m☆rsymallows

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[marsymallows]

Life After Social Media

About 2-3 years ago, right before I quit my previous job, I finally decided to put a halt on my on-again and off-again relationship with social media. I’ve done enough “social media detoxes” for me to realize it’s doing more harm than good to my overall health. I had to stop being a baby and put on my big girl shoes once and for all. The How’s and Why’s I was hesitant to do it at first because…

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[marsymallows]

Pursuing Creative Passions as a FTM

I’ve been feeling a little positive lately—once again, all thanks to ART. I could say this again and again: ART is one of the main reasons why I am still sane, and motherhood is not getting in the way of me pursuing my creative passions for that reason alone. First, I’d like to commemorate the day I finally came out of my rut and hit that start button on one of the longest courses I had to take…

Pursuing Creative Passions as a FTM

[toiich]

One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977), dir. Agnès Varda

[marsymallows]

Film got me curious so I'm watching it now. So far the first 5 minutes is sooooo pretty just as I had imagined. Plus the portraits of women are all sooooo beautiful! Unfortunately, there are no subtitles.

[eepykeepy]

hi i made a book using stuffed alpaca's deltarune video essay for class!!

and also the margins of the book have songs from the organ in chapter 4 that you can play on a little piano that comes with it :)

and it comes in a nice little box yay!!!! it was so much fun to work on :)

[madebytaylorursula]

A near perfect version of my Project Hail Mary rebind with painted edges! This won’t be listed in my Etsy shop for a while. I am prepping for an in-person event at the end of the month, and I have to make sure I have stock to sell there! A few listings I am letting sell out, or I am making inactive for now while I prep for the Makers Festival on May 30th in Massachusetts. I plan to have a few copies of some of my most popular listings - like Dune, PHM, Jurassic Park, and more ready to be sold then. This is one reason why rebinds are so expensive! They take so long to make, you can only make so many at any given time. I am excited for the festival - I am just not sure how popular rebinds will be, so I may be overly prepping, but better safe than sorry.

My Etsy and Insta are also @madebytaylorursula

[teleportbooks]

This book has reached its recipient, so I can share pictures now! This is Deadset by @pbaintthetb, an amazing Nie Huaisang fic in which Nie Huaisang is murdered and becomes a tgcf-style ghost.

I did a kintsugi-look binding for a different calamity au (ironically, one in which Jin Guangyao was the ghost) but spoilers, this was the fic that I first thought of using it for. And while my first attempt was just a surface design on the cover, I built this into the structure of the book itself. The cover structure is inspired by Ben Elbel's "pixel binding" which is a book cover made of many tiny squares; using irregular pieces here makes it not quite as flexible, but I'm still very happy with the effect.

The individual sections of the cover were glued to a thin, flexible paper, then covered with a decorative paper that I worked down into the spaces between (definitely use paste rather than pva for this). The gold is deco foil, often called toner-reactive foil but it adheres to dry pva as well, so I simply filled the channels with pva and then applied the foil using the head of a pin to apply pressure (you don't need heat when applying it to pva).

For the rounded spine, I used leather pieces so that I could still have the thickness but they would be flexible enough that I wouldn't have to sacrifice the irregular shapes.

The way Ben Elbel builds his pixel binding books is the textblock is wrapped in a suede cover, basically like a paperback but suede, and then the pixel binding cover is glued to the suede at the spine. I'm not sure that duplicating this construction was necessary here, but it worked out well enough. The suede-covered textblock is an interesting look and feel all by itself actually.

[fiend-for-culture]

My fanbind of @you-remind-me-of-the-babe's fic Depth of Reason

More pictures below the cut! 💛

Headbands: rayon embroidery floss from Edmar (this was my first attempt at doing hand sewn headbands!)

Book cloth: Verona book cloth in yellow ochre from Hollanders and blue mist from Etsy

Heat transfer vinyl: Cricut Iron-On foil and Everyday Iron-On vinyl

Paper: short edge book binding paper from Church Paper

[spacewonder19]

Comet R3 Panstarrs © Michael Jäger & Gerald Rhemann

[nasa]

Send Your Name to Space with Roman!

Send your name to fly on Roman and download a boarding pass like this one with your name on it!

What’s the farthest you’ve ever traveled from home? Want to beat your record by about a million miles? Submit to have your name added to a memory card that will be attached to a plaque on our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope traveling a million miles away!

Prior to Roman’s launch, an SD card loaded with submitted names will be attached to this plaque where the square outline is.

After launch on August 30, Roman will journey way out to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), the same orbit as our James Webb Space Telescope. At L2, the gravity of the Sun and Earth, together with an object’s motion around the Sun, let it stay lined up with Earth as they orbit. That will give Roman a relatively steady orbit without using much fuel. Like Webb, Roman will trace out a large orbit around the actual L2 point — much larger than the Moon’s orbit around Earth — and the two will easily be kept far apart.

Telescopes at L2 also have a constant, unobstructed view of a wide swath of the sky. Earth won't block much of Roman's view since it will be so distant! And at L2, heat from Earth, the Sun, and the Moon have less effect on infrared telescopes, which “see” heat.

The Roman Telescope model has its boarding pass! Do you have yours?

Send your name here. Submissions close July 16. Follow along with Roman’s road to launch at science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[marsymallows]

Another one from NASA! I sent my name to Mars years ago because it's free and exciting and it's Mars, aka me. LOL.

This time, I think I'm gonna send mine, baby K and J's names altogether. It could be a literally out of this world time capsule and I want to be a part of it again!

[longreads]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week’s Top 5:

* Quiet, please (The New Yorker) * An ode to art (The New York Review of Books) * The value of vultures (The Washington Post) * The Big Ea(t)sy (Oxford American) * A marginal conversation (The Yale Review)

Learn why our editors are recommending these stories. 

[marsymallows]

Bedventures of Baby K on Independence Day! 🇵🇭

Bedventures of Baby K on Independence Day! 🇵🇭

[marsymallows]

Me Time

There are so many things motherhood snatches away from a woman and I can speak for a lot of moms out there when I say, “I miss my me time the most!” I have to be honest, maybe this is a cry for help, but not the kind that needs intervention or the involvement of authorities LOL. It’s just another rant on a random Sunday when ironically, I have a tiny bit of “me time” to waste. Before deciding…

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[marsymallows]

Mondays are my New Fridays

Never in my wildest dreams have I thought I’d say that, but 2 years after writing about it first 👉🏻 here, I still say and feel the same. 2 years ago, I was living the ultimate dream, working from home and having only myself and my hobbies to support. Fast forward to the present time, with an 8-month old and same partner in tow, things have obviously turned super chaotic, but still, Mondays have…

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[marsymallows]

A Love Letter

Hey, it’s finally April! How have you been? I hope life is treating you well. If not, then at least I hope you get something good out of it. Yesterday, we learned about a death in J’s family, not in his immediate nor in his extended family. If I’m being honest, I’d say she’s more than family to J. A day before it happened, J had worked from home and in a brief video call, he had a chance to…

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[marsymallows]

Musings of a Worried Nanay

Yesterday, my parents picked us up from the airport as my little one and I will be staying with them until the Holy Week. J will be flying back to Cebu this afternoon to work a couple more weeks before joining my family for our week-long rest from work and Holy Week traditions. On the way home, we were talking about the weirdly less foot traffic in the airport and were amused by the surprisingly…

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[marsymallows]

Creative Juicing

Creative Juicing

[marsymallows]

Not So Manic Monday

I’ve been lurking around the reddit sub, buhaydigital once again to see why things have been quiet lately. I must have joined too many subs to even see new posts from this one, but surprisingly, checking out the sub itself didn’t help as there weren’t really any new ones from at least over a year now. Weird. Are freelancers too preoccupied with their respective jobs to rant on this space anymore?…

Not So Manic Monday