CardinalMelody's Blog

11 years since nationwide gay marriage in the US

23 years since sodomy was legalized

Varishkava! I adored the flea caravan from the moment I met them--they're a cheerful light in a dark world. Way before I knew anything about Act III, I could imagine them inviting their new warrior friend to set down her weapon and enjoy their company and hospitality awhile before rushing off again on her quest.

And feeling inspired by the bug food other people have come up with in art and fics, I had to draw some, too. Everything here is made with blood--they're fleas!--and I think they'd mostly eat foods that keep well for traveling, with fresh-made foods as more of a special thing.

Even places that didn’t regularly provide their people with free food often had emergency stores in case of famine or natural disaster that they distributed to people like in ancient China.

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Gema.piano on instagram

Celebrate PRIDE MONTH 🏳️‍🌈 with this curated selection of YA novels, comic books, manga and graphic novels from Laughing Boy Books!

IT IS TIME! The whole gang is here! Separated ones under the read more

That type of bevor seen in the first picture wouldn't usually go with an armet-style helmet, but rather with a helmet without its own built-in neck protection, such as (what is neologically called) a sallet or kettle helm.

If you wanted to get more neck protection out of an armet, you'd use what is usually called a "wrapper plate" which is kind of similar to a bevor but shaped to fit armets.

Arming jackets/doublets (usually also called gambesons - the thing about the Middle Ages is that they didn't actually have a lot of standardized words for things at all and many words we use today to refer to specific pieces of equipment are either completely new, or they refer to something specific today but a medieval person would have used the same word to refer to many different things) have strings all over them not just to keep them tied together but because that's how you attach the plate armor to the body. Their padding also not only acts as padding, but also offers some basic resistance to blades in the event that a blade gets between the plates and through the maille (chainmail) armor that usually fills the gaps between the plates. There is almost no chance at all of a blade penetrating the plates themselves.

Bigger thicker gambesons were worn as a form of armor themselves for poorer soldiers who couldn't afford anything better. They are surprisingly cut-resistant and cushion the body against blunt force as well. Stabbing weapons will go straight through them, but even then it's better to have it than not, because if you're wearing 2 inches of padding and get stabbed by a 5-inch blade in the heat of battle when everyone is constantly moving around and your opponent has no time (or desire) to drive it all the way in, that's only 3 inches deep into your actual flesh instead of 5.

Oh one tip I will give that technically is a correction is that that belt in the bottom-left picture is anachronistic. It's hard to describe how 15th century belts buckle but it usually looks something like this.