BibliomancerKay

Short Rest

her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.

remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.

And for me, following a tutorial or taking a class... does not spark as much joy as rummaging around on my own and making my own mistakes. This fell by the wayside for a while, probably because I wasn't that experienced when i found out about it, slash I didn't have a story in mind with the right aesthetic. But it never left my mind. And when I found out about the genealogy of this style, with forerunners like alain taral combining bookbinding and woodworking (and marquetry! be still my beating heart) and the articulated binding style developed for italian phonebooks in the seventies, I was reinvigorated.

Oh, and the issue of wanting a book thematically compatible with pixel binding? That's gotta be C Language Cultivation, babey!

So, pixel binding. The broad concept is that it's a semi-flexible cover style created with squares of board material (pixels) hinged together with the covering material. I understood the principles. I bought 3mm tile spacers years ago for this exact project. It was still an ADVENTURE in iterative experiments. These are all C Language Cultivation, and from right to left, i shall call them v1, v2, and v3. And in the end, they were *also* an experiment in different materials. But for all of them, i went in with cover board squares, spaced, and with my turn-ins finished with doublures before casing in.

V1! I knew I was probably going to run into some unforseen game-breaking issue with this one, so I didnt sweat it too hard. I got my thinnest board (0.5mm), faux suede bookcloth, and i even misprinted my book (note the untrimmed fore edge) and just went for it anyways. I lined with more bookcloth. It's not a great book, the boards are awfully thin for the size of the book, my shoulders are HILARIOUSLY large, and my doublures want to come up at the corners, but it works! And the covers are NICE and flexible.

V2! I felt confident, and it was time to break out the real leather. But my DREAM was to bind this in those old school royal blue compiler colors, and i didn't want to risk my good hide just yet, so i grabbed some hand-me-down goat. I did manage to goof things up by cutting my hide too large, needing to trim down some turn-ins after the pixels were in place, and then not being able to pare them. It's lined with paper rather than bookcloth, and despite trying to be careful, i DID punch through it once while trying to work it into the hinges. I also used my BEEFY board, 2.5mm, and the cover feels sooooo nice and luxe, but it is.... very, very stiff. Comparably.

(i am also struggling like HELL to get my squares right. this is a style that really prefers notebooks over actual story contents that need precise trimming and margins, but im stubborn.)

Okay!!! At this stage I was big confident and big impatient, and for v3, it was time for the good leather. I went for the same dimensions as the v2 case and tried to trim my text block less (mixed success). I measured my cover dimensions including the tile spacers and cut my hide to size and pared it carefully. And I went with in-between 1mm board and lined with paper, but was more careful with it. It was nearly, nearly brilliant. This was also a hand-me-down hide, and halfway through assembling the cover I realized... it was probably sheep. And sheep wants to screw you over and delaminate when it gets wet. The book is not bad at all, but it's undeniable that the hinges on v2 are MUCH more elegant and crisp than for v3.

But despite that, it's a very exciting success! Look at that FLEX! I'm almost definitely going to do a v4 (sob) when i get some blue goat hide (soon!), and this was a really cool set of iterations. There's all kinds of interesting quirks, like how i realized it was best for turn-ins and doublures to avoid having edges land too close to a hinge. Or one of the things that came down from alain taral's techniques is that for the best opening action the endpapers flyleaves are a single U-shaped sheet, laminated to the first and last pages of the text block, and then the book isn't cased in at the cover boards, but along the spine. I was so skeptical at first, but i gave all of my books the dangle test, and they performed admirably!!

If I hadn't accidentally used sheep instead of goat, I think I would be completely happy. But as it is, this is still a successful increment, and I'm one hundred confident I'll realize my vision next time!! I'm sure there are more secrets and hacks that I'm missing out on by not taking one of ben elbel's classes, but experimenting and failing myself makes me happier than ANYTHING.

I will say that for someone casually looking for this flexible cover effect... the horizontal hinges are much more for aesthetic than function. The cover is fixed at the spine as it is, so there's simply a limit to how much the cover can move outside that plane. If you're interested in the cover flex more than pixels specifically, I think the italians had it right, and vertical strips of board are the way to go. I'll be trying that out soon as well, but I don't have specific plans just yet. This was a really cool exploration and I'm so, so happy I finally committed to it!

Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.

Commission Painting this character was a joy 💛

Faun lady.

Black people dont need to be made into animals or aliens to become “palatable” to audiences. We are alive and we have stories to share. If you want to see black kids share their story with the world considering following FLY on Kickstarter. We launch June 9th ! (link in bio)

“Voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t work.”

How would you know? It’s never been tried for long enough.

Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris all lost.

Biden won, but most people spent his entire presidency shitting on him and giving him absolutely no credit for his successes, which were MANY. (If you need a refresher: RFMA, PACT Act, Chips and Science, Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson etc.)

You can’t say “vote blue no matter who” and “vote for the lesser of two evils” doesn’t work if you refuse to ever give it a chance of working.

Also I hate that phrase “lesser of two evils” when we’re talking about someone who supports unions and immigrants and healthcare and food assistance and queer rights and voting rights over someone who is literally trying to end us all.

And the lesser of two evils is, by definition, BETTER.

It’s like the difference between a wound with a bit of an infection, and literal death. Those aren’t comparable.

Democrats are not perfect and no one has ever claimed otherwise, but they are making lasting change. It’s slow and it’s not linear , but it is happening.

Pro forced birth Democrats have been all but forced out the party. Same with anti-gay Democrats AND anti-trans Democrats. You don’t see many Dems supported by the NRA at all anymore. And all Dems believe in the climate crisis.

This was NOT a given even 10 years ago.

Democrats are not becoming more conservative. They’re becoming less. Across the board. Progressive policies have become a deal breaker.

This is what you’re saying is one of “two evils”?

Give me a break.

Do you want things to get better or do you want to scream “perfection only!” and watch it get worse?

Cause that’s what we’re living right now.

We’re living in a refusal to vote for and celebrate the successful harm reduction, or “lesser of two evils,” as you say.

There are rarely examples where we actually get to see what happens if the “lesser of two evils” wins.

And the thing is, when they win, they’re shit on so successfully that we lose next time. Again, Biden.

They do something, or many many things right and the goal post gets moved, again and again.

In the end, the only knowledge anyone has of their actions is that they can’t do anything right.

That’s a dangerous way of seeing the world.

I know this cause we are living it.

What is happening right now is a product of that way of thinking.

I don’t need to find statistics or read a report cause this is our reality.

This is what happens when people refuse to vote for and celebrate the wins of “the lesser of two evils.”

When people choose a candidate in the primary who has no chance of a snowball in hell of winning and then complain and don’t vote when a candidate they REALLY didn’t like becomes the party nominee.

This is our life.

We don’t have to imagine it.

And yet, the mantra hasn’t changed. The goalpost keeps being moved. Dems don’t get any credit for doing ANYTHING right. People spread demands that are literally impossible and convince other people that they are not only possible, but easy. And enough people refuse to vote for harm reduction that the harm is constantly increased.

Perfection is the enemy of progress. That’s not just a catchy phrase, it’s a fact.

If Al Gore had won, we would be A LOT further along on climate than we are now, and we would not have gone into Iraq.

If Hillary Clinton had won, we wouldn’t have lost the Supreme Court. We would still have Roe and affirmative action and the VRA and the Chevron Doctrine.

If Kamala Harris had won, we wouldn’t be at war with Venezuela and Iran and possibly Cuba and maybe Greenland? Trans people would not be attacked at the federal level. Immigrants would not be kidnapped off the streets. We would still have the Department of Education and labor and a DoJ that doesn’t do the president’s bidding.

THIS is the result of refusing to vote for and support the lesser of two evils, WE ARE LIVING IT!

So maybe going forward we stop. We give a chance for the lesser of two evils to actually work. To scream from the rooftops every time they do right thing. We don’t just vote for it once, but do so over at least a decade.

Cause we’ve tried your way. It hasn’t worked. This exact moment that you are reading this post is proof of that.

So let’s try this way, for once. Let’s give this country a fighting chance at actual progress.

I made a Room Building tutorial! Lemme know if it helps! 🧡