AshWolf's Rambles

Ashleigh D.J. Cutler aka AshWolf Forever's Tumblr. No rhyme, reason or logic to the posts will be found. Just whatever interests me, I find amusing, or think others might want to read. Expect chaos, it's what we do best in Crystal Prism.

[liberalsarecool]

Cosign.

[ashwolfforever]

Cosigned too.

[dduane]

Just a note for the local crowd

Every now and then a difficult period like this comes along: so it's time to request some assistance.

I've kind of been neglecting my vision for the past year or so, aware that I needed new glasses (and to go have a consult for possible eye-related surgery), but putting it off... and now the situation has, as it were, come home to roost.

The other day, when I was typing something and then (to check it before posting) had to pick up the Mac and hold it up to my nose to see what I'd typed... I realized that if this went on much longer, even with dictation (because after you dictate, you still have to edit...), I wouldn't be able to write.

That would be bad.

I need to go see my Eye Lady, get examined, and get both sets of glasses re-fitted with new prescriptions. This—as usual, each time it needs to be done every year and a half or two years, due to Weird Eyes—is going to run into a low-four-figure-ish kind of money. And due to other recent unexpected medical expenses, right now there's not enough dosh around (or spondoolicks or whatever term you prefer...) to get things sorted.

Therefore: can I get people interested in keeping a writer, you know, writing (as I've got three novels working at once at the moment...), to consider doing one of these things?

(a) Go over to Ebooks Direct and buy a book. (Or a bundle. Or a gift card for somebody else who might like my work.) And if you do: thanks so much!

(b) Stop by my Ko-Fi and drop a little something in the pot. It'll be most appreciated.

Support Diane Duane

Support Diane Duane

And if you can't do either of the above:

(c) Reblog this and let other people see it?

Whatever you do: thanks very much!

[dduane]

Just to quickly update folks (as it’s been a crazy day): Thanks to all of you, matters are much improved. I have a call in to my Eye Lady: we’ll soon see what can be sorted out.

Meanwhile: Thank you SO MUCH. ❤️ …More detail shortly.

[ashwolfforever]

Share Your Story: How ACA Cuts Are Affecting Your Health Care

Across the country, people are already feeling the consequences of cuts to the Affordable Care Act and rising health care costs. Premiums

[ashwolfforever]

If you haven't heard of these people yet... You have now.

[ashwolfforever]

Passing On Info from Common Cause

**I get emails from a group called Common Cause. Since I don't know too many people who I could forward this to, I decided to share it here instead.** Hello,

There’s a lot going on that affects our democracy. We’re here to keep you informed, educated, and up-to-date. Here’s info about three events happening next week.

Tuesday, May 12, at 7pm:  

Join Common Cause Ohio and friends for a conversation about the impact of last week’s US Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision that effectively killed the Voting Rights Act. We are excited to be bringing you three powerful panelists and an amazing moderator!

Panelists:

Andrew Walchuk, Policy Director & Counsel, Voting and Fair Representation, Common Cause

Lisa Graves, Founder and Executive Director, True North Research

April England-Albright, National Legal Director/Co-founder, Black Voters Matter

Moderated by Ainslee Johnson- Brown, Co-founder, Ohioans Against Extremism

Register for the Callais Decision Webinar here

Wednesday, May 13, at 6pm:

Join Fair Districts-Fair Democracy to discuss attacks on direct democracy. We’ll be joined by David DeWitt from the Ohio Capital Journal, Jennifer Parrish Taylor and Taylor Givens-Dunn from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), and Laura Lucarelli from Ohio Ballot Protection.

Register for the Fair Districts-Fair Democracy Huddle

Thursday, May 14, at 8:30am:

Finally, please join the Common Cause Ohio team for our monthly morning round up of everything that’s going on relating to voting rights, elections, corruption, and democracy in Ohio and beyond.

Register for Coffee with Common Cause

Looking forward to seeing you at one, two, or all of these events next week!

Thanks for all you do,

The team at Common Cause Ohio

[wordpress-blaze-247645982]

DSLR Scanning Vintage Photo Albums: The Ultimate Guide

This step-by-step guide ensures your family’s memories are captured with superior quality and context.

Camera-digitizing (DSLR/mirrorless scanning) is the superior method for preserving and documenting fragile vintage photo albums. This step-by-step guide ensures your family’s memories are captured with superior quality and context.

Continue with Care! Archiving is a manual process. Before starting, make sure your workspace is stable, use the correct tools. Some actions suggested here can easily cause damage to precious originals. You are the steward of your own history! Please refer to my Disclaimer & Copyright Page

Don't miss my video on Photo albums - Preserving Your Past

I. Essential Camera Setup

To ensure consistency across an entire album, preset the settings listed below into a camera custom setting, C1, C2, C3 etc. then set your camera to that custom program mode before you start capture.

Highest resolution can be achieved by choosing the high definition (pixel-shift) mode on mirrorless cameras like Panasonic Lumix, Sony, Olympus and some Pentax cameras. This also has to be turned on in settings just before you start capturing.

SettingValueRationaleExposure ModeAperture Priority (A/Av)Controls depth of field for optimal sharpness.White BalanceCustom – 5600KMatched to lights for consistent color reproduction.Aperturef/5.6 to f/8Typically the sharpest range for most lenses.FocusManual FocusProvides precise control (Peaking On).QualityRAWPreserves maximum image data.Self-Timer2 SecondsPrevents camera shake.StabilizerOFFAvoids distortion when mounted on a copy stand.

II. Archival Pre-Capture & Folder Structure

Think of capturing the full album with all pages, front and back, as creating a 'master map.' It preserves the context of how the photos were curated and ensures you know exactly where they belong if you remove them. Aim for the highest resolution possible here—it’s a safety net for your close-up captures. Also, keep an eye out for 'hidden' history: if you’re taking prints out of the album, be sure to capture an image of any writing found on the back.

Initial Album Capture: Before starting capture or removing prints, document the front cover, inside cover, and every full page to create a visual guide for context.

Folder Structure: Use identifiers for FFP (Front-Facing Pages) and RFP (Rear-Facing Pages).

III. Three Options for Digitizing Album Prints

Choice 1: Prints Stay on Page (Recommended for Fragile Albums)

The prints remain secure, minimizing handling risk.

Setup: Position the album on a copy stand. Use a stack of books to level the non-captured side so the target page is flat. Use a 2-light setup at 45° angles.

Place small A5 sheets of foam board under the side you are currently capturing to ensure it is level and on the same plane as the camera on the copy stand.

Flattening: Use small, clean transparent acrylic sheets to hold down curled prints.

Gutter Shadow: For photos spanning the center crease, capture the left and right sides separately and stitch them in post-processing.

Choice 2: Capturing Entire Album Pages (Recommended for Speed)

The fastest but lowest detail option.

Technique: Frame the entire page consistently.

Use the same 'stack of books method' as described above.

Post-Processing: Use a High-Definition Mode if available. You will need to individually crop and straighten each print later in software.

Choice 3: Remove Prints from Pages (For Highest Quality)

Allows for documentation of rear captions but carries high physical risk.

The "Pro-Tip" for Removal: If prints are stuck to "magnetic" pages, use un-flavored dental floss in a gentle "sawing" motion to cut through brittle glue without tearing paper fibers. Don't lift the paper yourself, let the dental floss do the work. A hair dryer on low/cool for 10 seconds can help soften stubborn adhesive.

Capture: Position each print to fill the sensor and capture every print individually. Photograph the reverse side immediately if notes exist.

Labeling: Mark the back of the print with its original location (e.g., FFP-01) using a soft graphite pencil.

IV. Post-Capture & Final Steps

For prints that are difficult to flatten, use transparent, archival-quality acrylic sheets. These sheets must be spotlessly clean and dust free! They provide physical protection and keep the print flat without adhesives. It is strongly recommended that you use polarized light when using acrylic or any other shiny overlay, refer to my post, Polarizing Sheets & Lens Filters For Camera-Digitizing

Remember: The final capture, image renaming, and saving process follow the same principles as the "Ultimate Guide to Digitizing Vintage Prints."

Please don't overlook the archive label

The example below is an archive label attached to a print/negative wallet but the process is the same for all media types.

Remember to photograph the archive label for every album

Include an image of the label in your folder for the specific album

Adhere the physicl label to the inside back cover of the album.

You will find a full explanation of this procedure in my foundation post, Camera Scanning - Archive Structure & Priorities

Further Reading

1. Library of Congress: Preservation Guidelines for Digitizing

This is the "gold standard" for archival handling. It provides critical safety instructions that reinforce advice on fragile materials, specifically regarding why you should never apply pressure to brittle spines or use glass/Plexiglas to flatten photos if the media is flaking.

Key Focus: Material safety, workspace cleanliness, and handling brittle paper.

Source: Library of Congress – Collections Care

2. Amateur Photographer: How to Photograph Film Using Your DSLR

This guide is a highly technical, detailing how to use a lightbox, manage color casts, and use "inverted curves" in post-processing.

Key Focus: Lightbox setups, RAW white balance adjustments, and film-specific metadata.

Source: Amateur Photographer Magazine

3. The National Archives (UK): Digitisation Standards

This article explains the technical "why" behind using TIFF formats and ZIP (lossless) compression, and it sets professional benchmarks for resolution (PPI) that match museum-quality goals.

Key Focus: File formats (TIFF vs. JPEG2000), checksums for corruption detection, and naming conventions.

Source: The National Archives – Digitisation Guidance

**Ready to preserve your treasures?** Go to my home page and start digitizing at museum quality—

I hope you found this post helpful! A Like would truly make my day and let me know you enjoyed it!

Source: DSLR Scanning Vintage Photo Albums: The Ultimate Guide

[aquilacalvitium]

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

[aquilacalvitium]

Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again

[dduane]

Any first-ish draft is going to be crap. (With the usual note: if it's not crap when you write it, it will be later. Or large parts of it will be. You'll look at what came out of you at white heat [or even just in an everyday piece of work and kinda lukewarm] in two or three days, and it'll be crap then. It's frankly kind of astonishing how quickly perceived perfection turns to crap. It's almost like there's, I don't know, some kind of Entropy thing running or something.)

And this is fine. Move on past it and edit what you wrote.

Then write some more crap.

My cousin in Thoth, this is how it goes. This is how it will always go. Even when you become a career writer—thirty, forty, fifty novels along—it will still be crap when it first comes out.

AND THIS IS OKAY. The essential imperfection of the Universe makes it impossible for your initial emission to be perfect either.

(And if you think it is... wait till your betas or your copyeditor get at it.) :)

So now go do more. Because otherwise, nothing gets done. ...And then where are we?!

[redstonedust]

pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

[bincliff]

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

[haemey]

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

[lilithsaintcrow]

"...although the change was expected to affect only 3% of users, “this could amount to 2m devices rendered obsolete according to some estimates, potentially generating over 624 tons of e-waste”."

Amazon upsets ebook lovers by ending support for old Kindle devices

Up to 2m e-readers made before 2013 will no longer be able to download new titles

And a chaser, for those interested:

Don't Toss Your Old Kindle Yet. Here's How to Keep It Alive After May 2026

Amazon is ending support for older Kindles, but you still have easy ways to keep reading—no upgrade required.

[ellipsus-writes]

We want to hear from you! 📣 🗯️

Over the past two years, the mess that is generative AI has barrelled its way through human creative spaces. It’s been… a shit show.

The effects of this hostile takeover are well reported: slop, enshittification, deepfakes, misinformation. AI came straight for creative work first (because it was illegally trained on it 🙃)—and yet, beyond the (very real) concern of industry redundancies, and the (dubious) claims of AI “replacing” human creatives, there’s notably a lack of discussion about how it’s impacted creatives just being creative.

Writing, scrolling, reading online—the basic ways we live our daily creativity are being impacted by This Thing, and it deserves more attention.

We know you have an opinion—and we know it’s good. We’d love if you’d share it with us.

The survey is anonymous and takes about 3 minutes. We’ll compile some of the findings and publish for all to read. (And if you want to be quoted in a future essay or social posts, please feel free to leave your name/pseudonym or social handles in the optional contact form at the end.)

We're committed to supporting human creatives in the age of AI—and we’re working to build a human-led, human-affirming network to make sure that human creativity is protected. Because without art, we’d be really screwed.

So please, tell us how we can help! Take the survey here.

- the Ellipsus Team xo

[a-mel0n]

reblog if you’ve had an online friendship that’s lasted more than 2 years

[ashwolfforever]

@wolfsea @scribble-hunter @flakyftw

[ashwolfforever]

It's my 10 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

Gee, where has the years gone? I can't believe I've been on this site for a decade now. That's pretty impressive I guess. ANYWAY, if you want to see more of what I do, you can check me out on Patreon and Ko-Fi!

Ashleigh D.J. Cutler | Patreon

Creating the Realm of Crystal Prism

Join Ashleigh D.J. Cutler's Membership

If you're enjoying what I do, please support me on Ko-Fi!

[ashwolfforever]

hey. just seen your promoted post. you should make a furaffinity account and post your story on there too, or at least do some promoting on there. that’s a big audience waiting to be tapped into. a feature i like about furaffinity is that every time anyone uploads a post, it’s shown on the front page - all the most recent posts appear there, at least for a few moments. it’s good for bringing in a little bit of new audience that might not be browsing through tags.

Userpage of AshWolf-Forever -- Fur Affinity [dot] net

She/Her | Female | Sagittarius. . Hello everyone! It's AshWolf Forever of deviantART here. I'm a published author, a digital a ...

You Want Nice? by AshWolf-Forever

Start listening to it.. . ▶Website: ashleighdjcutler.com/. ▶Patreon: patreon.com/ashleighdjcutler. ▶Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/ashwolfforever. ▶Re ...

I do have one.

[ashwolfforever]

Item: A Soft Pillow Rarity: ⏶ Common

What's your comfort game?

Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.

WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition on Steam

Live the life of a wild wolf in a realistic ecological simulation set in Yellowstone National Park.

My go to is this or Cattails: Wildwood Story for now.

[ashwolfforever]

Item: The Scream Rarity: ⏶ Common

What is the scariest game you've ever played?

Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.

Copycat on Steam

A poignant narrative-driven game about rejection, belonging and the meaning of home. It follows the story of a newly adopted shelter cat who

Toss up between this and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

[ashwolfforever]

Visit Ashleigh D.J. Cutler's Shop!

If you're enjoying what I do, please support me on Ko-Fi!

Well I finally did it. If you don't want to have to buy Branded By Tears from the big A, you can get it from Little A (me) on my Ko-Fi shop!

[purr-in-ink]

A small moment of gentleness in the middle of everything. 🐈‍⬛🤍