Being critical of your interests is sooooo fun when you have the critic gene & then you sound kind of insane to the average tv watcher when you're like "this is my favorite show, It's Racist" & then you try to clarify what you mean & get that [Speech (legendary) - FAILURE] "the racism is really interesting though"
[Speech (legendary) - SUCCESS] I find the sociopolitical context of pulpy old sci-fi born circa the civil rights movement really fascinating to analyze especially when it was progressive for its time but still reveals the writers' unexamined biases in the subtext
is anyone trying dracula daily this year? i am TRYING to keep up and complete it this time. i would love to have others to chat with that IS attempting it this year!
oh my god... had a panic attack around lunchtime and felt absolutely wretched ever since UNTIL I finally finished and posted that art and immediately felt amazing?? relaxed and breathing easy for the first time in hours... healed of my anxiety by the power of inflicting ship art upon you...
playing the organ, from a beginning organist/writer's perspective
lol so I was talking to @ashloraptor in DMs about what information/misconceptions someone might want to keep in mind when writing about playing the organ, and the length of my response started to get a little silly, so I figured I'd just make a post about it 😛 Honestly, I've wanted to write about Ganondorf playing the organ for ages but never gotten around to it—but for anyone else who wants to write it (or Phantom of the Opera, or whatever), maybe this will be helpful?
My experience is that I'm a fairly experienced pianist (hobby, non-professional) and took a couple organ classes in college, though I get sort of severe anxiety while performing that causes my legs to shake—semi-manageable with the piano, but an obvious problem while playing the organ? 😭 I think I still might know enough to offer some insights, though (though definitely non-exhaustive, so if you want to write about organs in any detail, I'd definitely do some research:
I think it's easiest to compare it to playing the piano, which more people are familiar with. The first big difference is that the piano has what's called the sustain pedal, and as long as that's pressed down, the sound from whatever notes you play will continue to resonate even after you're no longer physically pressing the key. The notes get muddled after a while, so you need to press and depress the pedal fairly frequently, but it's an easy way to get a smoother, less choppy sound, especially when your hands are traveling all around the keyboard. You can also manipulate the volume fairly easily—more pressure on the key is louder, and less is soft.
With the organ, there's no sustain pedal, and no pressure-based volume. If you're pressing a key, it's playing at the volume of whatever pipes/stops you have activated, and when you let it go, the sound stops. This means that maintaining a smooth sound is more a matter of creative fingering than anything else—finger substitutions, sliding your thumb along keys, etc. If there's a transition between two notes that can't be made smoothly, you need either your other hand, your feet, or even another finger on the same hand to hold down a note and carry the sound. You might also purposefully put breaths in between note transitions to keep the music from becoming too heavy, which can happen easily with chords if you're too smooth. You're basically looking for a balance of sound that's maintained entirely by the fingering: not choppy, but not overbearing, either.
Some organs have a sort of volume lever you can adjust with your foot, but for the most part, volume is a result of which and how many stops you have pulled. As a basic explanation, each stop correlates to a specific set of pipes, and when the stop is pulled/activated/on, playing a key pushes air through those pipes to create sound. When the stop is off, the passage of air is stopped. You might see stops labeled as 8', 4', etc., which correlates to the length of the pipe, and thus the pitch of the sound. Lower numbers are higher pitched; higher numbers are deeper. Pipes can also have different sounds to them (often indicated in the stop's name), ranging from loud and even horn-like to softer and flutish. If you pull multiple, different-lengthed stops, you get a layered sound, which is how playing even a single note on an organ can sound harmonic.
Furthermore, each keyboard on an organ has its own set of pipes/stops, meaning that by setting different combinations to different keyboards and switching between them as you play (or playing with one hand on one keyboard and the other on another), you can customize the sound that comes out. As a loose rule of thumb, the lowest keyboards have access to the loudest/deepest stops? The pedal keyboard (operated by your feet) has the lowest pipes available—16', sometimes 32', and apparently on only a few organs in the world, 64'.
ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY that emotionality on the organ is absolutely possible, but it has to be calculated and coordinated beforehand. There's almost a sort of timed choreography to it—you plan out your stop combinations ahead of time, and if you want to change the stops mid-song, then you need to plan for that movement, because it's taking your hand away from the keyboard. Operating the pedal keyboard ESPECIALLY requires a level of mental and physical coordination that takes time to develop because you are both reading an extra line of music from what the piano would require AND moving your feet along their own keyboard independent of your hands. I used to get literal headaches when I was first learning how to do it 😭
What else... OH, so the shoes you wear matter! I have a pair of dedicated organ shoes, but some people (church organists especially) play in stockinged feet. You need your feet to be able to glide across the keys, with soles thin enough to feel them. Traditionally female shoes have a heel to help you heel-toe your way down the notes, and I assume traditionally male shoes have some sort of heel/lift, as well? You might also get some strange responses from friends if you put out a post on Facebook or something asking if there's a brick and mortar shop that sells organ shoes. Ask me how I know.
The last thing I can think of that could be interesting from a writing/characterization perspective is that I feel like uncertainty comes across more easily on an organ? There are tells on a piano if you're uncertain about a passage—for my own part, I might play too quietly, and then too forcefully as I regain confidence—but when you press a note half-heartedly on the organ, it has this wavering quality, like blowing into a flute with not quite enough air. Because there's no changing the volume, either, the inconsistent note is very evident and difficult to hide—so you need confidence while playing, or at the very least, pressure.
Overall, it's very full-bodied, very coordinated, and very planned. Usually, you'll notate your music ahead of time with fingering and foot/heel markings. Also, organs vary widely. Stops available on one organ might not be on another/sound like another, so they can be very individual instruments. A good organ is a pleasure and a bad one is a trial—though I think that’s the case of most instruments, actually 😛
Anyway, that's all that's coming to mind right now, so I hope that helps!
I spent a lot of time in 2025 thinking about this particular sequence of events in this boot. [I also spent about ten seconds of 2025 holding this man's hand while he guided me to a desk in his lair and whispered "this is my music" to me, so this was a very epic year.]
I’ve been wanting to try bookbinding for a while, and I finally (after years of on and off working on it) finished my first project! So heads up for a long post. I have a lot to say about the process, so feel free to skim for pictures!
It’s for the fanfiction “Blind, But Now” by aperplexingpuzzle on ao3, @ghirahimbo here. It’s my absolute favorite fanfiction, and one of my favorite books in general. It is a Legend of Zelda fic, based around Skyward Sword and the struggles that come once the battle is won and the journey is complete. It’s Link/Ghirahim, which is a pairing I hadn’t really considered/enjoyed before this, with a blind Link. It's a great pairing, because they work as unexpected mirrors for each other, highlighting the similarities of their roles towards Hylia and Demise.
The writing is absolutely gorgeous. It deals with great symbolism, and the question of what’s left when you’ve completed your destiny. How do you live with yourself, and how do you live with others, when everything and nothing has changed?
And, by the way, it fixes plot holes and time travel paradoxes from the game! That is so rare! Time travel is so hard to do right!
For the bookbinding, I.. kind of jumped into the deep end for this by ignoring so much advice. “Don’t start with a big book” “Don’t start with an important-to-you project” “Don’t make a black cover, it’s easy to have smudges show up” Nope! I’m going to start with my favorite fanfiction, which came out to 643 pages, with black covers!
It took so long, and a large part of that was struggling with my ability to even touch the project. I think I took an unintentional year-long break from it because my brain just said nope. Even with that, it was so much fun. I really enjoyed getting so immersed in the story again, learning about the construction of books, figuring out artwork for it.
I struggled a lot with how to do things. With the increasing popularity of bookbinding there’s a lot of resources, but those resources are on a spectrum of “glue pages together, that’s a book” to “follow the precise procedure that’s endured for thousands of years for a reason, you can’t really learn from a tutorial you need to get a feel for the process”. I really wanted to make a good book, both from my love of books growing up and my love of this particular fic, but I also didn’t have access to the “right” equipment for a lot of parts. So I was stuck trying to interpret what a middle ground looked like, and I ended up bouncing between so many different tutorials. I really lucked out with very few major mistakes that were fairly fixable.
I went with a (I hope I’m remembering the right terminology) sewn binding on short grain paper, with sewn on endpapers that were laminated/made pages. For some reason wheat paste was tripping up my brain, so I stuck to PVA glue.
I also struggled with rounding and backing. I was really determined to make the book as sturdy as I could, so I decided to not stick to my preference for a flat spine/pages. But rounding and backing it felt.. off in ways. I think I kind of half way rounded it, got a little bit of a backing effect, then un-rounded it a bit when it wasn’t feeling right? It was hard to know what to do with it, and it didn’t help that a lot of sources online said that this was a really hard step without the correct equipment.
The biggest issue I had, that luckily was something I could fix, was when a tutorial I was following suggested adding too many layers to the spine. My first book had a spine with the sturdiness, and unfortunately the flexibility, of a rock. It.. would have worked, but I was very disappointed that it wouldn’t open flat. I managed to get the paper layer scraped off, as well as the excess end bands. I really wanted 3 for a red-blue-green theme :( But, I’m happy enough with it as is! The first one has green on the top and bottom, the other has one red and one grey.
I’d intended to use book cloth for the covers, but I got some and discovered that it had a Bad Texture for me. I’d also gotten some paper samples that I’d really liked, so I eventually gave in and went with paper. As much as I want durability, I also need to be able to comfortably touch the book. And some of the paper samples were really cool.
The first cover I did was on a “linen texture” paper. It has a fairly plain front, with the title and author and a small embellishment, but that was very much what was needed to get myself to start. Plus it fit my silver-on-black theme.
I am not much of an artist, so most of the art is bits and pieces from the games so I could not feel too bad about tracing. I hoped that tracing wasn’t too bad if it was from official game art.
The first bit of that on the cover was Ghirahim’s sword for the spine instead of a title. Even with tracing it came out a bit more squat than I’d hoped for, but I was still thrilled with the end result.
For the back, I used Canva to try out some designs, and that’s where I found the mountains. I really hesitated on using them, I wasn’t sure how well the snow would come out, and then I had a really good day for a “fuck it, lets try” mentality, and it came out great! But wow is lettering hard with a brush.
The second cover threw me a bit. It was a glossy paper that I picked because I wanted to try something a little different for the second book. That was a big part of why I was doing two books, after all! But it turned out, once it was glued to the boards, that pencil wouldn’t show up at all. So I thought I was stuck completely free-handing it.
Somehow that led to me going back to my favorite cover design, that I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to do well enough, because the lack of the ability to outline it first led to more creativity and I used stencils made out of paining tape for the cover. I really liked how that came out, too. I was excited about the dual symbolism of the red string of fate meeting the image of blood on the strings from the Lost Woods scene.
The stencil method made for a lot thicker paint, which gave it a little bit of a tactile effect that I enjoyed. The spacing out of the letters was pretty intimidating, though. I couldn’t get those to work with stencils, and my normal handwriting is.. a bit rough.
The spine was harder than expected, I couldn’t quite get a stencil to work for that fine detail, so I figured out that I could etch fine cuts into it to give a rough outline. The paint lines came out chunkier than I’d like, but the shape is better than the first, and I’m happy with the red gem. I debated adding the gem color to the first book, but it has such an emphasis on the silver and white that I decided not to.
The back is something I had debated even harder than the front of this copy. I had desperately wanted to do something to represent one of the ending scenes from the story, but a combination of my confidence in my art and the nature of the scene (gorgeously written but something that can’t truly be represented by something physical) made me decide to avoid it. At least until I hit one of those ‘fuck it, I’m doing it’ mentalities.
I am very happy with it. It does not and cannot encompass the fullness of the scene, but it represents it well enough, and it’s interesting and fun. I had a brief run-in with the fact that paint isn’t as dry as it seems, and a lot of the back peeled off when I had it in a press overnight, but it was easy enough to fix!
For the endpapers, the first one has some paper from a local shop, I think it was imported from Italy? But it felt like a good fit for the story and characters and overall vibes. I liked the texture and the shininess, and it covers for the fact that I did not in fact fit a tree in on the covers! I was worried that the cords around the spine would show through because it seemed a little thin, but it actually worked better than what I used in the second book.
The second book, I used a fun, shiny, Triforce-gold paper. It is super soft and lightly textured. It’s a lot thicker, so I was surprised at the cords showing through.
My most embarrassing problem is the table of contents. I edited the text before printing it so many times, just little adjustments that shifted the page count a fair amount, and, uh, apparently forgot to adjust the table of contents for the last adjustment? I don’t think there was a good solution. I did not have it in me to rip it apart at this stage. I didn’t want to cut it out, between the then lack of a table of contents and the potential for structural issues for the signature. So. I attempted to make it look somewhat purposeful and matching the black cover. It is.. accurate. (oh please be accurate)
I had a lot of fun early on with the art for the chapters. Looking back, I wish I’d done a bit more, but once again, I’m happy with it!
This is going back to a lot of the tracing, but like I said, I made sure it wasn’t fan art or anything, and it’s mostly items and symbols and whatnot from the game. The swords were a lot of fun, figuring out how much detail to use for a black & white line art.
I kept the colors to a minimum to make them stand out. Chapter 17 with the Triforce (contrasting with chapter 16 with the uncolored Triforce) and chapter 18 with the green line are the only colors in the book. I used a foil pen on the green line, and I worried a little that it was too subtle, but I did want it to be subtle. And the Triforce color was an interesting debate on whether to go with a gold color or something more true to the game, which would be yellow. I went with a shimmery gold because the yellow didn't feel like it had the right weight for the symbol.
And last, I put all of the chapters author notes in an Appendix. I'd debated putting the at the end of each chapter, and I can't remember what made me choose this over that.
As someone who grew up reading books, I am thrilled that I got to physically make one, and I'm especially thrilled that I got to make this one. I found all of the (admittedly at times frustrating) details fascinating, and I think I have a whole new appreciation for book structure. Whenever I'm at a Barnes and Noble now, I always grab this super nice book of Arthurian Legends just to open it, because I've never seen a book open so smoothly and never had the proper appreciation for it before.
It was a while ago now, but I also had a lot of fun reading and skimming Blind, But Now so much while I was formatting it. I love this story, and I feel like I picked up on a lot of nuance and themes that I might have missed on a more casual read through.
Someday I might try another project, and hopefully my note taking on my process is enough to give me a little bit of a head start from where I started this time.
And @ghirahimbo, thank you so much for writing. I really, truly love Blind, But Now. ♥️
I’ve been wanting to try bookbinding for a while, and I finally (after years of on and off working on it) finished my first project! So heads up for a long post. I have a lot to say about the process, so feel free to skim for pictures!
It’s for the fanfiction “Blind, But Now” by aperplexingpuzzle on ao3, @ghirahimbo here. It’s my absolute favorite fanfiction, and one of my favorite books in general. It is a Legend of Zelda fic, based around Skyward Sword and the struggles that come once the battle is won and the journey is complete. It’s Link/Ghirahim, which is a pairing I hadn’t really considered/enjoyed before this, with a blind Link. It's a great pairing, because they work as unexpected mirrors for each other, highlighting the similarities of their roles towards Hylia and Demise.
The writing is absolutely gorgeous. It deals with great symbolism, and the question of what’s left when you’ve completed your destiny. How do you live with yourself, and how do you live with others, when everything and nothing has changed?
And, by the way, it fixes plot holes and time travel paradoxes from the game! That is so rare! Time travel is so hard to do right!
For the bookbinding, I.. kind of jumped into the deep end for this by ignoring so much advice. “Don’t start with a big book” “Don’t start with an important-to-you project” “Don’t make a black cover, it’s easy to have smudges show up” Nope! I’m going to start with my favorite fanfiction, which came out to 643 pages, with black covers!
It took so long, and a large part of that was struggling with my ability to even touch the project. I think I took an unintentional year-long break from it because my brain just said nope. Even with that, it was so much fun. I really enjoyed getting so immersed in the story again, learning about the construction of books, figuring out artwork for it.
I struggled a lot with how to do things. With the increasing popularity of bookbinding there’s a lot of resources, but those resources are on a spectrum of “glue pages together, that’s a book” to “follow the precise procedure that’s endured for thousands of years for a reason, you can’t really learn from a tutorial you need to get a feel for the process”. I really wanted to make a good book, both from my love of books growing up and my love of this particular fic, but I also didn’t have access to the “right” equipment for a lot of parts. So I was stuck trying to interpret what a middle ground looked like, and I ended up bouncing between so many different tutorials. I really lucked out with very few major mistakes that were fairly fixable.
I went with a (I hope I’m remembering the right terminology) sewn binding on short grain paper, with sewn on endpapers that were laminated/made pages. For some reason wheat paste was tripping up my brain, so I stuck to PVA glue.
I also struggled with rounding and backing. I was really determined to make the book as sturdy as I could, so I decided to not stick to my preference for a flat spine/pages. But rounding and backing it felt.. off in ways. I think I kind of half way rounded it, got a little bit of a backing effect, then un-rounded it a bit when it wasn’t feeling right? It was hard to know what to do with it, and it didn’t help that a lot of sources online said that this was a really hard step without the correct equipment.
The biggest issue I had, that luckily was something I could fix, was when a tutorial I was following suggested adding too many layers to the spine. My first book had a spine with the sturdiness, and unfortunately the flexibility, of a rock. It.. would have worked, but I was very disappointed that it wouldn’t open flat. I managed to get the paper layer scraped off, as well as the excess end bands. I really wanted 3 for a red-blue-green theme :( But, I’m happy enough with it as is! The first one has green on the top and bottom, the other has one red and one grey.
I’d intended to use book cloth for the covers, but I got some and discovered that it had a Bad Texture for me. I’d also gotten some paper samples that I’d really liked, so I eventually gave in and went with paper. As much as I want durability, I also need to be able to comfortably touch the book. And some of the paper samples were really cool.
The first cover I did was on a “linen texture” paper. It has a fairly plain front, with the title and author and a small embellishment, but that was very much what was needed to get myself to start. Plus it fit my silver-on-black theme.
I am not much of an artist, so most of the art is bits and pieces from the games so I could not feel too bad about tracing. I hoped that tracing wasn’t too bad if it was from official game art.
The first bit of that on the cover was Ghirahim’s sword for the spine instead of a title. Even with tracing it came out a bit more squat than I’d hoped for, but I was still thrilled with the end result.
For the back, I used Canva to try out some designs, and that’s where I found the mountains. I really hesitated on using them, I wasn’t sure how well the snow would come out, and then I had a really good day for a “fuck it, lets try” mentality, and it came out great! But wow is lettering hard with a brush.
The second cover threw me a bit. It was a glossy paper that I picked because I wanted to try something a little different for the second book. That was a big part of why I was doing two books, after all! But it turned out, once it was glued to the boards, that pencil wouldn’t show up at all. So I thought I was stuck completely free-handing it.
Somehow that led to me going back to my favorite cover design, that I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to do well enough, because the lack of the ability to outline it first led to more creativity and I used stencils made out of paining tape for the cover. I really liked how that came out, too. I was excited about the dual symbolism of the red string of fate meeting the image of blood on the strings from the Lost Woods scene.
The stencil method made for a lot thicker paint, which gave it a little bit of a tactile effect that I enjoyed. The spacing out of the letters was pretty intimidating, though. I couldn’t get those to work with stencils, and my normal handwriting is.. a bit rough.
The spine was harder than expected, I couldn’t quite get a stencil to work for that fine detail, so I figured out that I could etch fine cuts into it to give a rough outline. The paint lines came out chunkier than I’d like, but the shape is better than the first, and I’m happy with the red gem. I debated adding the gem color to the first book, but it has such an emphasis on the silver and white that I decided not to.
The back is something I had debated even harder than the front of this copy. I had desperately wanted to do something to represent one of the ending scenes from the story, but a combination of my confidence in my art and the nature of the scene (gorgeously written but something that can’t truly be represented by something physical) made me decide to avoid it. At least until I hit one of those ‘fuck it, I’m doing it’ mentalities.
I am very happy with it. It does not and cannot encompass the fullness of the scene, but it represents it well enough, and it’s interesting and fun. I had a brief run-in with the fact that paint isn’t as dry as it seems, and a lot of the back peeled off when I had it in a press overnight, but it was easy enough to fix!
For the endpapers, the first one has some paper from a local shop, I think it was imported from Italy? But it felt like a good fit for the story and characters and overall vibes. I liked the texture and the shininess, and it covers for the fact that I did not in fact fit a tree in on the covers! I was worried that the cords around the spine would show through because it seemed a little thin, but it actually worked better than what I used in the second book.
The second book, I used a fun, shiny, Triforce-gold paper. It is super soft and lightly textured. It’s a lot thicker, so I was surprised at the cords showing through.
My most embarrassing problem is the table of contents. I edited the text before printing it so many times, just little adjustments that shifted the page count a fair amount, and, uh, apparently forgot to adjust the table of contents for the last adjustment? I don’t think there was a good solution. I did not have it in me to rip it apart at this stage. I didn’t want to cut it out, between the then lack of a table of contents and the potential for structural issues for the signature. So. I attempted to make it look somewhat purposeful and matching the black cover. It is.. accurate. (oh please be accurate)
I had a lot of fun early on with the art for the chapters. Looking back, I wish I’d done a bit more, but once again, I’m happy with it!
This is going back to a lot of the tracing, but like I said, I made sure it wasn’t fan art or anything, and it’s mostly items and symbols and whatnot from the game. The swords were a lot of fun, figuring out how much detail to use for a black & white line art.
I kept the colors to a minimum to make them stand out. Chapter 17 with the Triforce (contrasting with chapter 16 with the uncolored Triforce) and chapter 18 with the green line are the only colors in the book. I used a foil pen on the green line, and I worried a little that it was too subtle, but I did want it to be subtle. And the Triforce color was an interesting debate on whether to go with a gold color or something more true to the game, which would be yellow. I went with a shimmery gold because the yellow didn't feel like it had the right weight for the symbol.
And last, I put all of the chapters author notes in an Appendix. I'd debated putting the at the end of each chapter, and I can't remember what made me choose this over that.
As someone who grew up reading books, I am thrilled that I got to physically make one, and I'm especially thrilled that I got to make this one. I found all of the (admittedly at times frustrating) details fascinating, and I think I have a whole new appreciation for book structure. Whenever I'm at a Barnes and Noble now, I always grab this super nice book of Arthurian Legends just to open it, because I've never seen a book open so smoothly and never had the proper appreciation for it before.
It was a while ago now, but I also had a lot of fun reading and skimming Blind, But Now so much while I was formatting it. I love this story, and I feel like I picked up on a lot of nuance and themes that I might have missed on a more casual read through.
Someday I might try another project, and hopefully my note taking on my process is enough to give me a little bit of a head start from where I started this time.
And @ghirahimbo, thank you so much for writing. I really, truly love Blind, But Now. ♥️
oh but here is the link to the video tribute by @opera-ghost that made me cry and also featured a surprise cameo from samuel wyn-morris so that's all normal and fine and great
jbbartram-illu
origamiaround
annaxmalina
pixelskylines
titsay
theartofmadeline
