Normal Guy

J(ay) / 23 / I am normal

[shitty-fanfic-prompts]

The four penguins from Madagascar are, somehow, isekaied in the middle of the clone wars

[anakinnoanakindontanakinstop]

Palpatine is dead within the hour

[thoughtportal]

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

{source}

[onemillionwordsofcrap]

I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!

[puellamagiholyquintet]

New years art for Puella Magi Madoka Magica for new years! Happy new years!

[sliding-bathroom]

[xadnem]

Wireless headphones are killing sex. There is an inherent eroticism to cables and cords and wires.

[asingularcanadian]

Hey bud, I think you might just be into bondage

[xadnem]

I am and that's related but not the whole story.

[xadnem]

In a freshman-English-teacher-obsessively- assigning-phallic-and-yonic-symbolism-to-everything-to-get-these-kids-to-realize-the-curtains-are-more-than-just-blue sense, beyond mere ropes and chains you've also got your jacks and ports and plugs representing all manner of penetration and intimacy. Apple robbed us of this when they removed the headphone jack, and the rest of the world followed.

This obsession with making everything sleek and smooth and sexless, there is an unpleasant chastity in modern consumer electronic design, an aversion to character and quirk. Is it any wonder that such a design philosophy would malign hoses and lines that are so prone to kinks and tendril perversions?

[asingularcanadian]

Please don't stick your dick in a charging port

[xadnem]

You don't know what we have!

[xadnem]

Wireless headphones are killing sex. There is an inherent eroticism to cables and cords and wires.

[asingularcanadian]

Hey bud, I think you might just be into bondage

[xadnem]

I am and that's related but not the whole story.

[mdkm444]

happy birthday, madoka! 🩷🪽🎀

[gamer-comix]

nuanced writing was not NA's forte. nor was checking to see which character was saying which line.

(akira has been in all three of these so far. that's probably a coincidence...?)

[doomstarx1]

Gundam SEED makes me feel like I'm getting hit with 1,000 baseball bats

[geellyart]

You made me a believer.

[sliding-bathroom]

ありがとうマギアレコード………

[moomoofoo]

merry christmas

[crimeronan]

curious about the political leanings of people's parents. tell me

left-leaning mom, left-leaning dad

left-leaning mom, right-leaning dad

right-leaning mom, left-leaning dad

right-leaning mom, right-leaning dad

single parent mom, left-leaning

single parent mom, right-leaning

single parent dad, left-leaning

single parent dad, right-leaning

none of these (i am aware i am missing a million other family conglomerations)

i have no idea what my parents' political views are / see results

Voting ended onDec 28, 2023

when i say "left-leaning" and "right-leaning" that's so i can include everyone from "kind of a centrist" to "bleeding heart leftist" to "alt right monster." like. left wing or right wing.

politics and families are way too complicated for a ten-option poll so just. work with me here. ok

[gender-trash]

publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur

[gender-trash]

now THIS is a hardcover

[just-evo-now]

what does this mean

[gender-trash]

i can explain in more detail with pictures when i get home from work, but executive summary:

both trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks are usually constructed via perfect binding, where you take a stack of loose-leaf sheets and dunk the spine edge in, basically, hot-melt glue (low-temp thermoplastic with a little flexibility to it). stick a cover on the outside of that bad bitch and you're done. very easy and cheap to manufacture, but not durable; not only does the soft cover provide no protection, pages can fall out individually if the glue fails for whatever reason. (i don't have a picture handy but just grab any mass market paperback off your bookshelf and look at the spine)

typically, or perhaps traditionally, when binding a hardcover ("case-bound") book you assemble the sheets into signatures, which are sewn to each other to form a text block, like so:

(well, admittedly, using both linen tape and french link stitch is sort of the belt-and-suspenders of textblock construction. in my defense though look at the fucking size of this tome) but the point is that even before you've gotten around to gluing anything, the textblock hangs together and functions as a book, albeit an unusually wobbly one -- so if the cover completely falls off or something, the rest of the book still hangs together.

the other method of construction i see on many mass-manufacture hardcovers and some trade paperbacks is that they've folded the signatures and sewn them individually (one at a time, not to each other) -- this is easy to do on a specialized sewing machine -- and *then* potted the spine in glue, like you do for perfect binding. this is less liable to lose pages if you fuck up the spine, because instead of each page being glued in individually, they're sewn together into signatures which provide more glue surface area apiece. (i can post a picture when i get home...)

uhh oh yeah endbands. endbands are the little decorative bits that get glued onto the textblock before it gets cased in -- this is in itself sort of a cheapo mass-manufacture imitation of more traditional sewn endbands, which actually provide some structural stability; modern glued-on endbands are really just decorative. here's a picture of a sewn endband on an example book from the bookbinding museum in sf (left), and a different textblock with endbands glued on (right). (the latter also has mull glued onto it, which is like... starched cheesecloth, kind of? you can use kozo paper here too; it also helps stabilize the spine for extra durability)

anyway on mass-manufacture hardcovers i often see really half-assed endbands that are glued on crooked or slightly undersized or something and i'm like "are you even TRYING" (they are not)

and also usually on recently manufactured books the entire case (the "hard cover" of a case-bound hardcover) is covered in paper, including the hinges, which is a terrible decision because the hinges are the part of the book that MOST needs the durability, being The Primary Moving Part. at least fucking cover the spine and hinges in bookcloth i beg. please. for me

[just-evo-now]

sorry loser you lost me at this

get a real programming language dork.

[gender-trash]

thats why im using it as a clamp and not as a book :p

[gender-trash]

@just-evo-now i am back home! where my books live!! so i can take pictures of the bindings :D

a couple of perfect-bound paperbacks:

the benefit of perfect binding, such as it is, is that all the pages can be aligned with each other and the spine is nice and square. (the other benefit is that it is cheap.) but if you're folding pages into signatures you're always gonna get some creep where the inner pages of the signature extend a little bit further towards the fore-edge [edge opposite the spine] than the outer pages do; you can either leave it like that for a deckled edge or trim it off for a neater finished look. (personally i am not a huge fan of deckled edges but Madame La Guillotine can only handle so much book, you know)

a paperback and a hardcover with the signatures-potted-in-glue style (i wish i knew what it was called):

i quite like the green endband on this hardcover! matches the cover nicely, is an appropriate size, aligned well, etc. (in addition to gluing them on crooked, the other common Endband Sin is to make them too damn short and it looks ridiculous)

the cloth-bound hardcover from the first image in this post, pub date 1978:

as you can see, it has much more flexibility than the potted-in-glue style (which can bend a little bit, but cracks if you open it too far), because the signatures are sewn to each other, with some kind of mystery green paper glued over them for stability (and, deeper in the spine, brown... something. fabric?? some of my other vintage books seem to use thin brown canvas...). no endband, but honestly it doesn't really need one.

and! here is a 1945 pocket handbook for engineers (you know, with useful integrals and trig tables and unit conversions and stuff in it) in norwegian, which was falling apart when i got it (i picked it up on the cheap with the intention of hopefully fixing it someday):

the cover is nonfunctional and the stabilizing paper on the spine has gotten so crumbly as to be useless (i got about halfway through peeling it off), but the textblock itself is in pretty good condition, because the signatures are sewn securely to each other -- if you squint you can kinda tell they used kettle stitches on the ends and chain stitches in the middle and i thiiink the chain stitches are where the loose loops on the top came from. anyway, i can pretty much finish peeling off the old crumbly paper stuff and glue on some new kozo paper (and ensure the loose loops are tucked safely away/glued down) and this bad bitch will be ready for a new cover!

[macleod]

I am really going to have to start paying attention to book binding going forward.

[esoanem]

(via @trans-cuchulainn )

[muffinrecord]

Artwork for the new event

[r0zeclawz]

yo that guy is weak to magic damage lets fucking kill him

[everyoneisgayandtrans]