Just a place to make and share fanart. Life Series/Hermitcraft mainly, though Stardew Valley and other SMPs make appearances. ↓ Asks & requests open. (congrats you found my main!)
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I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL
“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”
My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.
Update: you guys this is an amazing resource for learning asl. Bill Vicars is an incredible teacher. His videos are of him teaching a student in a classroom, using the learned vocabulary to have conversations.
Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.
He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms
His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.
Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore
And it’s all FREE. Seriously. If you’ve ever wanted to learn ASL
Good news! The UPS Store lady (lovely woman) said that their laser guillotine can cut through the completed spines, no problem, even with all of the stiffener and end bands attached. Apparently their equipment can cut through wire (!!)
Dropped the books off this morning and will hopefully have them back by Thursday, with the head and tails trimmed correctly this time.
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In any craft, as in life, shit happens. Sometimes through inexperience, sometimes through overconfidence. Sometimes, as in this particular case, through a fun combination of the two.
Back when I was glueing the spine, I told you all that I was going to be following bitter melon bindery’s tutorial for hard case binding. And I *was* — from memory. I’d done the spine part four times before, and was confident that I would remember all of the steps. Which I *did*!
Save one.
After the first coat of glue, bitter melon takes her textblock out and trims it before putting it back in the press to add the bookmark, endbands and spine stiffener. Why was it important to trim it at that point, and not later?
Because of this:
It makes no sense to trim the head and tail edges of the book *after* attaching the bands and the bookmark. Correcting the issue now would mean chopping off the endbands and reapplying them — something that I noticed after the spine had finished drying, but hoped wouldn’t matter. I was too focused on evening out the fore edge at the time to worry about the head and tail.
This isn’t too bad. In knitting, this would be roughly equivalent to frogging out a couple of rows of a blanket; annoying, yet doable. Still, it’s important to explore all of the available options before taking costly or time consuming corrective measures. So:
Option 1: decide to live with it
This is always a choice. And, if I were just making my own personal copy of this book, I might seriously consider it. This is what I chose to do after botching the casing in of Saint’s Guise.
However, I made the same mistake on the author copy of TIOADL. Call it pride, but I would rather not send out something that looks like this:
Option 2: sand the edges down
As mentioned before, I don’t own a guillotine. I *do* have quite a lot of sandpaper, however, in a variety of grits. If this was just a few mm, I might consider putting the book into my makeshift clamp and going to town.
However, I don’t have a very good ventilated area to perform the sanding operation in, and my makeshift book clamp is really not up to the job. I’ve attempted this sort of sanding once before; in my experience, the act malforms the edge (squashing it), while also filling the air with fine paper dust. I simply lack the tools and space to do this safely and achieve a nice finish through sanding.
Option 3: hack and slash
I could try (*try*) to tackle the text block with a ruler and a box cutter. Bitter melon has some tips to help with the process. However, this is a relatively thick book; I don’t own a crafting knife with a blade longer than the width of this textblock. I’m quite likely to make a hash of it (I have before!), and would *still* have to sand the edges afterwards in order to even them out. Not fun.
Which really leaves me with only one option:
Option 4: back to the guillotine
Ultimately, I don’t see much of a choice here. I’m going to have to bring these back to the UPS store and get the head and tail edges trimmed. I’ve already marked where I want the cuts to go, and have triple-checked that the new edges will be square with the front and spine using my straight edge.
My only concern is whether they (the UPS employees) will be able to chop through the spine stiffener and end bands cleanly. Guess there’s only one way to find out!
(I’m going to cut off the bookmarks first so that I can reuse the ribbon. Thankfully, I have plenty of the green endband material left to work with.)
Anyway, that’s it for today. Next time (hopefully) cover design and construction! Not sure if I will show the computer side of things (GIMP + LibreOffice), but I will at least document the process and materials.
one time I went over to a friend's house and their housemate was making paper in the living room, and we saw this big tub full of water they were using to dissolve old scrap paper into a slurry, and everyone was immediately like "oh, you need scrap paper?" and started turning out their jacket pockets and producing expired coupons and bus tickets and crumpled receipts and old shopping lists and whatever else they'd been carrying round with them for no good reason, and passing it all to the paper-making housemate to make sure it was suitable before it got torn up and dropped into the tub, while people took turns stirring the slurry with a big wooden stick. it was strangely ritualistic, like presenting an offering to some kind of temple elder for inspection before placing it in a watery shrine to be devoured and reformed. pulp for the pulp god.
"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, being spent on species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
Unreal Engine 5 is experiencing some backlash from the gamers at the moment, and while some of that is because of performance issues, a fair amount seems like it's coming from a specific "UE5 look" that comes from developers using the default pipelines and out-of-the-box settings.
There's no reason you need to have this generic and specific look, the engine hands you the tools to do things in different ways. But it's expensive, takes technical know-how, and you lose some of the broadly applicable knowledge that a standardized engine promises.
So any technical issues like hitching or lack of demand on hardware aside, we have a case where lowering the labor and barriers to entry means a field of products that consumers like less. UE5 promised to be a tool that would lower costs, and a natural consequence is homogeneity, even if the engine does allow wildly different looks and styles.
I do wonder whether this is a fate of any attempt to democratize creation, whether there will always be a huge bulk of creations that are using all default settings and end up being very boring to consumers who are overexposed to it, and associations with low quality. My mind goes to AI art, I guess, but this has all kinds of other problems with it. There's some cycle of impressive, to generic, to actively signaling low effort, and I don't know how escapable it is.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the generation of Unreal Engine with a “genericness” problem is also the one in which they introduced inbuilt AI tools for development.
ooo i dont think i've done one of these in awhile, if ever!
last song: drugs by EDEN (so underrated omg please go listen)
currently watching: RuPaul's drag race all stars season 4 and I just started rewatching House as well
currently reading: The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sheriff (shit is starting to go down and i'm scared to keep reading bc i know it will make me sad. guy loves his chickens so much and the world is ending)
current obsession: stardew valley, masterchef, green stuffed olives (i can eat a whole jar in one sitting)
currently working on: artfight attacks, next chapter of Tokyo, learning the insane guitar solo at the end of Comfortably Numb (Pink Floyd) on piano
currently wearing: really cute pink silk leopard print pj's from victorias secret (the bottoms are super short shorts that look like a frilly skirt. I cant go downstairs unless i'm wearing my robe bc my whole entire ass is Out)
last search: bruschetta pasta recipe (I need to make some)
favourite flower: lupins and carnations (not a symbolism thing, I just think theyre pretty)
last song: 君の銀の庭 (Kimi no gin no niwa) by kalafina. this is the ending song of the madoka magica rebellion movie which I rewatched recently and I am in love with both.
currently watching: didnt start anything new after the madoka rewatch.
currently reading: again, didnt start anything new yet. my last book was Metamorphosis though.
current obsession: I am very deep in the alnst chambers. the release of zombie stage is not helping.
currently working on: artfight, polishing my animated short for school even more, an unrelated fan animatic, remember the rize animation I had been doing? that also
currently wearing: pajamas, which is an old tshirt and loose pants
last search: googling the song's name so I write it correctly here lol
favorite flower: ? I never thought about that... I liked this flower that grew in front of my apartment that would bloom at night when I was a kid. Their turkish name was "akşam sefası" but I couldnt find their equivalent english name. so species name "Mirabilis jalapa" it is.
:D Thank u for the tag! It was fun to read your answers.
last song: "Bag of Bones" by Mitski
currently watching: Several anime bc of the new season, but notably Goodbye, Lara and Though I Am An Inept Villainess
currently reading: I'm listening to A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark but am still early on in the book, I'm e-reading Annie Bot by Sierra Greer (absolutely devouring it lol, robot women are my fave), and physically reading London's Calling by Adam Brink.
current obsession: ngl I'm super excited about Bridgerton and the upcoming lesbian season.
currently working on: Various writing projects that I keep bouncing between XD
currently wearing: Tank top and shorts, it's been hot
last search: "Vampire Syndicate: Gangs of MoonFall", I saw a tumblr post about this game and got curious enough to look it up.
favorite flower: Hard to choose a favorite, but I enjoy daffodils and carnations! And crocuses.
no pressure tags: @lifeofmysteries @peren-gren @haboat @cat-denied, and anyone reading this who wants to do it lol
last song: hmm difficult...i forget. maybe something off of tom waits' swordfishtrombones?
currently watching: been going through buffy (season four!) and deep space nine (season one!) with my friend lately! it's been a good time
currently reading: i'm at the same point i get stuck at in the two towers every time i read the series, which is where it's just sam frodo gollum wandering around the mountains for ages. i'll get there someday. but i'm also looking forward to starting strange pictures by uketsu so !!
current obsession: the other thing i've been reading, which is the 70s claremont x-men comics (and of course x-men more generally)! x-men have always been a fave of mine and i'm having a phenomenal time with them, which i've never read before. magneto is back and oh boy he's up to something!
currently working on: a visual novel with a couple of friends (mermaid toxic yuri!) and the early stages of planning a novel! about Ghosts and Big Houses and Bad Sibling Relationships, i think
currently wearing: my comfy linen pants :) beat the heat!
last search: lactaid. i had some delicious ice cream and demons enacted cruelty upon my physical form
favorite flower: oh man i dunno. i like scilla! i like dandelions. i like the native flowers in my yard
no pressure tags: @jofiah @tangerineginie @meggydolaon @gravitonbeamemitter @treespeaking and anyone else who wants to! :)
thank you so much for tagging me!!! i always love doing these
Thanks for tagging, Cat!! What you're working on sounds INCREDIBLY fascinating :D
Last Song: the store I'm at was just playing Buwan by Juan Karlos is that anything lol
Currently Watching: Veeeery slowly going through Trollhunters XD but I suppose a more accurate answer is that I put on Haydunn's pokemon videos as a sort of background watch when I'm doing something
Currently Reading: I finished Thorn Season quite recently and just caught up with the Spy x Family manga the other day :3c I haven't really started another thing since lol. Manga wise, I plan to pick up where I left off in Love Bullet and Frieren, but next on my reading list is The Strange Case of Harleen and Harley
Current Obsession: Have any of you heard of the hit game Fire Emblem Awakening for the 3DS and more importantly have you seen fRobin Fire Emblem 🥰🥰🥰 She has been my favorite chew toy for like. 3 years now??
That aside, I've gotten reaaally into Witch Hat Atelier :3c Tho as the first obsession has been a persistent brain fungus, I cannot shake the thought that Qifrey looks a lot like mRobin XD Reading the manga and watching the anime just has me going "that's Robin 🧍🫵" at consistent intervals.
In a related problem perhaps entirely unique to myself, I keep getting "Qifrey" and "Fikri" mixed up in my head whenever I think about them lmao
Anyways I would like for Robin to have all of Qifrey's damage pretty please ^w^ Shirahama has made an art form out of whumping that man and I want it on my blorbo STAT 😤😤😤
Currently Working On: three different Chrobin aus apparently!
Currently Wearing: a robotics shirt I got as a freebie from being a friend's +1 at an invention fair XD I know jackshit about robotics
Last Search: Anisocytosis XD I've been working at a hospital for the past month and my search history is riddled with it lmao
Favorite Flower: I don't actually know either, I'm not a flower person >w< I like plumerias I suppose, their local name here is kalachuchi which I think is adorable <3
thanks for tagging me mesa :DDD also TROLLHUNTERS MENTION!!!!!!
last song: a place for us by berlinist
currently watching: 3Below (sequel series to trollhunters ;))
currently reading: the final empire by brandon sanderson (for my fantasy literature uni class)
current obsession: i spend the most time thinking about my own ocs rn lmao. i've got oc casts from three different writing projects that im working on simultaneously
currently working on: uni work mostly but in my free time i work on the previously mentioned oc projects and the dnd campaign that i dm for
currently wearing: humpback whale shirt :]
last search: searching my favourite flower to try and remember what the hell it's called
favourite flower: common heath! they have drops of nectar in them that you can drink by picking them and sucking the base like a straw. my primary school had big bushes of them and i would spend a lot of recesses picking them for that purpose lol. they're also very vibrant and pretty, and they're native to my area.
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Alright! The book is back from the UPS Store, where I’d dropped it off to get the fore-edge trimmed (because I don’t own a guillotine). Now it’s time to take the textblock’s final measurements and cut some boards to fit.
I’ll be following along once more with this tutorial from bitter melon bindery, so be sure to check that out if any part of this is unclear.
Materials and tools for this part:
1. Book board (mine is 80pt)
2. A cereal box (more on that later)
3. Masking tape
4. A ruler
5. A boxcutter
6. A cutting mat
7. A straight edge (optional, but awesome)
Step 0: Trimming the edges
No matter how carefully you do the sewing and folding of the textblock, the fore edge will have this sort of sawtoothed appearance that I prefer to remove. I’ve tried trimming textblocks before with a ruler and a boxcutter, but honestly that method is *really hard*.
On the other hand, guillotines powerful enough to cut through almost two hundred pages of paper at once cost a chunk, and I don’t have the space to store one. So I outsource the trimming to my local print shop.
NOTE: if you go this route, be really really clear about what you want. Talk to someone. Mark your cutting lines directly onto the book. Leave a sticky note with instructions. These people can and will trim off the glued edge of your book and even rebind it as a spiral bound book if you leave any ambiguity.
Ask me how I know xD
Step 1: Measure the trimmed textblock and do some math
Following bitter melon’s recommendations, I measure the width and height of the text block, then add 1/4” to the height. This will be the size of my cover boards.
Step 2: Measure and cut the book boards and an edge gap spacer
You’ll need two cover boards. You can use the first one to measure and cut the second.
This is a good time to use your straight edge, if you have one. Cutting these things square (with true right angles) can be tricky without a solid edge to brace against. Measure twice!
For the edge gap spacer, measure and cut a 3/8” wide piece of book board at least as long as your boards are tall.
Step 3: Measure and cut a spine board
The width of the spine board is the thickness of the text block (measured at the spine) + the thickness of one of your book boards.
A note on materials
The last two books I bound had spine boards the same thickness as the cover boards. This is the method shown by bitter melon and a few of the other tutorials I have watched. However, thicker spine boards apparently have several disadvantages, including greater difficulty with seating them correctly (see below):
In comparison, look at this professionally bound book (one of the Discworld collector’s editions, for those curious):
The spine is of a notably thinner, more flexible material. Since this is also a frequently dispensed bit of advice on the bookbinding subreddit, I figured I would give it a try this time. My spines are therefore cut from a box of granola bars (the cereal boxes I had felt just a tad too flimsy to me).
Step 4: Layout
Grab some masking or washi tape. I stuck it to my sleeve a couple of times to reduce the stick before placing one of my cover boards on top. Use the edge gap spacer and a straight edge or other reference line across the top to place the spine board.
Unstick the edge gap spacer and repeat on the other side to place the second cover board.
Step 5: Test the fit!
Now we can wrap our little cover around the text block. Check that the spine doesn’t look too wide, and that there is enough space around the text block to form a slight overhang when the book is closed.
Doing so will help you catch mistakes. Mistakes like the one I have been dancing around now for a while…
… I forgot to get the head and tail edges trimmed.
…
*sigh*
Mistakes like this are, for good or ill, all part of the bookbinding process. Next time, I’ll talk about how I got into this situation and how I’m going to recover from it.
I’m a 1900s truther, mostly because I enjoy the thought of making the Doc live through WW1. But *also* because I think Louis deserves to wear stuff like this:
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