Shadytail's Musings

Mostly ADHD. Some fandom. Occasional politics. A few hobbies.

[shadytail]

Minimum Viable Equipment

The MVB was developed by a grad student who just wanted to read fic offline. It was developed to bind good books without buying new equipment except a bone folder, because that’s cheap. I did buy equipment eventually, but not until I had been doing binding awhile.

Materials for the MVB

Fic on AO3 of a reasonable length

Duplex printer, ink, and paper

PDF viewer: Acrobat or Preview or whatever Linux uses. Something that can print booklets

Hole puncher: Awl, thumbtack, thick pointed needle and thimble, T-pins, etc. The shaft does need to be long enough to go through 8 sheets of paper several times over. Eventually you’ll want to find/make a needle-onna-stick like the one I found in the quilling supplies, but Hobby Lobby doesn’t seem to carry them anymore.

Needle: If it can fit the thread, it works. I like blunt needles better but anything stiffer than a beading needle will work.

Paper folder: Handle of a butter knife, back of a spoon, pastry scraper — many things will work. Your fingers will get very tired and maybe even sore if you keep setting creases with the flat of your nails. Bone folders work best; one should be your first equipment purchase. They’re pretty cheap and available in the scrapbooking section of most craft stores.

X-Acto or box cutter

Scissors

Straightedge: Eventually you’d want a metal ruler, but for this project anything will work, even a folded piece of paper.

Consumables

These will show on the final book, so have fun putting together a combination you like.

Thread: Lots of thread will work, so long as it is thin-ish and strong. You should really, really have to try to break the thread with your hands. If you have no other thread on hand, raid your dental floss supply. One strand of embroidery floss is too weak but two strands is good. #5 pearl cotton is too thick; #8 is as big as thread should get. Floche works but abrades very quickly. Will is to springy to work well, and rayon shows wear too fast to be worthwhile. Thinner beading threads should also work well, but fire-wire will have you cursing its stiffness. #12 pearl cotton, hand quilting thread, and upholstery sewing thread have the best balance of strength, thinness, and availability IMO.

Ribbon: At least 3/8th in (1 cm) wide and decorative, such as grosgrain or satin ribbons. Alternatives include thin strips of paper, flat borders sold for scrapbooking, or twill tape. Washi tape on paper would work pretty well too. Bias binding is a little to stretchy.

Cardstock: Two letter or A4 pieces of cardstock from the scrapbooking section. I suppose manila folders would work too, although they’re a bit plain.

[amalgamasreal]

If you're making a Mecha story you're obligated by tradition to absolutely wreck Australia:

So the question is what is Ozzy-Land's status in Witch from Mercury? TELL US BANDAI!

[shadytail]

Ah, so that’s how Kiwiland defends itself against Emutopia: with mecha-centric force design.

[shadytail]

Minimum Viable Binding

So you know the Minimum Viable Product in software engineering? Well, great as ASD’s tutorial is, it’s kind of overwhelming. So I’d like an easier entry point to fanbinding than a really professional-looking hardback. I like to make simpler, non-adhesive bindings. They look cute, function perfectly well, and build the skills for more complex binds.

Okay, so my Minimum Viable Bind (MVB) or “Bare-Minimum Bookbinding” is basically a book block with a cardstock cover. The tapes weave through slits in the cover to hold it on. Instead of typesetting, a whole other craft, you can just download the pdf from AO3 and print it out as a booklet.

Skills for a case binding:

Typesetting

Designing a bind

Imposing and printing pdfs

Paper grain

Folding signatures

Punching and sewing on tapes on a frame

Tipping in endpapers

Gluing up and lining the spine

Making a case. Subsidiary skills:

Precise measuring, squaring, marking, and cutting on board and paper

Includes squares, spine widths, hinges, etc.

Covering boards (including drying without warping)

Especially the tricky bit about mitering corners

Aligning everything and attaching case to text

That’s a lot. Especially typesetting, which is its own specialized craft and more work than actually binding the book. Very different work too. Involves new programs or relearning old ones in new ways that are basically akin to a new tool anyway.

So my MVB instead starts out with AO3’s auto-generated PDF (under the Download button at the top of every chapter, right next to EPUB, MOBI, and HTML).

Other skills the MVB does not need: everything from tipping in endpapers onwards. Except for a little marking and cutting with a knife. Or determining paper grain. ASH’s tutorial is for your second bind, after you’ve decided this is kind for fun.

The MVB is also designed to require minimal equipment, but this is getting long and the editor is not happy with me, so time for a new post.

[lasaraleen]

rip to c. s. lewis, you would’ve hated ai

[lasaraleen]

[shadytail]

Monologuing Strategies

This thread at Captain Awkward has a bunch of useful info and strategies for curbing monologuing in conversation. I need to go through and copy out the best ones for future reference.

An idea to occured to me as I was reading that I’d like to experiment with: using breath to limit my conversational turns. You see, my form of ADHD makes the split attention needed for self-monitoring very hard. So something like the three sentence rule won’t do so well. (How many sentences have I already uttered? Plus I’m perfectly capable of constructing a grammatically-correct page-long sentence on the fly, just like a 19th century novelist.) I’m better off with natural rewards — where doing the thing is a necessary condition for getting the reward and can’t be skipped.

In the same vein, I bet limiting my conversational turns to 1 breath might work better, because it’s a natural limit on how much I can talk at all at once. Learning to notice when I’m running out of breath won’t be easy, but maybe it’d be possible.

For longer talks I could count breaths on my fingers and once my hand was all open, then end the turn — though that’s the kind of infodump you’d want to get consent for first. And I could regulate stuff further by the size of breath I take. Then I don’t have to think while I’m talking, only before.

Anyway, it’s worth a try.

[shadytail]

How to filibuster

Russia doesn’t know how to filibuster.

Here’s a perspective on the Ukraine war that has haunted me for three years, but I’ve never seen anyone else really discuss. In this essay I will…

For the record, filibuster in the US Senate sense was adapted from filibuster in the original, which as a private military expedition, usually organized by Southerners before the Civil War hoping to expand slavery to Central America. They basically all failed, except for Texas.

Was Texas a filibuster? Well, maybe Sam Austin didn’t think so, but on the other hand, they did revolt against Mexico in part because Mexico didn’t allow slavery. And the US government wasn’t involved, although they sourced equipment from here. I haven’t looked up whether they had significant private support from wealthy Southerners in high positions (probably did). So it does check the boxes.

The main difference from a regular filibuster is that the Anglophone Texans had immigrated first and integrated with wealthy Trianon somewhat. (Step 1 that Putin forgot. Active-duty Girkin emphatically does not count).

Step 2 is that the immigrants convinced their Tejano neighbors that independence was a good idea. The Russians completely skipped this step, pulling their leaders from a failed politician, a former Father-Frost-for-Hire, a guy who still lived with his mother, etc.

Step 3 is to acquire military equipment and maybe train a bit. In the 19th century US, militias were still a thing. Some of the Texans probably had served in the US or Mexican Army, but I didn’t look that up. In any case, less specialized equipment was needed: mainly cannons, which civilians could buy. Nowadays war, as opposed to a protracted insurgency, requires tons of heavy equipment—tanks, APCs, MANPADs, howitzers, and their ammo—which would tax the funding of even the richest crowd, if any government would even let civilians or NGOs buy them.

Come to think of it, Putin failed even in Step 0: pick somewhere hard to get to. Ukraine has a good rail network and a full highway network. Even when the central government was still convulsed by the aftermath of revolution, volunteers could flood the Donbass for the price of a ticket or a gas-tank. (And flood they did: volunteers who had been organizing themselves into centuries to train self-defense during Euromaidan). Not like pre-rail, mostly pre-steamboat Texas, on the other side of the desert from Mexico City, governed by generals over an unmobilized populace.

So in short, if Putin wanted the Donbass, he completely failed to filibuster it properly. Good thing, too, because Ukraine deserves a better future than kleptocracy.

[my-midlife-crisis]

artist unknown

[shadytail]

Unglamorized domesticity

Songs despising housework by Shirley Şerhan on Youtube. Nope, not “housework is no fun, tee hee”, but straight up “I hate chores.”

[petitepointplace]

Antique Embroidery Book written in Cyrillic.

[thatswhywelovegermany]

*** watch with sound ***

Historic steam engine: Sets off developing huge clouds of smoke and steam

Public address system: Please note: Smoking in the station is only allowed in the designated smoking areas.

[shadytail]

AOC on religious freedom

Official transcript (also p. 49-50 of the pdf):

“I am experiencing this hearing and I am struggling whether I respond or launch into this question as a legislator or from the perspective of a woman of faith because I cannot--it is very difficult to sit here and listen to arguments in the long history of this country of using Scripture and weaponizing and abusing Scripture to justify bigotry.

White supremacists have done it. Those who justified slavery did it. Those who fought against integration did it, and we are seeing it today.

Sometimes, especially in this body, I feel as though if Christ himself walked through these doors and said what he said thousands of years ago, that we should love our neighbor and our enemy, that we should welcome the stranger, fight for the least of us, that it is easier for a rich man--it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into a kingdom of Heaven, he would be maligned as a radical and rejected from these doors.

I know, and it is part of my faith, that all people are holy, and all people are sacred, unconditionally, and that is what makes faith sometimes--that is what prompts us to transform because it is unconditional.

It is not about that it is up to us to love parts of people. We love all people. There is nothing holy about rejecting medical care of people, no matter who they are, on the grounds of what their identity is.

There is nothing holy about turning someone away from a hospital. There is nothing holy about rejecting a child from a family. There is nothing holy about writing discrimination into the law and I am tired of communities being of faith being weaponized and being mischaracterized because the only time religious freedom is invoked is in the name of bigotry and discrimination.

I am tired of it. My faith commands me to treat Mr. Minton as holy because he is sacred. Because his life is sacred. Because you are not to be denied anything that I am entitled to. That we are equal in the eyes of the law and we are equal in my faith in the eyes of the world.

So, I just have to get that out ahead of time because it is deeply disturbing, not just what is happening here but what this administration is advancing is the idea that religion and faith is about exclusion.

It is not up to us. It is not up to us to deny medical care. It is up to us to feed the hungry, to clothe the poor, to protect children, and to love all people as ourselves.”

[otterson24]

[shadytail]

Documents for end-of-life

[mango-habanero-autism-deactivat]

If you’re genuinely interested in learning more about settler colonialism and answering questions like “wait what does land back look like?” “What can I do?” and “What are the contexts informing this and why do Indigenous people reject being part of the US/Canada?” there are free syllabi online which can answer these questions (they will not answer it directly, the point is to get you to think for yourself and ask more questions that can lead you to thinking more deeply about this and how you can personally take action towards better practices of solidarity) 

Here’s the Standing Rock Syllabus: 

https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/

Allyship and Solidarity Guidelines of Unsettling America:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/allyship/

Towards Decolonization and Settler Responsibility:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/towards-decolonization-and-settler-responsibility-reflections-on-a-decade-of-indigenous-solidarity-organizing/

Sample Syllabi of the DEcolonization Resource Collection:

https://nationalhistorycenter.org/decolonization-resource-collection-sample-syllabi/

Further Readings:

https://decolonization.wordpress.com/decolonization-readings/

These are limited resources that mainly deal with North America and English-speaking countries, because that’s the context I am coming from. If you have resources from other regions and other languages, I welcome them here, or anything from your local context. 

[effectiveresistance]

Accomplices Not Allies:

indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex

Autonomously And With Conviction:

itsgoingdown.org/autonomously-and-with-conviction-a-metis-refusal-of-state-led-reconciliation/

[revretch]

Actually all fossil reconstructions are wrong because flesh only evolved recently. Before that it was bone world

[personalphilosophie]

[amalgamasreal]

If you're making a Mecha story you're obligated by tradition to absolutely wreck Australia:

So the question is what is Ozzy-Land's status in Witch from Mercury? TELL US BANDAI!

[shadytail]

Ah, so that’s how Kiwiland defends itself against Emutopia: with mecha-centric force design.

[talonabraxas]

Sun Conjunct Jupiter April 11, 2023 The Sun brings highlights. It sheds light and illuminates.

[shadytail]

Reblog gong for the stunning imagery, not the astrology (which I really don’t believe in).