Advice From a Vending Machine

I once had a pretentious description but now all this blog really is, is a menagerie of ridiculous inclinations. 

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

[oonpy]

Keep in mind I do some blogging while walking at active crowded roads

[mothtowers]

the establishment fears the humble late bloomer. while you were experiencing the worst dramas of your life through high school dating I was still playing with toys

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’m kinda surprised that nalbinding isn’t as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.

I guess it’s because it’s slower or something.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Nalbinding aka needle binding is when you use yarn and a big sewing needle to make fabric btw

It also has a lot of different kinds of stitches you can do that make different densities of fabric.

Some people even make rugs.

[thewolfwaitsbelow]

I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they don’t know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.

I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.

It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You also don’t need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.

It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.

Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.

[the-color-of-sound-is-space]

I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric

[what-even-is-thiss]

I found this channel by a nice man who makes up close tutorials

Happy Needlebinding

I create videos on YouTube to learn people how to needlebind using two fingers and your thumb. Needlebinding helps people to relax, relieve

[slenders1ckn3ss]

@hollowedskin

[hollowedskin]

Ooh thank you for the tag! It is going in my hoard of links and such.

I am fascinated by nalbinding, but I'm also still working on my panic at cutting yarn to do colour changes in crochet (because then I can't undo it and reuse the yarn) so I feel like nalbinding will by necessity have to come after I can cut yarn without crying like, at least 80% of the time.

[fatsexybitch]

You can always blend it back together! Learn the fisherman's knot and or the Russian join. Cutting doesn't have to be scary!

[allsadnshit]

Keeping an alive tumblr in 2026 is proof of one's sincerity and authenticity - a type of person who enjoys posting for the sake of it with absolutely nothing to be gained....just the enjoyment of curation and self expression untainted by opportunity and relevance

[linguisticparadox]

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

[ri-writing]

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

[linguisticparadox]

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

[wanderingchaos]

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

[athenadark]

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

[the-haiku-bot]

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[elfwreck]

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

[noswordinourlake]

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

[stevespookington]

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

[rostekhorn]

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

[trambrosia]

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

[concerningwolves]

You will never 100% idiotproof your creative work & if you try to, you will only succeed in smothering the soul out of it. btw

[pangur-and-grim]

stop showing it to me

[hedjblogr]

[shamebats]

[stuckinapril]

I’ve had tumblr for 4 years but some of you bitches have had it for a decade. It’s time to seek penance

[stuckinapril]

wait I’m curious now . Reblog this with how long u’ve been on tumblr for. Dating back to ur oldest blog ever !!!

[jollygreengiantdick]

For anyone who wants to see the exact date and time you started on tumblr:

Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your

[queerforscience]

How long have you been on Tumblr?

< 1 year

1-2 years

3-4 years

5-6 years

7-8 years

9-10 years

11-12 years

13-14 years

15-16 years

17-18 years

Since the beginning (19 years)

Voting ended onMar 25

Round to the closest year! I couldn't figure out the best way to succinctly communicate, for example, >10 but <=12 in a way accessible to people with varying degrees of comfort with math notation.

[aromantic-goldfishdeactivated202]

genuinely I cannot fathom trying to use Tumblr like any other social media. I just thought to myself “why does Tumblr even have a ‘Best Posts First’ feature? why would I want to see good posts?” and then I had to stop and consider that for a second

[handsomeboymodelingschool]

I love having interests that I would never ever recommend to any of my friends ever

[goofballproximitysurveyor-deact]

[precious-silly-thing-deactivate]

me, when i can’t organize or plan for shit: nonlinear narrative sequence enhances the dreamlike atmosphere of this tragicomedy

[susiephone]

so frustrating to be a skeptic with a sense of whimsy because like. I want there to be cryptids. I want there to be magic. I want there to be evidence of something we don't fully understand and can't explain. but then 99% of the "proof" out there for that stuff is like. the most obvious scam you've ever seen in your life.

[magpie-rat-king]

#born to be mulder forced to be scully

born to be mulder forced to be scully

[wordfather]

huh. something small but unexpected happened and it threw me off my rhythm. the whole day is ruined now. its gonna take me 3-5 business days to recover

[katrafiy]

[homoquartz]

i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.