Bits and bobs

Hodgepodge of fandoms, my own writing & art, and generally anything that catches my eye as fun and/or interesting If I forget to tag things/use the right triggers/am otherwise screwing up, please just let me know! [cis woman || straight || >18]

[8nin]

"There's millions of Tumblr users" to you. To me There's only about 12 and we all reblog the same five posts from each other

[draconym]

Me: Fuck, the paper towels I want are on the top shelf.

The Sir David Attenborough That Lives In My Brain: Being smaller-than-average presents an added challenge to foraging ... but necessity is the mother of invention. A little creativity turns a baguette into a tool, and voilà--

(paper towel roll falls on my face)

Sir David Attenborough, pleasantly: Success.

[hihuddy]

Artist: Tim Brierley

Posting this for my soul cat Kenzie (she passed a few years ago but I still think of her every single day) and for everyone else who has lost someone they love. ❤️

[marithlizard]

It's been a while since I said "this person wins the internet", but today it is merited.

(via bsky)

(The classic XKCD comic)

[ajaxgb]

Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

[celestial-sphere-press]

A Treatise on Breaking and Repairs by @glimmerglanger

this bind has been in development hell for some time, but I've decided it's met my proof of concept so here it is!

for this bind i used a lovely typeset by @finalfrontierpublishing .

this is a three piece in-boards bradel, with a leather spine. cover is inlaid with a second bookcloth, and the edges/cracks were painted red oxide acrylic, then water gilded with brass leaf for the kintsugi effect (I painted so many layers, it was damn near the whole real lacquer process). I didn't get a perfect finish, but I'm happy enough with it! edges are black ink with a single line of gold that matches the gold thread in the endband; the gold line is also the point where the story switches from "breaking" to "repairs" which is also shown by the art change in nic's typeset. some people might recognize this double core gradient endband from my binderary class this year, as i used it to teach the class.

process photos & video in the next reblog

[celestial-sphere-press]

so when i say this involved a lot of time, i mean I painted probably 10+ layers of acrylic over these bookcloth edges and sometimes sanded it back down to get a reasonably smooth raised surface for gilding (multiple layer of lacquer (and bole? maybe) are how actual kintsugi is done, though with much higher precision, and it's not usually a raised finish afaik).

and then applied brass leaf (i was at a friend's apt that day and did not have my bamboo tweezers so... bamboo chopsticks)

the leather spine involved some paring practice

and also figuring out that my first attempt to gild the leather section was going to tarnish, scraping all that back off, and going over it again with the acrylic first, then the leaf, then sealing it with dosabiki.

the gilding i did for this book is pretty cobbled together I think; i used the red acrylic to replace more authentic red bole, and then used an Italian water size to affix the brass leaf (water gilding style); and then finally pulled out the Japanese dosabiki to re-size the end result, which is common in japanese gilding to prevent tarnishing. the one part I might probably have screwed up is I'm not certain if I let the water size cure long enough before I applied the brass leaf; when I tried to burnish the leaf a little, it rubbed off instead. So somewhere in there I didn't give it enough time to dry.

[aflo]

I'm imagining a world where RPGMaker somehow made it as the de facto codebase for software and you have to navigate your banking app by walking around in a huge room full of NPCs named "make deposit" and "make withdrawal" etc and there's loud as fuck stock music playing

[aflo]

[delicious-dream-before-the-storm]

The band, the music, the dance.

puts on sound 📣🎶🎵

[amorphousturtle]

Ok, I NEED you to understand just how insane even ATTEMPTING this was for them.

1. Playing an instrument is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Don’t think I’m stepping on any toes saying that.

2. Dancing is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Still not controversial.

3. YOU AVOID, AT ALL COSTS, MOVING YOUR BODY WHILE PLAYING A WIND INSTRUMENT.  To make the correct, pleasant sounds, you need to be in the correct form. And that form involves your ENTIRE body, even your legs when sitting down.

4. “oh, but I’ve seen marching bands before and-” MARCHING BANDS HAVE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS DEDICATED TO FIGURING OUT HOW TO MARCH WITH MINIMUM BREAKING OF PROPER FORM. A marching band tries to be as smooth as possible while moving, so as not to jar their instrument, mouth, neck, arms, torso, or anything else.These ladies and gentlemen are BOUNCING and still playing properly, what the FU-!

5. AND ANOTHER THING! Wind instruments and dancing BOTH make demands on your breathing, so the fact that they are dancing (making you breath faster for extra oxygen) AND playing wind instruments (making you effectively hold your breath) AT THE SAME TIME is HUGE. Their lungs must be MASSIVE.

[thejollywriter]

All of that also; the song is Sing, sing, sing (with a swing). If you wanna listen to some of THE SPICIEST big band ever recorded. Its a big hard song and this band does it expertly.

[copperbadge]

I know myself well enough to know I would not be very good at fanbiding and that would mainly frustrate me, so while I love fan binding and admire those who do it, I've never dabbled.

I have never regretted that decision more than I did waking up from the dream I recently had, where I excitedly bought a rare copy of the novel that Goncharov (1973) was based on, opened it up, and found that it was a hollowed out "book safe" for keeping valuables in.

[greaseonmymouth]

@copperbadge were you looking for the Goncharov novel ?

I tracked down a copy of this invaluable classic and somehow got my hands on a near pristine copy secondhand from the 4th printing. It’s lost the dustjacket, alas, but that means I got it for like £5 and not the £4200 a first edition printing in fine condition goes for.

(Who’s the author? *looks at smudge on spine* uhhhh Mkkhill Montanann)

It looks right at home in my bookcase 🥰

Under the cut: a look inside at what the book holds:

Just kidding.

It holds only the air of regret and disappointment.

[copperbadge]

OMG HAHAHA AMAZING! What a find! Truly a vintage treasure. I am dying, it looks fantastic.

[jiubilee]

The real tragedy about the barricade is that we don’t know how much is true. Victor Hugo was there at the June Rebellion, so what is fact and what is fiction? That question gives me chills because we’ll never know. 

[enjolras-in-valinor]

Charles Jeanne (who I think is probably actual real life Enjolras) wrote an in-detail account of the ACTUAL barricades in a letter to his sister after the fact

you can read it, tenlittlebullets translated it into English :)

it’s really graphic, he leaves no gory details out, just FYI if you’re gonna read it, keep TW: VIOLENCE  in mind

[tenlittlebullets]

#how is he real-life enjolras if he survived (via metellus-cimber)

I’m so glad somebody asked this, because the answer is: when they finally ran out of ammunition, Charles Jeanne rounded up everyone who was still standing, went, “look, if we’re going to die, we might as well die fighting,” and led a suicidal ten-man charge against an entire flippin’ infantry column, armed with nothing but bayonets. The first few ranks of soldiers were so unprepared for such a spectacularly insane attack that they were too surprised to shoot. They crossed bayonets and tried to hold the insurgents off in hand-to-hand combat, but Jeanne’s swordsmanship was apparently aces, because he held off a bunch of them at once and covered his friends as they tried to breach the ranks. And once they were in, nobody could shoot them for fear of taking out their own guys.

So the last stand that the insurgents had intended as a noble suicide ended in them breaking through the ranks entirely and winding up in the next street over, outside the combat zone, going “well shit, what do we do now?” (I’m guessing the infantry column wasn’t very deep; central Paris at that point was a rabbit warren of narrow twisty streets, and assembling troops en masse for an organized attack was a logistical nightmare.) Unlike the National Guard, the army weren’t total chumps and got themselves turned around to give chase and start shooting once they weren’t at risk of friendly fire any longer… and that’s when all the civilians holed up in their houses went “no way, you’re not getting your hands on these crazy bastards” and started hurling furniture and crockery down on the soldiers’ heads. Jeanne was understandably distracted at the time, but afterwards somebody informed him that the barrage of unlikely projectiles included a piano. A piano. That is some straight-up Looney Tunes slapstick right there. No wonder Hugo went for the heroic death scene instead; if he’d stuck to real life, he probably would’ve gotten complaints that he’d wrecked his readers’ suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, someone opened an alley gate for them to shelter in and take stock of the casualties–most of them survived(!!!), but a few were pretty nastily wounded. Their host then had to lock Charles Jeanne in to keep him from charging right back out and taking on the whole goddamn army singlehanded. He probably would’ve broken down the door if the poor man hadn’t pointed out that going back out would give away his wounded comrades’ hiding place and the identities of the people sheltering them. They sat there listening to the gunfire gradually slow and go silent, and then in the middle of the night the ones who could still walk were allowed to slip away one by one at long intervals from each other. Charles Jeanne went straight home, slept like the dead for a few hours, was woken up at five in the morning with a warning that he’d been denounced and the building was surrounded, and then slipped out in disguise and managed to evade the police for four months before a former comrade ratted him out and he was arrested.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Charles Jeanne’s letter is an absolute treasure that deserves to be available to anyone in Les Mis fandom who wants to read it. Incidentally, “how Actual Historical Enjolras survived the barricades by being too good at his suicide mission” is also one of the stories I tell when anyone asks me what the hell is so interesting about researching people nobody’s ever heard of from an obscure chapter of French history. 

[tenlittlebullets]

Bringing this back for Barricade Day! To answer a few questions that keep coming up in the reblogs: here’s my translation of Jeanne’s letter, which was my main source. Jeanne stood trial, was imprisoned instead of executed (because can you imagine what a martyr he would’ve made), and died of tuberculosis just a few years later. Despite his improbable survival story, the RL June Rebellion was not an everybody-lives AU–like the revolt in Les Mis, it ended in a hard-fought retreat into one of the buildings on the street, followed by a massacre. The guys who led a suicide charge and accidentally won were, unfortunately, the exception.

[asteralpanda]

it annoys me so so so much when people credit victor hugo with musical lines :(

you think that man could have written "to love another person is to see the face of god"? he'd write "to open your heart to another human being in this world who lives at a similar time to yourself, to love them as mother, brother, father, sister, cousin, friend, husband, wife, is to see the Lord Himself's visage: it is to peer into the soul of God, and such a feeling do all experience, or at least all those with non-unimpenetrable hearts" or something twice as long with fifteen interludes about french politics

[hamletthedane]

What he actually said in Les Misérables (transl):

“God is behind everything but everything hides God….To love another creature is to render that creature transparent so that God may be seen behind them.”

It’s honestly not too far off :)

[whatapictureisworth-press]

So it’s been awhile since I’ve bound anything, but when I read the Cursed Amulet Story by @sunderwight, I was like, I gotta make an actual, physical evil amulet now. Except the evil amulet is also going to be a book. And the book is like a diary by the guy trapped in the amulet.

The book is held in the brass frame (also made by yours truly) by friction; it pops out super easily so you can read it but it’s not going to fall out accidentally.

The typeset fit into exactly one piece of normal 8.5x11 printer paper, and if anyone else wants the file to make their own evil amulet, I’m happy to share.

[cephalopod-celabrator]

I think it's really funny that reading the discworld witch books (at least the ones that are Weatherwax+Ogg+Magrat), Granny immediately seems like the scariest one by far. She seems like a terrifying force of nature accompanied by a jovial old grandma and an insecure young woman. But as the series progress, the times when Granny holds back and Nanny and Magrat jovially engage in brutal physical violence add up. Now I'm not saying you *shouldn't* be scared of Granny, I'm just saying that she has a rather strong conscience in her way, whereas Magrat and Nanny will both sucker punch you, kick you between the legs and happily step over your groaning body. Granny is to be feared, but Nanny doesn't fight fair and Magrat will kill a motherfucker. Terry Pratchett really knew how to write female characters.

[oma-goodness]

Too right to stay in the tags

[krakenartificer]

image transcription

#Granny fears what she might do too much to ever do it #the other two have no such limiter #because Magrat believes she’s a good person #and Nanny doesn’t care

[namk1]

[rj-abacura]

I am obsessed with this.

So because parkour is such a ridiculously male dominated sport, the "correct technique" for a lot of these movements that you're taught when you become an instructor plays to a male body's strengths: upper body strength, higher center of gravity, etc.

She demolishes this course by moving in ways that make sense for her body. She doesn't muscle her way up to her over a wall, she just throws a leg up over the wall. She doesn't use upper body strength to do the salmon ladder, she uses her hips!!! And it's fucking incredible.

So many girls and young women walk away from parkour because every movement caters to the strengths of men, because doing what makes sense for their bodies is seen as "bad technique" to be trained away.

If pre-transition me had seen this I would have cried tears of joy.

[kafkasapartment]

Least Bittern (Ixobrychus exilis). They do this fairly often, straddle reeds as a spot and catch fish and insects without having to fly.

[ladyrenity]

@kedreeva I hope you don't mind me tagging you, but I feel like this is something you would like

[kedreeva]

I never mind tags! This is awesome!

[crowboy-bebop]

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

source: hellgate osprey cam

[curlicuecal]

[nomettesbizzareadventure]

Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. 

Or, send in a ⭐star⭐  to have the author select a section they’ve been dying to talk about!