Real Suspicious Cargo

I AM A BABBLING BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK mid-30s • scientist • queer • trans • they/them pronouns • moooost nsfw stuff is at sordidlittlescenes • tends to obsess over one band or another

[runawaymarbles]

Fanbinding(ish): Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Leather on bookboard, with hot foil stamping on the spine. The endpapers are a Japanese wave design, partially as a reference to Canaan House being on the water, and is also a reference to the fact that this book was a birthday present for @eebeesee, who is a giant weeb. (Fun fact: I bought that paper in 2012 and have been waiting uh, 11 years, to find the perfect project for it.)

Process under the cut.

Remember two months ago when I said I wasn't wild about doing another paperback-to-hardback conversion? Well. More fool me. (I did try and find a sewn hardback to take apart, but apparently this book was not sold as a sturdy hardback. Cue rant.)

I've tried debossing with leather before, so obviously, for embossing, I decided I'd just pick the most complicated design possible. I had to modify the skull a bit--taking out the IX, which did NOT cut well, and I had to make the lines around the glasses thicker.

After several hours of cricut cutting and experimentation, here is the cover pre-leather. (I also had to floss the skull's teeth with an awl to get some fuzz out, which I found very funny.)

Then, leather:

As you can see, I lose a lot of details in the teeth there, so I went around the edges with a heated brass stylus.

I bought a special skull stamp for the spine: it definitely wasn't made for heat, because while it did serve the purpose, it also came with a metal handle which made handling it awkward. (Oven mitts did not give me the necessary amount of dexterity. I ended up sort of wrapping a paper towel around the handle. My cousin has since informed me that we do own fire resistant gloves, but I did not remember this at the time.)

The stamp was also a pain to get even: it had to be at juuuuust the right temperature and pressure, or you'd either get too much or too little, as shown. It was also pretty picky about foil, but the brass color matched the endband cloth and insides best anyway, so that worked out. (White was a definite no.)

The other fun bit of this was doing the edges: I did them with black foil, but as we established in my earlier foiling experiments, that's not the most reliable. I think I got the best results so far on the top, but kept getting flakes on the others. I ended up painting the outside edge with ink, and then foiling on top of that. The bleed onto the pages ended up looking pretty neat, but since I hadn't done it on the top, I didn't do it on the bottom so that it wouldn't look weird on the inside. I'm not sure the foil added as much gloss as I was hoping for so next time I might just do the ink.

It did mean that I had to separate all the pages twice; I ended up bringing this to my girlfriend's haircut appointment and working on it in the corner. I hope it was the most strangely specific thing the stylist had seen someone doing when they tagged along.

[zoya-nazyalenskys-archive]

people need to realise that a poor little meow meow must be a character who has committed atrocities you cannot poor little meow meow a good guy that's not how this works

[zoya-nazyalenskys-archive]

what this post has shown me is that so many of people on this hellsite cannot distinguish between a poor little meow meow and a blorbo from my shows smh

[luulapants]

Hope this helps!

[cowboysurge]

are you a fan of the mountain goats and the locked tomb

the mountain goats only

the locked tomb only

tlt AND tmg

neither

Voting ended onApr 28, 2025

[nitewrighter]

What Mountain Goats Song are you feeling right now?

Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod

Autoclave

This Year

Foreign Object

No Children

Heel Turn 2

Getting into Knives

Cry for Judas

Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1

OP, you forgot __________ (write in tags)

Voting ended onNov 13, 2024

[knitmeapony]

[left-hand-of-dorkness]

a type of baltimore guys you see on certain special days is one in all ravens gear and one in all orioles gear and they’re doing their little game day things together like day drinking and yelling. i think they are in love

[left-hand-of-dorkness]

game day

[neververy4]

My friend when I tell him that I don’t think being a girl is working out for me

[raspbearyarts]

⚔️

[felixitous]

[ianmalcolmptsd]

[foone]

I think I accidentally got so high last night that I forgot:

That cis people exist, and/or

That men can have penises too

I happened to see a naked dude on the For You tab and was like "waow, this trans guy has a trans woman's penis! He's like... Double trans!"

No. No that's not what was happening. He was just a cis man. (or possibly a well-passing post-op trans man, I of course can't be sure)

But for a brief moment I forgot that men with penises existed, and some men get to be that way for free.

[queer-as-city-folk]

Whats your opinion on New Jersey

Positive, Have lived in NJ

Negative, Have lived in NJ

Positive, Have lived in PA or NY

Negative, Have lived in PA or NY

Positive, haven't lived in PA, NJ or NY

Negative, haven't lived in PA, NJ, or NY

Voting ended onApr 27, 2024

[sophelstien]

putting "israel" and "israelis" in quotes in order to imply israeli culture is not real does not make you woke or anti-imperialist, it makes you a performative virtue signaler and racist against the very real and thriving culture of half of the world's jewish population.

[sophelstien]

it will never not be wild to me how much the left has taken zionist concepts about palestinians—erased them from the narrative, claimed their culture is not real and that they are just part of a larger pan-arab group with no distinct qualities, and denied their connection to the land—and turned them around onto israeli jews out of hate. who does erasure help? why would you appropriate the concepts of a colonial nationalistic project if you want to end colonial nationalism? it doesn't make any sense, except that it does because so many goyim truly believe that jews are not an ethnically or culturally distinct group, but totally inextricable from the powers of global domination.

[ossifer-deactivated20250706]

the left's antizionism taking an increasingly exceptionalist bent wherein israel's existence is regarded as a uniquely profound evil instead of being merely being another example of the conditions imposed upon the displaced populations of similar settler-colonial states is deeply disquieting, and revealing of how many have not truly challenged the biases they hold as a result of societal influence; to me there's no coincidence that many who tread the line of antisemitic rhetoric with their critique are also the ones heralding from places under christian hegemony that are examples of successful settler-colonialism. exceptionalising israel's atrocities rather than situating them within a materialist understanding of the conditions of settler colonialism -- all settler colonialism, and to speak more broadly, all relations of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, exploitation -- is inane at best and reactionary antisemitism at worst

the present pervasiveness of the completely ahistorical notion that jews have no tangible connection to the land, and that israelis are thus a monolithic foreign presence that are equitable to an equivalent white european population, that is often backed up with arguments rooted in genetics and skin cancer rates as supposedly irrefutable proof of israeli 'whiteness' is something especially disturbing. can critique of israel not co-exist with the validity of the jewish connection to the land in addition to the plaestinian? is it not possible for one to be an antizionist primarily based on the reality that settler-colonialism and fascism are never justifiable? instead of hinging your antizionism on the fictitious idea that jews hold no connection, can you not instead leave it to the reality that the ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first?

all i can see right now is every scrap of nuance being violently paved over as the dominant rhetoric changes from the apt apartheid comparison and calls for acknowledgement of the ongoing genocide to increasingly dehumanising language and exceptionalisation. i also see no such fervor aimed at the united states for their past and ongoing crimes against indigenous people the world over, and the erasure of israeli jewishness as their recategorisation into whiteness is perceived as resulting in no loss of data, instead of an acknowledgement of the intersections of oppression.

antizionism is not antisemitism but playing mad libs with zionist talking points about palestinians kind of fucking is

[cassie-is-trans]

[knitmeapony]

[riverashes]

Do you think Mercy's ghost clung to Augustine via the blood and viscera on him as he went into the stoma? Do you think she promised, even in death, that they would not go forward alone?

[doctorskelegoats]

"I hope you die. I hope we both die." Julien Baker's cover of No Children carries all the rage and hate and love and exhaustion that Mercymorn took with her to the Stoma. Artist Credit: @midnightcrows

[txttletale]

Is it more Marxist to be a sadist or a masochist?

FROM EACH ACCORDING TO ABILITY

TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEED

[the-golden-ghost]

I'm curious let's go

Who would win in a no-holds barred battle between your Tumblr icon and your Discord icon?

My tumblr icon would win

My discord icon would win

They'd tie

They would make out sloppy style instead

I don't have discord/I'm bald/other infinitely nuanced answer

Voting ended onApr 9, 2024

[tvneon]