Do you have any tutorials (yours or other peoples') for corsets that you've used/made?
I actually have not made a corset (yet!). I am planning to make one eventually, and I’ve saved THIS BUNNY GIRL TUTORIAL by CalgaryCosplay
LucyCorsetry has LOADS of information and youtube videos a plenty on how to re-size already purchased corsets, pattern one for yourself, and how to train, etc. Her YouTUBE CHANNEL is addictive.
I have been afflicted with a terrible curse: tearing through a book series, and upon finishing, seeking out the fandom only to find that most of that fandom appears to be reading an entirely different series than I am, lol. I brought this on myself, to be clear. I think a big part of the mismatch is that it's a genre I'm not that familiar with and that I don't care about/for in and of itself, so I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Also, maybe I'm reading into things too much! But what can I say, a girl needs enrichment in her enclosure, and there's enough meat on this bone that I will be occupied for a while.
All of which is to say, I read through all seven books of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that are out to date (thanks, free Kindle Unlimited subscription!), and now I have a lot of thoughts and no one who cares about them ;____; I played myself ;_______;
This series is such a hard sell in general, because on the surface it looks like male power fantasy garbage, it's litRPG, and there's a decent amount of mildly obnoxious dude humor at first. But a) it's only slightly male power fantasy garbage, b) it's not tedious litRPG and in fact the genre evolves and shifts into more straightforward SFF the further in you get, which is clever on a meta level and also a relief, c) to the extent it is litRPG, it mostly isn't boring and annoying about it (no stat nonsense for the sake of stat nonsense), d) the mildly obnoxious dude humor is often genuinely funny and to the extent it is obnoxious, there's some in-universe reasoning for that.
Anyway, the premise is as follows: Earth is suddenly and devastatingly mined for its natural resources by aliens. This results in the death of billions: everyone who was indoors is instantly killed. Anyone who was outside gets a chance to enter the "dungeon", which offers a chance for the remaining humans to compete for an alleged chance at freedom and sovereignty if they reach the bottom floor, but it's basically The Hunger Games: a propaganda exercise that's meant to earn money for the aliens running it as a game show, only this is a dungeon crawling RPG rather than a Hunger Games/Battle Royale situation. No one has ever reached the bottom floor. The best result most achieve is to reach the tenth floor, where they can take a deal for some variety of indentured servitude.
Enter Carl, our hero, a former (late 20s? early 30s? don't recall his age, but somewhere around there) Coast Guard technician who is outside when it all happens because he chased after his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, a best in show tortie Persian cat. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, Donut eats a magic treat and becomes a sapient talking cat, and the books follow their struggle to survive and fight back against the cruel and inhuman system they've found themselves in.
Tonally, the series is interesting in that it manages to balance a very bleak, dystopian premise with genuine hilarity and moments of legitimately heart-wrenching emotion. Also, this is not a "lone heroic super cool guy saves and fixes everything" kind of story. This series is interested in teamwork and community in dire circumstances, and the found family of it all is genuinely moving. As a whole, it's just bonkers entertaining. I love when I can tell the author is having a blast, and you can absolutely tell that Matt Dinniman is having an absolute blast.
Anyway, a list of things I enjoy about this series and/or a list of general thoughts, some of which include mild spoilers:
PRINCESS DONUT. i love her. this cat is amazing and hilarious. She's exactly like you'd imagine a prize-winning Persian cat named Princess Donut to be. also, to my delight, she gets to be a fully rounded character. like yes, she's hilarious and often comic relief, but she's also taken seriously, and Carl is absolutely Insane about this cat. He fuckin' loves this cat, and the cat loves him. Also, hilariously, she has higher stats than Carl at the beginning. (In fact, she mostly has higher stats than him throughout, so she's technically the party leader. Which is why their party is called the Royal Court of Princess Donut.)
Donut has A+++++ insulting skills. On multiple occasions, I have lol'd in horror and delight at her savagery. A favorite:
Rezan: Why does that cat always type in all caps?
Donut: WHY DIDN’T YOUR MOTHER DRIBBLE YOU BACK OUT ONTO THE TRUCK STOP BATHROOM FLOOR, REZAN?
lest this give you the wrong impression, Donut is a classy lady. She is a princess, after all. but also she is savage.
Carl! The books are mostly in first person POV, so we're in Carl's head for most of them, and he is a great example of an unreliable narrator. He'll seem fairly generic at first, but stick it out through, like, the first third of the first book and onward for the slow and steady reveal of his Tragic Backstory and also such exciting psychological and emotional issues as: Insane about Donut; claims he "doesn't like drama" while in actuality he is clearly Repressing Everything; secretly an idealist who wants to believe the best of people; deeply committed to protecting people; full of revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian rage; holy abandonment issues batman; simply Does Not See It when various ladies basically throw themselves at him; generally Barely Holding It Together at all times.
people on reddit, mostly: Carl's stats!! blah blah blah power stuff. me: okay, but why is Carl Like This. let's deep discuss that. Also let Carl have a little breakdown. As a treat.
these books are so wildly, delightfully anti-capitalist, lol. I poked around Reddit and tumblr a bit, but didn't see anyone discussing this series' politics, but that aspect is super interesting to me. The series is very, very concerned with revolution and resistance and the form those things take when very few options are available to the oppressed, plus the ethics of revolutionary violence.
The dungeon AI! This thing is Way Too Online in a gross dudebro way, but frankly, it's still funny with it, and the evolution of the AI's character is fascinating. Also, I regret to inform you that I do find it extremely fucking funny that the AI has a thing for Carl and his feet. This is wholly hypocritical of me: if Carl was Carla, and the AI made the same comments, I'd have bounced. But what can I say, comedy is about subversion, I guess.
PREPOTENTE. MY PRECIOUS WEIRDO GOATMAN CHILD. Prepotente was a goat; upon entry into the dungeon and eating a magic pet treat, he becomes a goat man type thing, and he spends much of the series as one of the most dangerous and skilled dungeon crawlers, along with his "mother", the shepherdess Miriam Dom. he's a total fuckin weirdo who screams a lot for no reason and i love him. he better fucking survive the series, i swear to god.
one running theme of the series that I love so much is that Carl does not give up on people, and he does not write them off. He often runs into fellow crawlers who, if he was being bloodlessly practical about things, he should have bailed on. They're people who aren't prepared, who haven't leveled up enough, who aren't likely to survive much longer. But he doesn't abandon them, and he doesn't assume they can't get better. He sticks with them and helps them, and they help him. It's about found family ;____; they all love each other so much ;______;
MORDECAI!!! he's a changeling skyfowl and the team's game guide and later manager, and is a former crawler who took a deal. This is supposed to be his last season in the crawl, before he's free of his indentured servitude. he is Dad Shaped. automatic dad. there is in fact something quietly devastating about his Dad Shapedness.
There's a whole super interesting thing going on with the dungeon NPCs, and how we start out assuming most of them aren't "real". unsurprising spoiler alert: they may have been created by/for the dungeon, but many of them are very much real, and once they realize the position they've been put into, they're pissed.
i truly have no real idea where the series is going with its running theme about parents and children, and the protection or lack thereof of children. Our most heroic characters are consistently shown protecting and caring for the NPC children, even when it's at great cost to themselves.
everything to do with the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, the secret book with writing from prior crawlers that Carl is given, makes me Emotional. I'm honestly shocked the whole Cookbook was never planned, and that it was a result of Patreon votes. It's hugely important in the seventh book, not so much on a plot level--I can see how Dinniman could have gotten to some of these same plot beats without it--but on an emotional and thematic one. There's something so affecting here about the continuity of resistance, of finding hope and strength in the people who came before you, of planting seeds you water with blood and that you may never get to harvest, and the sheer, furious love of the whole thing.
so apparently Dinniman is a pantser when it comes to writing. Clearly, he's having fun, and it's more or less working out so far, but it does make me concerned about his ability to stick the dismount. I saw in an AMA that he likened it to building a spaceship with legos versus building it with a plan, and that he has fun writing himself out of corners. That's all well and good, but some of the things I'm most interested in this series are the overarching themes, and it makes me wary of those themes not getting a proper payoff. I guess I should just enjoy the ride, and accept that there will almost certainly be many loose ends.
On a meta level, I find it very funny and ironic that when I took a look at the reviews for the seventh book, I saw some people complaining about the absence of the more "entertainment" and "game" aspects of the series: no interviews with the outside, no "character sheets" for Carl, fewer big fights for Carl himself to take on, the AI taking on a more active 'deus-ex AI' role. Because in-universe, the dungeon crawl is no longer entertainment. At this point, the crawl has become an actual war, and the game genre it takes on--4x strategy--reflects that. Carl and the crawlers' choices have increasing ramifications outside the crawl, where actual war is breaking out at least in part as a result of their actions. The AI intervening more and more often to put its finger on the scale is part of the conflict; it's fighting this war as much as the other characters are, if with still inscrutable motivations.
This is in fact one of the central conflicts of the series: to what extent is this still a game? Has it ever only been a game? The crawlers and NPCs are in fact fighting for it to not be a game: they're saying "my life is real, my suffering is real, and if you won't acknowledge that, then you're coming in here with us to fight and die too. Not just a game anymore, is it?" And on another side of the conflict, you have the AI insisting that this stay a game, something with rules and a narrative and at least an attempt at fairness, however much the AI manipulates those things.
It seems like there's something of a genre shift going on with this series. As a reader who's not particularly interested in or invested in litRPG in and of itself, I'm fine with it shifting to being more straightforwardly SFF, and in fact, I think that's an interesting and fun choice on a meta level: the more the crawlers and the AI break and change the game, the more the genre of the series itself shifts.
"my life is real, my suffering is real, and if you won't acknowledge that, then you're coming in here with us to fight and die too. Not just a game anymore, is it?"
This right here is all the unwilling participants in the dungeon crawl: crawlers, NPCs, mobs, and surprisingly also the AI.
I picked up the first hardcover off the bookshelf looking sceptically at the title and then read the name of one of my favorite authors quoted on the back: Scott Lynch “This series has no goddamn business burying so much depth and emotion and complexity under its bawdy, gory surface, but it does so anyway. What a wild-ass and unexpected delight.”
🇬🇧 A year and a half ago, the first edition of the LARP History of Magic took place, without me knowing that it would be my last market for a long time. I wanted to make a special piece, new, unique... And I found these patterns from Paintyee almost by chance. It fitted perfectly and suited my goal of learning how to make complex pieces through sewing technics. This Iron Maiden ended up becoming an ingame item, a cursed receptacle, that saw more play and plots than I even did. Sometimes I wonder if it keeps trapped inside the soul of some unwary character... The rest of the time it makes an awesome jewelry box ☺️
🇪🇦 Hace año y medio se celebraba la primera edición del vivo de Historia de la magia sin yo saber que sería mi último mercado en mucho tiempo. Quería llevar una pieza especial, nueva, única... Y encontré estos patrones de Paintyee casi de casualidad. Encajaba a la perfección y cuadraba con mi objetivo de aprender a hacer piezas complejas a través de costuras. Esta Dama de Hierro acabó convirtiéndose en un objeto de juego, un receptáculo maldito, que vio más juego y tramas incluso que yo. A veces me pregunto si conserva atrapada en su interior el alma de algún incauto personaje... El resto del tiempo lo uso como un estupendo joyero 😌
WIP pic of my current project -- the walls at our new (much larger) place are extremely bare, so I took one of my favorite pieces by Vitor Gonzales and adapted it for carving in leather. 18" diameter, out of 10-oz veg-tan. The tooling took about nine hours all told; haven't decided yet how I'm going to dye it to best bring out the design.
Not for sale -- this was done entirely for my own enjoyment, though I may find some royalty-free designs to make similar pieces available in my shop.
This weeks project is a three leg small camping stool. Some one sent me a picture of one they saw on holiday and I said..gotta have one..ya know..like you do lol. So..here’s how I made mine..which I might add..is super comfortable.
Pic 1: I remembered I had an old camping stool in my shed..you know those nylon and cheap stitching ones that fall apart after a few uses, I’m glad i didn’t throw it away as it came in handy as a Template. I used it to mark out a shape on the leather for the seat as shown and to get the sizes for the leather pieces that would become the leg ‘pockets’. As seen here the leather was cut and then ..as is quite usual these days i figured what a waste of leather just to cut it and leave it bare..so I found some designs in my book and cobbled something together that I think suits nicely. I did the usual tracing the design then transferring it to the leather using a metal ball point stylus.
Pic 2 : I was told in my early days that I shouldn’t use Tracing paper as it gets wet from the wet leather and will tear….well I’ve never had a problem with it and it’s very cheap..just don’t press too hard and don’t use a normal pen or pencil as that is asking for trouble if it should tear. seen here the pattern is taped down to prevent it moving around whilst i transfer it. I use decorators paper tape it doesn’t stick as much so won’t harm the leather…it works for me..but do what feels right to you.
Pic 3 : You can see here the outline transferred onto the leather..I didn’t have to press hard at all so no issue with the tracing paper.
Pic 4 : I used my new arthritic finger friendly swivel knife from Tandy to carve the picture ready for tooling. (No it’s not called that lol..but the fatter grip helps reduce the cramping in my fingers. )
Pic 5 : I used the dividers first to mark the line and pushed a bit harder on the second pass to have a slight groove already which I found helps to guide the actual ‘Groover’ seen here and keeps it from slipping quite so much.
Pic 6 : Using the dividers I marked the second line for the next stitch groove, I’ve since learned that it’s best to sand your edge smooth all round first because later when I did it I ended up getting a bit close to the stitch groove..so lesson learned there..but it worked out ok.
Pic 7 : Then I used the edger to round things off a bit on the edges..always very satisfying doing this bit..don’t know why..just try it yourself and you’ll see what I mean lol.
Apologies for the workshop spam but I’ve been quite literally pounding away on this job and it’s so very close
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#leatherarmor #leatherwork #larp #larparmor #handmade (at Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByhKlMfn8HI/?igshid=3hfd8h2h1f19
Re-did the second costrel, and managed not to melt it this time. 🤣 We’ll need to acquire a stopper for it (the other one was off a bottle of some apple brandy that I chose specifically for the cork), but it is now waxed and ready for use.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the one I ruined; I hate to just throw it away, because I sunk a lot of time into it, and it is functional, and it looks fine from the front, but I have no use for such an unflattering example of my work.
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