am pretty bad at sewing.

I think there's a broader pattern here.

A long time ago I wrote about rhumb lines and map projections and peeling an orange: an old metaphor for understanding a geospatial concept that's pretty surprising when you learn about it. I am pretty sure that I independently came up with the idea, but so did lots of other people before me.

Most topics have been covered before. I'm just writing them down again, whether I know it or not.

Writing in this way isn't that much different than oral history: every generation has to repeat the same stories for it all to work.

I hope that I'm humble enough to realize that I'm the millionth person to encounter each new thing, but free enough to enjoy the feeling of discovery. When I log on to TikTok in a daze of boredom and addiction and see some teenager who listened to Radiohead for the first time or learned about the Web Mercator projection, I'm reminded that everything is new to everyone at first.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.