Clockwork Oddities

No specific patterns or designs, theoretically fiber craft agnostic, hopefully a good mix of being encouraged to try new things without being overly prescriptive about it.

Please play along if you’d like. Interpret the entries in whatever way makes this process most enjoyable for you.

#fiber arts bingo <- tag that I will be tracking

number one chaos trio, all dressed up

A guide to designing wheelchair using characters!

In 1960, SAG and WGA struck to force management to adapt to the new technology of television. Without that strike and the agreement it birthed, residual use payments would not exist.

My parents stole nearly all of my salary from my entire childhood. My Star Trek residuals were all I had, and they kept me afloat for two decades while I rebuilt my life. I have healthcare and a pension because of my union. The AMPTP billionaires want to take all that security away so they can give CEOs even more grotesque wealth at the expense of the people who make our industry run.

To give some sense of what is at stake: There are actors who star in massively successful, profitable, critically acclaimed shows that are all on streaming services. You see them all the time. They are famous, A-list celebrities. Nearly all of those actors don't earn enough to qualify for health insurance, because the studios forced them to accept a buyout for all their residuals (decade of reuse, at the least) that is less than I earned for one week on TNG. And I was the lowest paid cast member in 1988. They want to do this while studio profits and CEO compensation are at historic highs.

I mean, if not now, when? And I haven't even touched on AI and working conditions.

We must fight for the future of our industry in the face of changing technology, the same way our elders did in 1960. So today, my Spacemom and I went to the place where it started for us, way back when, to do just that.

People don’t realize the absolute comedy that just went through Furry social media.

See, feral smut (i.e. smut of four-legged characters who otherwise satisfy the Harkness test) has always been a contentious subject in the furry fandom, due to how easily it leads to unwarranted real-life accusations of zoophilia. It’s an annoying bit of discourse that has been rearing its head every other year since the modern fandom began four decades ago.

Which, you know, pretty rich, coming from the fandom where a pretty large percentage readily admit to having had some form of sexual awakening over the TLK and MLP:FiM franchises.

And anyway, that discourse was exactly what was going on last week. People getting harassed on Twitter, as an extension of the whole “groomer” moral panic. A lot of fandom relative newcomers parroting arguments right out of the Burned Furs movement (a late 1990s/early 2000s movement dedicated to “purifying” the furry fandom from “perversion” and “degeneracy”).

And then, just as the discourse was at its most heated, Baldur’s Gate 3 entered the chat.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about the game that will let you fuck a bear. Yes, a bear, as in Ursus arctos. A Druid shapeshifted into a bear, to be fair (again: the Harkness test), but a bear nonetheless.

And mainstream media erupted with reports that the game’s sales skyrocketed based on that scene alone.

And the discourse suddenly screeched to a hilariously embarrassed halt.

This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:

Botanists and other Tree Experts:

He mentions later in the thread that not only do they not trim the trees annually, they’re trimmed at best once every 18 years. Supposed to be every five, and only in dormancy, which even my layman’s ass knows about tree trimming.

And yes, Universal can probably eat the fine. But it’s gonna be a whopper even if the trees survive (which is as mentioned kinda unlikely), California is a triple damage state for tree law, and it may increase dramatically if there were nesting birds in the trees.

"Worst and best case I ever saw was a guy who was caught in the act of cutting down a C&C tree by two Department of Urban Forestry supervisors while they were randomly driving around on a Saturday. Not only did he have to deal with the cops showing up and months of paperwork and bureaucracy, but he also had to pay the fines AND cover the cost of the tree removal + stumping + buying a new tree + planting the new tree + wages for the regular crew plus the extra workers they needed to get the jobs done. That tree ended up costing him upwards of $35K, and that was over 20 years ago."

Our cement isn't as strong as the Romans, our steel isn't as strong as Damascus steel, we cannot replicate the beauty of a Stradivari violin, we've already lost some of the technology that flew Apollo and Gemini to space