Gilded Fletching Press

My latest bookbinding project! (Or one of them tbh, I can't wait to show off several tinier books than this for the @renegadeguild Tiny Book Exchange.

This is my first tête-bêche featuring two classic Smallville fics: @rivkat 's fic Golden Rule paired with @seperis 's companion fic Slipping in Between. I've loved these fics for a while now and I've especially loved listening to dodificus's podific of Golden Rule. Both of the authors had permission statements in their profiles on ao3 and I really wanted to celebrate these two fics in print format. I really love the way that these two fics play off of each other. Golden Rule is excellent all on its own, with Clark's manipulation and the relationship he forges with Lex and SiB is such a great complement to that fic, providing a glimpse into Lex's pov throughout the events of the fic, all leading up to the big decision at the end.

Detail shots and process talk below the cut:

a business will let every person in it die a terrible death if it makes the business profit. A household will spend it’s last dollar to keep the people in it safe and healthy.

A household will use money as a resource to add value to the lives of the people in the household. A business will use people as a resource to add monetary value to the business

I’m also in art college. And even if I wasn’t, I’ve been doing art for almost a decade now. I’ve been disabled the whole bloody time.

AI, isn’t art.

There are many disabled artists and we have adapted our own ways of dealing with how we create. Fuck you, we have been doing this forever.

Vincent Van Gogh had temporal lobe epilepsy; Henri Matisse became a wheelchair user after surgery for cancer; Michelangelo had osteoarthritis, limiting mobility and causing pain in his hands and feet.

Paul Smith had a severe case of cerebral palsy and created art using typewriters.

Peter Longstaff has no arms due to Thalidomide, and paints with his feet.

Frida Kahlo not only had polio that disabled her as a child, but of course as we all know was injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems.

Fuck, you want a personal annecdote? I knew a girl (we have lost touch since) who was paralysed from the neck down and she painted with her mouth and there are other artists who do so too! And with eye tracking technology I’m sure disabled artists will be getting more and more tools as the years pass. But we do NOT condone AI art. All that does is put us, real disabled artists, who exist and need support, out of jobs and commissions.

hi, another disabled person here for more personal anecdotes! here is an art piece i made entirely with my non dominant hand 1 week before my most recent shoulder surgery on that same arm. i also wear splint rings to keep my fingers from dislocating while painting (or playing bass guitar cause i do that too). i make most of my income off hand painted art despite having hand tremors, frequent wrist dislocations/subluxations, and migraines.

my friend and her wife also make their incomes off wig making, leatherwork, and digital collage prints. both have chronic pain as well.

Mine isn't as drastic (yet) but I've been having to wear wrist braces and finger splints since childhood off and on because using my hands in a repetitive motions causes them to be in pretty excruciating pain.

What is my art medium of choice? Knitting. You know, that thing where you have to do a repetitive motion over and over again. I hold my needles a bit strange, I knit through the pain, I sometimes have to give up working on it for weeks at a time. But I will not stop because it's what makes my heart sing.

Disabled artists don't need your pity, we've been getting by, doing what makes us happy despite the pain and hardships for thousands of years, probably longer, I bet there were neolithic disabled artists.

No actual real artist wants or uses AI, including disabled artists. AI is for losers who are scared of the extremely important phase in art where you suck and want to skip it by stealing and not even in a cool "I'm emulating your style because I wanna learn from it" way.

'Big Self Portrait', (1967-68)

In 1988, Close experienced a spinal stroke that affected the use of his hands, and he adapted by strapping a brush to a wrist brace.

‘Self Portrait’ (1997)

Here is an interview with Chuck Close from 2011 about the relationship between his art and his disabilities.

It can only make images.

I've gotten out of the habit of blogging about my life. Because we now live in an era of Personal Privacy Hell, I thought I could count that as a win, but I realize I've been feeling more disconnected from my internet buddies, so clearly, the lazy habit is not serving me.

So, LATELY

I'm on Year #2 of being married. Loving it.

I'm old enough now that while I don't have any major medical problems my self, my rl friends are all dealing with SOMETHING left and right, and it's making me nervous.

I'm still self-employed, but now in 2 lines of work. Dealing with a bit of a seasonal lull in both at the moment, but I'm trying to enjoy the time off.

Hobby-wise,

I've got a few doodles, but very few of them have felt quite finished enough to post, so I've mostly been putting them in discord communities.

I'm stuck in my current fic WIP, which is Tim/Cassie. It's very frustrating, bc once I finish the fic, it will the the LAST STORY in the T/C typeset I'm working on and then the typeset will also be complete.

I've been working on book binding. So far,

- 6 complete typesets (4 SW, 1 Miraculous Ladybug, 1 SpyxFam) - 3 ALMOST complete typesets (1 SW, 1 DC, 1 original work) - 3 finished, bound books (1 ML for a friend, and 2 star wars) - 2 almost finished bound books (1 star wars, 1 spyxfam)

I want to put up blog posts about my typesets, but I haven't figured out how I want to go about it yet. I want to get author permission, and after, I'm tempted to just have them available for download somehow, but I know that can be a bit of a risk.

There have been cases of fandom outsiders downloading and then trying to sell copies (Illegal! Dangerous! Never do this with fic!).

On the other hand, I feel like the people who do this are mostly poking around for Harry Potter fic, and I think my typesets would be far enough outside their realm of interest that risk is low. IDK.

I was asked which tutorials I followed to achieve this look by @0n1ythisandnothingmore, and I figured it might be helpful for others so I’ve compiled a list!

Stranger Things -

Consensual Catfishing by foresthearts

I knew immediately as I was reading this fic, exactly what kind of cover I would create. I would have a youtube style cover and back as though someone was looking at a bundh of youtube videos about the characters. I used a few different websites to create the different cover elements of this fic like 2 different youtube generators. I started by making some of the video thumbnails with some of the details of the fic, I added the fic info into the actual youtube info points like the author as the channel name, summary as the description, date, etc. I also added in some of the tags and quotes into the 2 other video thumbnails below. I really liked the way it turned out. I then made a magazine cover style back where I found a pic I liked of the two characters together, some colour editing and grid outline. I used a message generator to create the first messages between the two of them to add as a quote. I also threw in another quote. In the end I did swap the front cover and the back cover around and prefer the youtube style area on the back. The cover took 1 hour & 5 minutes to make. 

a Bn size is the mean between An and An-1

The US doesn't "have to do things different" for the sake of doing things differently, as your words imply, nor is the sentence above about who uses what paper fully correct, either*.

The reason that the US (and Canada, most of Central America, Chile, and the Philippines) use different standard sizes* from Europe is probably pretty easy to figure out when you think about things like "there's a big fucking ocean between two of those places, but not between all of the countries in Europe."

The standard size of paper, according to the American Forest and Paper Association, comes from the days of manual paper-making, and their assertion that 44" is about the length of the average experienced vatsman's comfortable grasp. So a sheet is 1/4" that length. The US standardized its own paper according to what legacy equipment it had, and keeps those standards because even today, paper tends to not be shipped back and forth between Europe and the US unless it has to be, because paper and books are really fucking heavy, so why should either one of us change our standards? Doing so would require massive amounts of capital investment, and frankly, we like our paper sizes just fine. It's really not to our detriment at all. We don't really import a lot of paper, and in fact, we export a lot of it.

American paper sizes are also half of each previous size, it's just that our base is a rectangle, not a square, uses imperial measurements, and reaches back to measurements based on manual paper-making. Sure, we could spend billions of dollars changing our standards to meet that of countries that don't supply us with this good, creating a massive amount of industrial and consumer waste as everything from paper manufacturing mills and industrial printing presses to plastic binders and hole punches at schools all become garbage, but... why? We also use different standard sizes of snack food bags, based on how our industries developed, but there's no actual reason for those things to be standardized, so why, exactly, should they be? Because it bothers someone who doesn't use our machines and didn't know until today that it was different? That's not a real reason. That's just "haha the US sucks and is dumb and irrational."

No, it's actually super fucking rational when you remember that most European countries are smaller than US states, and we're standardized across the places where paper actually moves back and forth in massive bulk on a regular basis. You know: our own states, and Canada, and not Europe, on account of this being a huge fucking continent and paper being incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across oceans. That's why it's governed by the American National Standards Institute, which also governs or governed stuff like thread standards for nuts and bolts & exposure standards for film. The latter had the ANSI standard become the ISO standard, which is a great example of technology which was developed more recently and more specialized and thus not so deeply rooted and hard to change being much more possible to standardize.

tl;dr: all industrial standards like paper sizes have valid and long-argued reasons why they're like that, and unless you're coughing up the solution for changing something with hundreds of years of built-up infrastructure without breaking all of the industries that depend on that standard, the cash to do it, and the reason why all the old equipment that can't be converted should become garbage... fuck off, man, and leave us alone. There are real problems in the world, go solve those.

Do you really think America is so isolated that it gets to uniquely ignore the rest of the world?

Explain fucking Australia then?

Who isn't in Europe? Who is actually a continent, with no land borders unlike America. Who, much to my annoyance, has been more economically tied to the US than Europe since WWII (and its own neighbours since long before that). Who suffered a century of using American typewriters with American sized paper. Who also has their own paper industry like quite a lot of the world (though which still uses predominantly American designed and built machines) that creates massive kilometres long rolls of paper, like the America industry, that isn't limited by the length of someone's arm and is chopped down later.

Even with all those similarities we managed to switch to DIN 476 in 1974, the year before ISO 216 was created, along with a whole list of other countries that also aren't in Europe and also have massive ties to US industry (Japan 1951, Israel 1954, NZ 1963). We even have American made home and business printers that normally work with ISO paper seemlessly but get confused when we print a document made by Americans.

Also the UN switched in 1975. You know the big bureaucratic organisation that uses a lot of paper and functionally exists solely in New York. It can somehow get standardized paper while dealing with American industry.

Watercolour paper and most art papers are still sold in subdivisions of the big old arm width standard (called double elephant) in the UK, Japanese printmaking paper has the Hosho sheet and its subdivisions. I'm pretty sure newsprint still comes in its own formats etc. etc.

Check this shit out! Newspapers and Broadsheets are the opposite of universal, even in countries that use the Metric System.

CHAPTER 1. Loomings.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - it's none of your business how many - being mostly broke, and bored with the land part of the world, I thought I would sail around a little and look at the watery part of the world. I'm probably the most mentally healthy person you know. Whenever I feel my face getting grim; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself accidentally reading the ads in the window of funeral homes, and following funeral processions through traffic; and especially when I'm hangry, and only my extremely strong moral principles stop me from deliberately going out in public and methodically slapping people's earbuds out - then I know it's high time to get to sea, ASAP. This is my substitute for getting in fights. I'm too mentally healthy to kill myself; I quietly and considerately put myself on a ship and sail myself away instead. There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone feels exactly the same way, and if they don't, they're lying.

You think I'm lying? Exhibit A: a city. Go to your local coastal city. Everyone is looking at the water. They drive over from other neighborhoods just to come to the water. They make a day of it. They're not doing anything, they're just staring at the ocean. Why? Is it because they all work office jobs? No! Here come more of them! They cram themselves up to the edge of the water and stare at it. WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT. Perhaps the ships themselves all packed together, each one with several compasses on it, creates some kind of critical mass - all of the small compass-magnets on all the ships in the harbor combining into one really big magnetic field - and the people get sucked into the field and trapped there. That's science.

Exhibit 2: the countryside with lakes in it. Every path you follow in the countryside brings you to some water, such as a stream. There is magic in it. If you take your standard fool with ADHD dissociating in the middle of a supermarket and put them outside and give them a shove, they'll automatically lead you to water (if there is any nearby) (try it). Another good experiment to try is to get lost in the great American desert in a caravan supplied with a metaphysical professor! Try it in the great American desert at home!

Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are a match made in heaven. Married forever. That's science.