Ordinary Human Sewing Machine

My name's Silas. I'm 32. I'm queer, he/him/his. Currently in SoCal. I make costumes. I make scale models. I feed my cat. I talk about design and craftsmanship and stuff.

[cloudmancy]

is he rocking with the orthodox ita bag

[sfemonster]

Sphinxmaxxing.

[funeral]

Eugene Thacker, "Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror", Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, Vol. IV

[and-fishing-equipment]

me sinking my teeth into this neat little chart

[sigh-less]

On Book Banning

(Or this was gonna be a FB reply but frankly that site ain't worth my time and this is better here) So I read smut as like a 10 year old. You know what I did when I got to stuff that didn't feel like I understood it or made me uncomfortable?

I put it back. I read something else. I had a frank discussion with my mom about it, and we agreed that maybe it was a book I'd like when I was older. And that was that. I was embarrassed, sure, but I read a lot. And I knew there was a lot of books out there, and I didn't have to do anything that made me uncomfortable.

I came back to the books that I felt uncomfortable about a few years later, and understood myself and what I was reading about. And...I found it pretty great.

I read about all kinds of romances. I read about people that felt like me. I read about people that really didn't sound like me. I read about things I might want to do, things I did want to do later but didn't feel like I was ready to find a partner to do with at my age, and I read about what was going on in the characters heads-the good experiences, the bad experiences, and how they affected them. And I learned from reading. I read fanfiction. Some of it was written by people much older than me. Some of it was written by my peers. None of it put me directly in contact with people that would pressure me to do things I didn't want to do. I could read, engage in a fantasy, a sounding board of fellow readers, and step away when I

It helped me understand consent, it helped me understand what I might be feeling, it helped me see the nebulous young teenage years when I wasn't old enough to do some things, but wanted things I couldn't understand. I read about a lot of different ways to pursue physical desires, and helped me understand what was okay and not okay. I wasn't perfect as a young person but I didn't fuck up anyone else's life too badly, nor did I fuck up my own too badly. I had three things growing up that helped: 1) Access to any information I liked and 2) The permission to walk away from it when I felt like it, and 3) I understood the importance of the 'uh oh' feeling, the feeling like you should go. The thing about kids is that yes, they don't have all the means to figure out what they're supposed to do. And they can get into unsafe situations, however they're not without reason. Especially if you tell them to listen to feelings of uncertainty or doubt. I think it's worth giving kids more credit when it comes to their ability to choose what to read. The best thing you can do to get someone to read shit they're not supposed to is lump it all together behind an adults only section- where everything from YA romance with fondling gets put next to BDSM.

[chalicechipper]

working on my thesis and read an article on anticatholic erotica of the 18th century - found some titles:

venus in the cloister by jean barrin

love in all its shapes, or the way of man with a woman

memories of the voluptuous conduct of the capuchins in regard to the fair sex

and, a poem called, um, "a full and true account of a dreadful fire that broke out in the pope's breeches"

and some intriguing art:

[tura23]

My personal favorite is: The Awful disclosures of Maria Monk!

Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836)

Maria Monk's revelations of her time at the Hôtel-Dieu convent in Montreal, describing nuns forced to engage in sexual acts with priests and

[rosenkranz-does-things]

some attempts at vintage pulp covers style

[rosenkranz-does-things]

prints

[firstfullmoon]

“[...] she gave a single, long, full-throated howl, as if she wanted to rid herself at once of all the cries that pain had stored up in her.”

— Albert Camus, The First Man, trans. David Hapgood

“I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. It felt like a huge lump of cold clay. Someday I was gonna holler so long, glass would shatter and walls explode.”

— Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

“She’s going to scream, I thought. And it’ll be something real. Something we have to chain up in the backyard and feed with bloody steaks.”

— Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

[nixcraft]

Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

[caroline-vibecheck]

KillKillKillKillKillKillKillKillKillKillKill

[alluringapex]

There's a way to remove it~

Go into the power shell

then paste in:

reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot /v "TurnOffWindowsCopilot" /t REG_DWORD /f /d 1

like this

Then restart. Also here is how to turn off the awful search suggestions:

How to Disable Windows Web Search and Speed Up Your PC

Stop the OS from pulling up web results when you just want files and apps.

[venonomnomicon]

incase anyone didnt know there's some great free software to handle disabling windows bloatware without needing to mess with the command line

With the freeware O&O ShutUp10++, unwanted Windows 10 and 11 features can be disabled and the transfer of sensitive personal data onto Micro

O&O AppBuster gives you the control back over your Windows again! Now you decide which apps you want on your computer.

these are a mandatory part of every windows install for me. been using them for years and it's such a lifesaver

[foxofninetales]

Because this has mostly been talked about with Windows 11, heads-up that this installed itself on every Windows 10 computer in our house with this week's update.

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Incorrigible Optimists by RomanDubina

[as-deep-as-the-sea]

“I don’t want to be a burden” you’re more like a relief, a gift, a blessing actually

[transgayaccount]

“i dont want to be a burden” dude i found the point of it all thanks to you. i realised the joy of existing is doing so with you bro

[dalniente]

"i don't want to be a burden" you're worth carrying. i don't care if you'd be worth it to you; you're worth it to me. i smile every time i think of you. and buddy you're just gonna have to figure out how to cope w that <3

[yamitamiko]

"I don't want to be a burden" human hands and arms and hearts are made for carrying.

[hayleyolivia]

I just had some...thoughts... about sticking animal heads on human shoulders. Bear with me.

I think the reason some anthros look really strange (I’m looking at you, Skyrim) is because animal skulls don’t attach to their spines the same way ours do. Our spines and skulls are very vertical, but many animals’ are closer to horizontal.

Some people solve this by giving the animal skulls a human skull shape on the back. But, to me it makes them look somehow bald(??) and just kinda weird in general. If, instead, you change their necks to curve so that the spine still connects where their four legged counterparts’ do, they no longer look yucky! (And also don’t need a hair-do!)

This seems especially applicable for animals like big cats, cows, and lizards — animals whose spines attach very horizontally to their heads.

Anyway, enjoy some more art I did while having these very specific thoughts.

[carnivalseb]

They're going to have the mother of all sore necks. That lower back pain you get sometimes is going to happen to them above the shoulder. I'll bet that has cultural and social implications in the narratives that involve them.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You must imagine the character I’ve created here wearing a suit and a monocle, by the way.

[thesilvertophat]

During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.

The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors. The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general! Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.

[sigh-less]

Oh man, I have Lovecraft Theories.

So it's well known the man was a massive racist even for his time. Don't need to get into detail as to how, google is your friend. The point is, it's probably safe to assume he didn't have a lot of empathy.

(And yes, I am aware that he also had issues with mental illness his whole life too that ties into this)

From there, I'm gonna guess the only way he could see himself in a world in which he was very privileged, though his issues was by inventing forces that were able to disrupt and influence the reality of the world around him.

Think about it- what is privilege if not a state of rules that distorts reality of equality? And if one does suffer from severe, crippling mental illness, how do you rationalize it when you cannot see yourself as anything but superior?

I think his lack of empathy lead him to need to create forces beyond his control because he couldn't see how those around him might have lived with those forces as influence on their lives.

[stjohnstarling]

Ever since starting to publish romance novels I’ve been checking out the romance books at the thrift store specifically for the clinch covers, as a reference for what I might want to do with my own books.

As a culture we mocked these to extinction but I think we were just afraid of their power. The modern clinch revival still hasn't reached the heady heights of what they were doing in the 80s! The vintage covers can be really quite explicit. These ones in particular were steamy enough they had to be hidden on an inner flap.

[stjohnstarling]

This episode of the Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast where they interview Shirley Green and Sharon Spiak, who were romance novel cover artists in the 80s, is a fascinating look at what a huge industry these covers were. Did you know they had whole photography studios full of props to make these? They’d take photos and turn those over to a painter who’d make something like a couple of these a day. They had it down to a science.

[stjohnstarling]

Here is a particular favourite of mine, also by Sharon Spiak!

[rainbowsky]

For anyone who's needed a laugh/smile as much as I have lately, I give you this sweet little guy.

[weeee]

Time shifting

––

I wanted this but the original poster is transphobic

[anarchopuppy]

This is called the "analog loophole" and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. They can encrypt and copy-protect all they want, but eventually the file has to be sent to a speaker and/or screen, and it has to get there in a human-readable form because that's the whole dang point

The simplest way to exploit the analog loophole is just pointing a camera at a screen or a microphone at a speaker, but direct recording is also always possible and always will be. Anything that can be displayed can be saved and displayed again

[autumngracy]

Back in the day, people also used to share software over the radio with this technology. Because computer programs and files are really just sets of binary code, and that code can be turned into audio tones.

The resulting audio file can be played over the radio (sounding a bit like the old dial up noise, as it's just two quickly oscillating notes) and recorded to a cassette tape, which you can then give to your computer to "decode" back into 0's and 1's, which gives you the program file. You can then run it as if you'd installed it from a disk.

NPR did a very cool podcast about this.

[thememedaddy]

[american-auror-story]

[ouroborosorder]

my friends and I have created a game we call Quipposting, where you play quiplash but you roll a wheel full of character archetypes, and whatever it lands on, you all answer as if you are like, a wizard or cowboy. This legitimately makes quiplash go from a fun enough game to an S+ tier absolute unabashed banger

[ouroborosorder]

the best characters are Mafia Goon, Cyberpunk Hacker, Castle Guard, Sewer Rat, 16th Century Peasant, and Alien Poorly Pretending to be Human

[clamberingcat]

OP we desperately need examples

[ouroborosorder]

these are all from mafia goonposting but I think it’s my absolute favorite one of all time so I have a lot of pictures from it. Turn on some jazz and wait until people start talking in the accent and you’ll make Magic