Anyone want to help me play yarn detective? I...picked up a couple more balls from the box upstairs (it's been there for days, apparently, so people have Had A Chance) but they have no labels.

Ok, mystery yarn A has clearly been knitted before, and this is several balls of it. Between about 12 and 16 WPI, single ply, but fairly tightly spun. Burns like it's a wool/acrylic blend; self-extinguishes quickly. Colors are very short—often only ~1"
Mystery yarn B is 20 wpi on the nose, is mostly wool, three-ply, very round. Reminds me of Happy Feet DK but has way more of a sheen than I remember HF having.
Mystery yarn C, 14 wpi. I was sure that it was going to be a weird soft acrylic, but the burn test makes me think it's another acrylic/wool blend. The color's a gradient and each shift lasts about 6". I don't even know where to start with this one.
It's worth noting that in A, the colors are very distinct—there's nowhere that the colors were blended in the spinning. (There are lots of single plies that are almost right, but were clearly dyed before spinning, and this was not, imo.)
UPDATE: @linneaharts has called A for Silk Blend by Manos Del Uruguay, and it's a dead match for the wildflower colorway, so that one is SOLVED, hooray!
UPDATE 2: @bibliogrrl called B for Malabrigo, and after poking Ravelry, I think she's right, and it's their sock yarn in Marte, which seems to have *wildly* varying dyelots. But what I have looks a lot like this
https://t.co/QOv6hUr2wE and this https://t.co/UgAW3OBESj
Pals, this is like two days of back-to-back enrichment, this is all going SO GOOD! (Shh, deadlines, shh, it's going so good.)

I'm still full-on baffled by yarn C, but realistically, it's going to make ugly-ass socks for my gremlin child, so I care somewhat less about that one.
Also, hey, if anyone wants to peer pressure me into using Ravelry more, that would be, like. Ok. If you wanted to. https://t.co/junQ9rAYFG

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1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley

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1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”

Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.