Rayzeel's Soundboard™

Gay Autistic Jewish Wunderkind and Relentless Commie Bastard ~ VtM Era ~

[othellho]

Ingram, John Henry, Flora Symbolica: The language and sentiment of flowers, (London: 1869).

[escuerzoresucitado]

Who up stroking they sword while lamenting the social realities.

[wormzone]

weird ps1 game i found

[notlayingroses]

Everything I read about recovering from burnout is like “it takes months or even years to fully recover” and it’s like okay…. I have a weekend before I gotta clock in on Monday

[hellothanksjellyfish]

Just gonna leave this here

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[revmira1917]

i made this in december because it is never too early for May Day

[penwiper]

So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17 years in a hot attic!)  

[armoredsuperheavy]

In 2018 I developed a method to bind fanfiction into hardback books. Like penwiper, I was also literally working in my kitchen by myself and trying things out. This solo work was a meditative experience that allowed me to think deeply about the implications of what I was creating and what my ethics and philosophy should be. I got around to the idea that the knowledge I was building should be spread far and wide, so that together, many of us fans could bind all the wonderful fics that made our lives better in a million tiny ways, and wherever possible, create a copy to give to the authors themselves. In 2019 I wrote How to Make a Book From An AO3 Page, a free manual for how to format and bind fanfic, as a gift to fandom as a whole. It took off during the 2020 lockdown and has been going strong ever since.

Now, through the efforts of so many wonderful people, Renegade Bookbinding Guild has developed out of the Discord server I originally created just to answer questions about paper, fonts, printers and such. I figured there would be no more than 15 people joining. We have surpassed 3000.

I hope in another 20 years time my little tutorial still be kicking along out here, my bad photography and potty mouth sitting forever at the foundational level of an exploding practice of radical generosity and community, preserving the best of fanfiction from the ravages of time and digital threats and censorship, and giving authors the best thank you I know how to give.

ArmoredSuperHeavy, March 2026

[enbaluka-tokyo-drift]

[corpyburd]

Glad everyone is getting so much joy from early Quaker names! Looking forward to seeing any future pets/children/bands/drag acts named after stuff on this list.

[piedude]

[ariaste]

tag yourself, i'm Patience Fish

[whumpster-fire]

Categories Include:

Band Names: Charity Kill, Jane Snowball, Love Butcher, Revolution Sixsmith, Humble Thatcher, Thank Holland

D&D Character Names: Peregrine Doyly, Lancelot Wells, Squire Boone, Chardus Alatheo Eyre, Grissel Toldervy, Rutoron Rettle

Stripper / Porn Star Stage Names: Virgin Kent, Dykes Alexander, Charity Nutt, Patience Rawbone, Sarah Sparkling, Fountain Sterrey, Reuben Rawbone, Discipline Matthews, Jane Snowball

Pro Wrestler Stage Names: Wilde Wilde, Hercules Cross, Constant Shield

Lumberjack Folklore Characters: Old Adams, Cotton Brown, Silence Williams

Lumberjack Folklore Cryptids: Patience Fish, Barb Bee

Fake Names Your D&D Characters Made Up To Get Into A Formal Event: Eustace Cockery, Corn Russell, Marvelous Scanfield, Elizabeth Poope, Gey Poope, Job Bland, Love Beer, Rich Whale

Soulsborne Boss Names: Returned Elgar

Sonic OC Names: Robert Were Fox

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

from @reparrishcomics

[socialistexan]

Same exact playbook, down to the "but it was based on a lie."

[socialistexan]

It's kind of amazing how much this is the identical strategy. Focusing on the distress and harm of parents over the trans or autistic person themselves. Pathologizing the condition treating it as an epidemic, including calling it a social contagion causing a worrying "explosion" of diagnosis because it is "trendy."

Ignoring the experts on the subject while also appealing to "common sense" and dismissing all research that contradicts them while also appealing to "basic science."

Plus it's all the same quacks and actors behind previous medical and social moral panics saying them same things in the same ways and no one seems to acknowledge that.

[demonprincex]

she says in the article that she was inspired to think this way about autism after she started reporting on detransitioners. Her Twitter mentions are filled with prominent voices in the detrans terf movement. This isn't just similar, It is quite self-consciously an extension of the same movement.

[shrike-dyke]

reminder that buttons is the one who claimed that she had to misgender trans people because her Autistic Sense Of Truth wouldn't let her "lie"

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Step-by-step guide to wield a ‘Golden Cudgel’ like the Monkey King Sun Wukong by 襄阳梅子

[casual-darkness]

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

The levels of traditional Chinese architecture by 扇子有画

[fus-mar-hoz]

Often, when I interviewed survivors of the violence in 1965, they assumed I would want to ask them about the torture. What it was like to be beaten, to be starved, to be called a witch or a devil, to lose all contact with your family. To be gang-raped and thrown into the corner of a cell afterward, as if you were nothing. This was not usually what I wanted to talk about. To the extent that journalists or academics have ever spent much time asking survivors to tell their stories, they have already asked them this. Too often exclusively this, with the underlying assumption that it was only the excesses of the repression that were the problem, that if they had just arrested two million people, then proved in a court of law that those people were really communists, and executed half of them, that would have been OK. Personally, I was happy to let the survivors just sketch the worst parts of their stories in quick terms, if it became clear that going through those moments again would retraumatize them.

Unfortunately, though, I did have to ask a question, in two parts, that often proved extremely difficult for them to answer. It took me a long time to perfect the wording of this query in Bahasa Indonesia, so as to make myself very, very clear. At least when talking to those who really had been leftists, I would always say, “Think back to 1963, 1964. In those years, what world did you believe that you were building? What did you believe the world would be like in the twenty-first century?” Then I’d ask, “Is that the world you live in now?”

Often, their eyes would light up when answering the first part. They knew the answer. They were building a strong, independent nation, and they were in the process of standing up as equals with the imperial countries. Socialism wasn’t coming right away, but it was coming, and they would create a world without exploitation or systemic injustice. The answer to the second question was so obvious that it felt cruel even to ask. It might have been one thing if their government had committed horrible atrocities, but recognized the mistake, and built a just, powerful society. This did not happen. They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different.

The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins

[nedtheknight]

Wyrm Knight, Servant of Ash

[tajrishgp]

Rafie'nia Synagogue and a nearby residential building have been targeted by airstrikes this morning in Tehran. Last week the St. Nicholas Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church in Tehran was also damaged by airstrikes.

[afloweroutofstone]

It’s always fun to be reminded how recent European national identities are. Peasants in 1860’s Sicily had never heard the term “Italy” before, the majority of people in France didn’t speak French at the time of the French Revolution, etc.

[dostoyevsky-official]

[pyjnda]

from the observations of a british diplomat in the ukraine in 1912, quoted in Bini Adamczacks Beziehungsweise Revolution

[when one asks the avarage peasant farmer in the ukraine about his nationality, he will answer, he is "greek-orthodox"; when one pushes him to say whether he is a russian, a pole, or a ukranian, he will answer, he is a farmer; and when one demands demands to find out which language he speeks, he will say that he speaks "the language from around here". ... i.e. when one wants to find out which state he would like to belong to – whether he would rather be governed by an pan-russian or a specifically ukranian government – one will find out, that in his opinion, all governments are a plague on the land, and it would be best, if the "christian peasantfolk" were left to themselves.]

[wifehaver103947]

the new york times is now charging money for my favorite chocolate cake recipe so i bought a subscription and screenshotted it and canceled my subscription and now it's here for you for free

i do a mixture of red wine and fresh squeezed navel orange juice for the liquid, plus the zest of one large orange. now you make the cake