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I don’t knit. I’m saying this based on multiple factors:

1. Videos of people who knit trying to use a dodecahedron. Like this one or this one. They use the holes, they use the knobs, but the core shape of the tool itself is practically irrelevant, and if anything it gets in the way. Also note the end result, it’s way crappier than a good knitter could do by hand. (I might not knit but I do see people knitting all the time.)

2. The existence of a similar icosahedron. It could be used just fine for cyphers, but not for knitting - note how the holes are too small. (Also, you wouldn’t need so many faces.)

3. The Romans assigned manual labour - like knitting - to slaves. And slaves aren’t exactly the sort of person a Roman would waste precious bronze with, specially not for a tool with an excessively specific purpose, like this one.

4. Wool production in Rome was mostly around Gallia Cisalpina:

And yet those dodecahedra were mostly found around Germania, Belgica, Lugdunensis, some even in Britannia:

If anything the distribution hints more something military.

I think it’s unlikely to be a knitting tool, as you could achieve the same with a simpler tool.

For example, I’ve seen people saying it’s for wool gloves. But a bar with five holes and some knobs would do the trick, no need for an intricate form like a dodeca.

My guess for the dodecahedra is that they’re a tool to aid with cryptography. This video explains it well, but TL;DW you’d use the dodecahedron with two concentric circles full of letters, and rotate one to know which letter to replace with which. It’s a slightly more advanced and secure version of Caesar’s cypher, and I could easily see the Romans doing something like that.

On the other hand I wouldn’t expect them to be used for knitting or jewellery, as simpler devices would do the same job.

…but to answer your question, I think that most decor items will give those archaeologists a hard time. Stuff like this:

I was almost going to say “yerba mate bombillas”, but they’ll likely detect saliva DNA in them and guess that they were used as straws:

Thank you!

The usual: booze, games, cooking, gardening, anime.

This time I bought some Patagonia beers. I’m not a heavy beer drinker, but they’re great. One can of each type (Pilsener to share with my mum, IPA, and an amber lager). It’s 4AM and I’m seriously considering to crack the IPA open, I love it!

Games-wise it’s going to be Leaf Blower Revolution. I’m still farming witches and crafting leaves. (This sounds weird, I know.) I’ll probably also play some Oxygen not Included, I bought the Frosty Planet DLC a time ago and I didn’t play with it yet.

Cooking-wise, dunno, but people always ask me to prepare some stuff. It’s typically homemade pizza. Typical flavours are

• beef stroganoff - because my nephew loves it
• five cheeses - moz’, Parm’, provolone, ricotta, gorgonzola
• pepperoni - all times favourite. Made with 100% fake pepperoni made by slicing “Calabrian” sausages, coating them with paprika, and pan-frying them. I did this initially as a hack but people liked it better than the ones using actual pepperoni sausages
• “whatever I found in the fridge” + “whatever my BIL brought as filling”. Those typically include eggs, bacon, sweet corn, peas, onions, olives, stuff like this.

Gardening is… well. I need to plant some new cacti I bought for my cactus garden, plus check outside for hail damage - yesterday [Thursday] evening it hailed really bad. I’m worried the most about my kale and pepper plants (the tree pepper is probably OK, but the bishop’s crown and ladyfinger are probably damaged). Malena (my Sicilian / rangpur tree) and the kumquat probably liked it.

Anime-wise I’m re-watching the series Log Horizon. It’s really good; I heavily recommend it for people who like “trapped in a game” style isekai series. I’ll probably also watch a few series airing this season: Dr. Stone, Re:ZERO, Hazure Skill “Kinomi Master”, Unnamed Memory…

…you know what, I’m cracking the IPA open right now.

It narrows it down to people from instances that still federated with Hexbear and have money to spend on this stupid shit.

Relevant to note that every other bid comes from the same bidder, j_s_0e6b87. Here’s what I’m guessing about them:

• They likely know about Hexbear, since they were bidding on the address right off the bat.
• They aren’t a domain squatter. A domain squatter would try to minimise the amount of money spent on a domain; and yet they’re bidding too early, too frequently, and values considerably higher than the necessary to be the top bidder.
• They aren’t using automated tools, since the the times and values between the others’ bids and theirs are too erratic.
• Either they don’t plan to actually win the bid, OR they have lots of money (to the point that US$710 is pocket change for them) and really, really bad blood against Hexbear.

As @Sunshine@lemmy.ca mentioned it’s now at $505.

What’s up with j_s_0e6b87? (Let’s call them JS). If they really want the address that’s the wrong way to go - bidding too high, too early, too often, and in a bidding war against everyone else. A better approach is to wait until the last hours and then try to snip it.

Unless their goal is to raise the prices this way?

EDIT: currently $676. JS is in a bid war with TB (t_b_2a08d7), a newcomer. 🍿

I think that the additional time will be enough to let them contact the original owner. But dunno, there might be some drama involved, IIRC not even the original devs want much to do with HB.

And even if they move twice, the userbase seems close-knit enough to follow without too many losses.

Is it weird that I feel bad for them?

I don’t think it is. The main problem there seems to be users going rogue outside their home instance; I remember HB had some rule like “respect rules of the other instances you interact with”, but it was toilet paper. However plenty of the other users are completely OK.

Another issue is that there is some red scare against them. And even if they use it to shield themselves from actual criticism in a really dumb way, the red scare is still there.

They’ll probably stay in chapo.chat, and instance owners will update their blocked lists. A few users lost because they can’t be arsed to re-register, instead using .ml. But, past that, not much is going to change, I think.

I’m mildly curious on what’s going to happen with their older domain - or, what the winning bidder will make out of it. (Document bad online behaviour? Make it about NATO to rub salt on their wounds? What else?)

It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploits that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.