#everheartless

[everheartless]

**RATS SMP SPOILERS**

In today's installment of Safety Rat's adventures, he has endorsed the destruction (and subsequent explosion) of the boiler in the basement!

He has sustained hearing damage from said explosion!

(Jimmy didn't realize he needed to download an additional data pack to hear a conversation between the Wife and the Gardener, so while the other rats were eavesdropping, Jimmy couldn't hear. Chat has decided Jimmy is hard-of-hearing now.)

[everheartless]

attempt at building a bastion that isn't crumbling to pieces

[everheartless]

In this house,

WE SUPPORT BUILD MART.

[everheartless]

I'm getting the feeling that empiresblr is just handing Scott weaponry at this point.

Empiresblr: Angst, angst, angst >:)

Mr. Smajor: You want angst, you said? :)

Empiresblr:

Mr. Smajor: I can give you angst. :)

Mr. Smajor: *Elsa arc, "I don't want to hurt you," the disaster at Gem's, self-imposed exile, maybe for centuries*

Empiresblr: ...wait, that's not-

Mr. Smajor: Oh, and one more thing...

Mr. Smajor: pOPPY >:)))))

[everheartless]

You heard ma’boy Mr. Scott Smajor. We keep the flower husbands fan content going! (so he doesn’t get lonely, /j /j)

At least until we find c!Scott another boyfriend. cc!Scott is on his own, but I just want my characters to be happy, goddammit.

[everheartless]

Thinking about the logistics of a vampire metabolism again, and I might have a somewhat realistic answer to how much and how often a vampire would need to drink blood.

(Hear me out. My biology degree is coming in use for something.)

700 Calories per liter

That's the hypothetical nutritional value of human blood (assuming you can digest it. We aren't meant to drink blood and don't have the equipment for it. This has been your don't drink blood PSA).

Assuming a human-like metabolism, that's nearly 3 liters of blood a day to support a 2,000 Calorie diet (and about 4 fully-drained humans per week). This seems a bit high for even a fairly gory vampire interpretation.

Therefore, let's consider if a vampire metabolism resembled an ectothermic (cold-blooded) animal's. Why does this matter, you ask? Well, ectotherms famously have lower metabolisms than endotherms (warm-blooded).

Here's a nifty graph I found to illustrate. (Link: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0146)

Yellow highlighted line is ectotherms (cold-blooded)

Blue highlighted line is endotherms (warm-blooded)

TL;DR, if vampires were ectotherms, they would not need to eat as much.

According to dodgy first page Google results, humans need very roughly 30 Cal per kg a day whereas a larger reptile (I used alligator research, link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2366112/, for my estimates here) need less than 10 Cal per kg a day.

Using the low end of the study linked above to hopefully counteract the fact it references juvenile, GROWING alligators instead of adults, 5.7/Cal a day, we get a nutritional requirement of about 456 Cal per day for a vampire weighing 80 kg (about 180lbs).

Some more dodgy Googling even popped up numbers as low as 3 Cal/kg a day for large reptiles like alligators, equating to about 240 Cal per day for the same vampire.

Now, let's talk blood.

Bringing back that 700 Cal/L number from earlier and that your standard whole blood donation is 500mL, that's about 350 Calories per standard blood donation. Depending on the activity and weight of your vampire, it seems like 1-2 standard blood donations per day would suffice.

Translated into whole humans (for your more murderous interpretations), that's less than one human a week.

(For the math, 0.912 humans for the 456 Cal/day number and 0.48 humans for the 240 Cal/day number.)

We're talking around 2-4 humans a month.

I dunno about you, but that sounds like a much more reasonable (and narrative-friendly) number to me.

[everheartless]

Bookbinding, Trial 1

So, I finally have a finished product to show the internet!

For context, I read Poker's The Snow King on AO3, LOVED it, and desperately wanted a copy. The logical solution? Learn how to bind books, obviously.

Planning

Apparently I started this mess on July 28th, 2022 by asking Poker if I could, ya'know. Actually do it.

TLDR; I planned to edit, format for printing, and then go forward with putting together a copy. Poker said sure and doomed me for the next two months.

The first month was just editing. Granted, Poker's fic is already plenty readable as it is, but I wanted it to be polished and SHINE.

(I will never insult any editor ever again. Not that I did previously, but I REALLY won't now. This took me an entire month from three read-throughs with a fine tooth comb.)

It's obviously still imperfect. I'm an amateur writer and editor. Just because I paid attention in English doesn't mean I'm qualified.

If you want to take a look at the edited copy or even print it out for yourself, I've uploaded the PDF to my Google Drive here. (It's formatted for A4 paper size.)

Printing

The next step was printing all FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY-EIGHT PAGES (548) of this baby. The original fic is 135K words, and I added the roughly 20K words of alternate endings Poker wrote as bonus content at the end.

I was slightly ticked my printer messed up some of the italics, but after looking at it, I decided this was funnier.

Stitching

The pages are basically sewn together after being folded (basic ass description for those of you who haven't a single clue about bookbinding). I did what's called a French link stitch. As far as I'm aware, it's a more difficult stitch that I really shouldn't have started with, but..... I'm me. This was inevitable.

I could have stopped there, but I wanted the fancy bits on the inside of the spine called endbands. Today, they're usually glued on, but I decided to learn how to stitch them on like they used to a couple hundred years ago. Again, because I'm me. Don't be me.

Lots of gluing.... I don't want to talk about it.

(The black thing in the corner is my cat's ear, lol.)

The Cover

I swear, the cover was the most difficult part of the entire thing. I used scrap fabric I had lying around because I'm dumb and like to make life harder for myself.

Note to self for Trial 2, Mod Podge just doesn't have the strength for this kind of work, smh.

Despite that, I forged ahead.

Yes, that is hand painted. Yes, I regret every single second of it.

Add some corner protectors, and voila! A book!

More Pictures!

All in all, this took me just under two months, and I have once of my favorite fics IN HAND. It's glorious.

[everheartless]

In light of recent events...