Robots, aliens, mythology, fantasy, and other such things can easily ensnare my interest. Artist Tip Jar Commissions Art tag & Art blog Down and Out & The LiBrary
it's always "did you really need to burn down your workplace to prove a point" and never "how was the revenge arson? did you have fun doing revenge arson? were the flames pretty?"
On the morning of April 7, 2026, a fire was started at the Kimberly-Clark Distribution Center in Ontario, California. It escalated to a six-alarm fire and took nearly twelve hours to extinguish. The facility was completely destroyed and declared a "total loss". There were no injuries or deaths. An employee who was working in the warehouse is accused of arson.
Authorities stated that the employee had shared videos of himself starting the fire on Facebook, saying "all you had to do was pay us enough to live" and "there goes your inventory" while lighting pallets of toilet paper ablaze.
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS PAY US ENOUGH TO LIVE
No injuries. No deaths. This was a protest fire. This is why unions are important, to prevent frustrations like these, to ensure people are paid enough to live.
“And now we'll get what we want: a burger from the Five Guys restaurant. And if your conscience is bothering you, you should soothe it with the knowledge that you may have just saved my entire weekend. And all it cost was one shuttle trip, $13.99, and the diet of one Starfleet officer. I don't know about you, but I'd call that a bargain.”
Alright gentlefolks, you know I had to do it, so I present to you @gallusrostromegalus's Family Lore Story About The 1969 Easter Mass Incident aka the Bread Jesus Story because my brain generated an idea weeks ago and I was compelled to bring it to life with a hardcover 2-section pamphlet/booklet (also this was a challenge to try a new book binding style that's not a Bradel yet again:
Scoured the Internet Archive for something pretty I could use in the typesetting and found these gorgeous Mucha illustrated frames (see 4th image for name of the book), and yes I picked the one that depicted the crucifixion scene, haha.
And then the printer bugged out on me while I was reprinting a fixed version that was supposed to be black and white (the fucking Magenta ink tank is clogged clogged) so I decided to lean into the green and got out the jewel toned cardstock and the fancy American scrapbook prints (ouch import prices but worth it). The spine is just black bookcloth I made.
A couple of process and practice photos:
So it turns out when the conservation style 2-section pamphlet guide says you need to sew onto a strip of bookcloth hinge, it wasn't a suggestion because aw fuck, it was structurally important to not have a loose connection despite how much pulling and tightening you do (as seen in final photo between the practice typoed sections and the actual set). Lesson learned. Also, I definitely sewed on the bookcloth hinge backasswards but with enough PVA glue, everything will hold lol.
Typesetting this was fun though. Lots of evil cackling.
Wake up in enormous underground cyberpunk metropolis
Venture outside with your ant buddies to forage scraps from an incomprehensible civilization of alien gods (each one several times larger than the city you've spent most of your life inside) for the glory of your GodMomEmpress
Get attacked by a platoon of soldiers from a rival megacity, they're an offshoot of your species except like twice as big (basically orks) and like 10% of them are genetically modified supersoldiers with wings
Luckily, you've been engineered from birth to spit acid so you and your antfriends successfully defeat the rival ants and their winged miniboss
In my defense, I knew exactly what I was getting into. I just didn’t realize how much it would grow from my initial plan to what it ended up being. This is the third of my @fanartfrenzy binds, for the square "fic in my most recent fandom".
The Brooklyn Boys by @buckets-and-trees is a fun story. It starts in two places: one set of stories that are Steve Rogers x Reader, and the other set that are Bucky Barnes x Reader. Two sets of completely sweet little stories that you don’t realize are part of the same world until about five stories in.
And it’s not until about seven stories in that you realize that the Reader in both stories is the same person.
Now that I’ve spoiled you on the Big Reveal (sorry about that, unfortunately necessary to understand why I bound the stories the way I did), hopefully you can see why it would be a kick to bind.
(Please note that this post is long and image-heavy, so the rest will be under the cut.)
Since the stories start in two different places, it makes sense for the book to start in two different places, too, right? Right. I knew I wanted it to look like a normal book—though a double-sided one, with one side of the book containing Steve’s stories, and the other side, Bucky’s. So one side of the book looks like the picture above, with the yellow cover and grey spine, but the other:
Open either side and you’ll get Steve’s track on Steve’s side, and Bucky’s track on his. Get to the end of those tracks, and you find instructions to either flip and read the other track, or open to continue reading.
Here’s where it gets fun. The next story, Interlude, is where the two tracks converge, and this is where the reader should realize that the two tracks were in the same world all along. I wanted to convey that sort of “flipping” of the narrative by having the stories literally go in an unexpected and different direction—hence why you have to turn the book 90 degrees to continue reading.
And then… you literally just turn the page.
So the stories continue… still kind of on their separate tracks. We’ve got Steve’s and Bucky’s stories, running parallel but in full view. But you have to read both of them now to get to…
Steve and the Blindside is where it all comes together, when the reader (and Steve and Bucky) realize that the Reader character is the same person. It’s presented a little differently from the others, obviously, but you can’t access it unless you’ve read both Steve and Bucky’s lead-ins. And once you have read it, you reveal…
This, the final piece of the puzzle, where everything comes together. One volume, with all the remaining stories. And, on the flip side… the author’s commentary on how she came to write the story in this way.
*****
Let’s talk about the choices I made in how I bound all of this. I wasn’t originally going to make it this complicated; my original plan was to have the stories start from either end, and then once they meet in the middle, just keep going in that direction. I wasn’t sure how to make that happen, though, and in my searching trying to figure out what to do, I came across secret compartment books. I also realized that I had the base for a secret compartment book already: namely, a hardcover of HP and the Chamber of Secrets with a spine broken in three different places. Despite the fact that I don’t want copies of HP in my house anymore, I’m not a big fan of wasting something that could prove to be useful. Donating a broken copy of CoS would end up with it in the recycling bin, since the thrift store is unlikely to sell a book that’s falling to pieces. Wouldn’t turning it into something else be better? (You know. Transforming it, as it were. Yeah, terrible joke, very sorry, will delete if someone requests.) Plus, the Bucky storyline has a HP element in it, in that Bucky and the Reader character bond over HP. Using CoS as a base for this bind seemed like a good idea to me!
Which is how I decided: the broken textblocks, with one side hiding a tiny book holding the end of the story, would be CoS, and I’d build on them with the pieces leading up to that. I worked my way from the end to the beginning, binding first the tiny book (a quarto, incidentally), and including an extra-long ribbon on the spine. I then carved out the cavity in the largest of the CoS textblocks, using glue on the exposed edges (both inside and out) to give it stability. I glued the other end of the tiny book’s ribbon to the back of the hole in the textblock, then covered it with the same paper that I used for covering the tiny book, creating my hidden space. Done!
After that, I started working my way up. It took a while to think of how to lay out Blindside so that it stretched across both sides of the textblocks, but didn’t get destroyed when the textblocks were folded. I think figuring this step out was the very last thing I did—I had plans for nearly everything else—and I really like how it turned out, with the story coming from two places but needing to be read together.
Blindside, Shelves, and Ballet, are all pamphlet-bound, with a single signature sewn directly to their covers. I also included an extra piece of cardstock, folded the opposite way, which serves as a sort of anchor to the books. It’s the anchor that is glued to the texblock, and allows the reader to flip the books to the side after reading. I figured this was probably the safest way to attach the stories to the textblock, so they don’t fall out or end up in the wrong order.
All of this is hidden behind Interlude—which I’ll talk about now, but bear in mind, it was the last piece of the puzzle to be assembled. I was able to print Interlude as a single-page broadsheet on legal paper, using an accordion fold so that it would hide when the book is closed, but be fully visible once open. It’s pasted on either end to manila folders, which in turn are pasted to the textblocks. The part of the paper that is not pasted to the folders are backed by another piece of cardstock, so that they’re a little easier to read, and hopefully to prevent tearing or accidental incorrect folds.
With that done, I focused on the beginning of the story. Both Steve and Bucky’s tracks are technically perfectbound, because I needed to match the CoS textblock, and those measurements are 6x9, which is bigger than I could do as a signature with my printer. I also decided to go with perfectbound because CoS is perfectbound, and this would help match that a little better.
But in the end, I actually did stitch the pages, in a sort of single-stitch line a quarter inch from the spine, because I was worried that only having glue wouldn’t stand up to the excessive handling they would receive. (Turns out I didn’t take a picture of this—whoops. And it’s not really visible any longer either, but if Aspen looks closely when she lifts the cover, she might be able to see it.)
This ended up being super beneficial, because it gave me an anchor when attaching the covers.
About the covers:
So like I said, I used the CoS textblocks for the interior of the book. (And they’re all there, except for maybe a page or two, plus I added extra so that both sides of the book are even when it’s fully open, which lets the Interlude lay flat. I got through almost all of my misprints, yay.)
The head and endboards are the actual CoS covers as well. After separating the textblock from the cover, I cut off the original spine (which was going to be far too narrow for this, not to mention it was too rounded for my plan), and used the boards as the boards for this book. Because I needed the book to open flat, I decided to go with a secret Belgian binding… but I altered it a little bit, since I needed both sides to be readable before you actually open the book all the way, otherwise you risk tearing the booklets inside.
So, there’s actually five parts to the cover: the head- and endboards, the spine, and then what I started calling the inserts. And as luck turned out, the boards were exactly the width I needed so that the seam between them and the inserts was right where I’d done my reinforcement stitching.
I bound the head and endboards in the paper—blue for Bucky’s side, yellow for Steves, and the marblelized blue-and-yellow for the inside, and then a grey bookcloth for the inserts and spine. Black HTV and a Cricut machine did the spine decoration, and I bore the holes with this nifty tool that I found at Michaels, and worked like a charm. Then I sewed the whole thing together with embroidery thread.
Now came time to put the whole thing together. I stitched the seam between the head/endboards and the inserts to my reinforcement line, weaving back and forth to create a nice, solid connection. Once done on both sides, the book was assembled.
Mostly. Now that could lay it flat, I could paste in Interlude, and then it was finally done.
The whole thing took about two months, from the moment I started working on the layouts, to the minute I finished pasting on the cover decoration. The hardest part was trying to figure out how it would all go together, but I am so ridiculously pleased with the final result (despite my many, many misprints, and many, many mistakes, and many, many things I would fix if I were to do it again). I had so much fun trying to figure out this puzzle of a presentation, and how to do it in a way that would make sense for both the story and for a reader who might not know what to expect.
I loved doing every single part of this project. I am itching to do another secret compartment book again. (I have six more HP books, if anyone’s game to let me destroy another!) I almost want to do it again, to see if I can’t fix what I fucked up, and I also never want to do it again, because this was easily the most difficult project I’ve done to date. I am thrilled beyond words with the result.
(Things I learned: pick a book that is thick enough—if I did this again, I’d probably go with OotP so I don’t have to add more to even out the sides. Be more careful laying in the pamphlets; Bucky and the Shelves runs a bit close to Blindside, which makes it difficult to open the latter. And think double hard before doing the titles—I messed up and had to patch the cover to Bucky’s track, which was extra annoying because I had a limited amount of that paper and it took weeks to even find a good color match.)
In case you need more visual: here’s a video of the book, and me showing how it works.
Thanks for reading! Thanks so much to Aspen for her amazing story and for giving me permission to bind it. I’m happy to answer any other questions people may have.
It's taken me more than a year to make this post. And it would have taken even longer, except I realized that what was holding me back now was wanting it to be perfect, which, let's face it, will never happen. So I am here to tell you about my friend @zulufic, about the amazing people of @renegadeguild, the Renegade Bookbinding Guild, and about fandom and community and how sometimes we really do get it right.
Zulu was my fandom and irl friend, and there is no good way to say this, she died of cancer a year and a half ago. She was family. She and my wife and I knew each other for twenty years, a significant part of our adult lives. Were at each other's weddings (her wedding to @belldreams was only a dozen people), travelled to cons, and helped each other move. She spent an unplanned week camping out in our living room one summer, as we torrented Stargate Atlantis, modded a House big bang from our living room couch, marathoned six degrees of actor separation media with us. Fell in and out of fandoms around each other, large and small. Witnessed each other's families and relationships and lives grown and change.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. She fell into another fandom, hard. I made her an anthology of her A League Of Their Own fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would… you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic the next year, because that's what friends do. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back.
She asked me for a favour over that summer. "Soooo… could you do something for me? Could you do another pamphlet, of this particular fic?" Yes, I said, yes I will. I will make you a pamphlet. I will make you TWELVE pamphlets. A HUNDRED AND TWENTY pamphlets, and more. (Spoiler alert, I did not make a hundred and twenty pamphlets, but I did make multiple copies of three.)
Here's the thing. She was on the prolific side, as a fic writer, and had been in fandom for decades. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish in time. I recognized there were finite amount of things I can finish while she was still here to see it, and that if I had tried to make this the only project I had, I would have collapsed under my own sadness.
That week, I said to a good fanbinding friend, I want to bind more of Zulu's fic, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed right now. Her response: "Can I help? Do you want me to typeset something?" Me: (ALL THE EMOTION) "… yes. But also, I was thinking of asking the Renegade guild if anyone else would be bind a few of her fic, too, maybe a few quick pamphlets?" Her: "YES, do it."
I did it. I posted. She immediately started a spreadsheet organizing what I'd already bound, and to let other people sign up for things, and put herself first on the list. The fact that someone else was organizing for me (made a SPREADSHEET!) made me a bit weepy. By the time I went to bed an hour later, I think we had half a dozen people signed up to participate.
I should have been prepared for the full force of the Renegade Bookbinding Guild members, otherwise known as the inhabitants of the enabling server.
The next morning came. And a few more people signed up. I tentatively suggested that if anyone wanted to include a card or note and maybe some stickers for her wife and their kiddo L, it would be welcome. And people started asking me questions. Like, what fic does she like best? Where should we start? Can we make a care package? What does her wife need?
Knowing the people in the server, and their general kindness and enthusiasm, I should not have been surprised, I really shouldn't. It just hits differently when you're the one who's the recipient, you know? "I don't know why you're surprised," said another friend. "You asked us to help and we're helping!" And it wasn't an official guild project, just an incredible act of community and compassion. And immense enthusiasm and zero restraint.
I started asking some surreptitious questions of Zulu and Bell. I'd asked Zulu a few weeks before about granting blanket permission for anyone to bind her fic, and for the typesets to be shared. I casually said, "Sooo I mentioned this to the fanbinding group. If someone does want to send you something, can I share your address? And can I suggest they send cards/stickers to L?" (Yes, and yes.)
We started a separate thread in the Discord server to keep up with the planning. Some collaborations started to come up. I'll typeset from South Africa or southeast Asia or from next door in the next US state, you print and bind, we'll collect some of the American books for a mass mailing to Canada. I don't have time to bind, but I can contribute to shipping costs. I don't know that fandom, but I can take your typeset, and make a copy. I love that fandom but don't have time and materials, but I'll typeset if you bind. At this point, there were more than thirty people involved. New-old fandoms were discovered. Techniques and experiments grew.
I told Bell a little bit. She knew there were books coming. I didn't let her know the full scope, but I figured she could use something good to look forward to. Zulu said one of her goals was to finish all her WIPs before she died. (That hurt my heart. She almost made it! But even at the end, she got distracted by a new fic idea...)
The behind the scenes binding continued. There was negotiating over obscure fandoms, and exclamations over fic for niche favourites. A need for a great deal of baseball theming because Zulu wrote a LOT of ALOTO fic in the last few years. There were anthologies and pamphlets, and tiny books, and large chonks, and an entire collection of every drabble Zulu ever wrote in House fandom.
There was a 100-word hockey RPF drabble bound in a one-page folio with metallic foil details. There was a whole-fandom slipcased pamphlet set of her handful of Friday Night Lights fic. There were Buffy and X-Files fic unearthed from deep in her backlist. There were several bonkers-ambitious binds of her SMAUs, social media AUs of tweets and screenshots that had me throw up my hands and exclaim "how am I supposed to typeset this?"
There were obscure Canadian fandoms encased in the fanciest of marbled paper pamphlets, and a House fic about stolen lunches bound in a brown paper bag. A flower-titled ALOTO fic with a cover patterned like a seed packet. A Yuletide obscure movie fic in silk moire. Firefly fic with a marbled paper inset, and a Stargate Atlantis fic with a vellum dustcover. A crackfic five things fic with a metallic paper DVD on the cover as a Chinese stab binding, from a fandom that needed MOAR LENS FLARE. ("I am sure you know this, Luna," said the binder working on it, "but Zulu is really fucking funny." Yes, yes she absolutely was.)
I can't name every single book because there were more than FORTY of them, but I love every one of them and the care that went into them.
I told you Renegade goes hard.
We drove to nearby city to see Zulu and Bell in August, 2024. They'd just changed up her pain medication and she was having a good day. We had a good visit. I put the pamphlet fic in her hands myself. They'd told her in June that she should expect about a year at most. It would only be three months. That was the last time I saw her in person.
We moved up the projected mailing date from mid-October to mid-September.
We knew, over the September long weekend, when the group chat went quiet, that it wasn't a good sign. I'd kept up a steady stream of pet pictures and other small bits of news. As the summer ended, we had fewer responses from her, and were more likely to just get an emoji back. Morning glory flowers only bloom for a day, and they were blooming outside my back door. I started sending a picture of that morning's flowers to the group chat each day. (And cat pictures. Of course.) I don't know if anyone but me really cared about the morning glories, but it felt like something tangible to hold onto.
The first few envelopes and boxes started to arrive. There were cards and stickers and handknit slippers, and a science facts zine just for L. I told Bell, tell Zulu we love her. And that I'm not sorry I unleashed 30+ fanbinders on her AO3 account.
Bell: (lists off the books that had arrived.)
Me: Oh, so the group shipment from California isn't there yet. Plus at least three other packages I know about.
Bell: Holy shites
Several lovely people found my name in the acknowledgements of more than one fic, and sent me copies, too. (Twenty years in fandom together…) I cried.
We knew things weren't good when Bell emailed to set up a time for a video chat. A few days after the September long weekend, we talked to them face to face, to get the news that they were moving Zulu into hospice care the next day. It would be the last time we'd hear her voice. We knew it was coming, it just all went so much more quickly than expected. She died less than three weeks later.
(But take a look at the dates on the last fic on her AO3 account. In such typical fandom fashion, she was updating her last fic from her hospice bed. A direct quote from Zulu: "The most important thing once I'm there, of course, will be to sort out the wifi situation.")
So, timelines got bumped up by another week. There was a rush for mailing. One international package from Europe got returned to sender without leaving the country due to post office shenanigans, and had to make a return trip, too late for Zulu. The package from Japan made it. The big group shipment box was sent via overnight delivery. It was supposed to arrive on Tuesday. It showed up on Friday, the day that she died, after she was gone. But by that last week, I'm not sure how much Zulu would have taken in about it, honestly. Bell took it with her to supper that night with friends and family to open as a special treat.
There were more than forty books of all sizes all told, from more than thirty people, and I still have about four more in progress myself right now, though I'll never get to put them in Zulu's hands and see her grin and say "Aww, you GUYS…"
But we flooded her with books of her own fic. We deluged her family with her words and love.
The books were on display at her memorial service, along with the quilt that her ALOTO friends had made for her. Also, the jersey she got printed based on her own fic (such a dork, I say with the world's most affection.) The books were all over the front of the room, and it wasn't even all of them. Zulu's mom sent a heartfelt thank you card to be shared with the whole group. The memorial also included earl grey tea and shrimp (two of Zulu's favourites) and a video message recorded to her from one of the actors from A League of Their Own (which I am sure confused many people, but we knew what was up!)
The second group shipment arrived with me several months later, and at least one more book came to me in person at the Renegade retreat, and Bell has them all in a bookcase together. I still have a few more to finish right now.
And, Renegade being Renegade, a couple of people have eyed Zulu's AO3 account and said, "Well, we didn't manage to bind ALL her 350 fic… so far…" And I laughed until I cried, and I am still hugging you all right now Renegade, SO HARD. And you've left a legacy, and you've made a difference. There are no thank you's that are enough. The love is stored in the fanbinds.
I've asked anyone who wants to share what they made to tag it #fanbindsforzulu. If you want to see some amazing things, check out the tag. And if you want to read her fic, and if you want to bind it, she would have loved that, and I would love to see it, too. And tell your friends you love them.
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