Retrieving your partnerâs body, and dealing with the devil: Etho buries Bdubs at the snow castle.
1.8k fic exploring Etho's thoughts the night after Bdubs dies; warning for (discussion of) major character death. i just keep thinking about how etho says 'that hurts me' right after bdubs death... he is so hides everything behind 1 million layers of jokes usually. but that hurts him.
dedicated to the devious @conscious-naivete who contaged her last life brainworms over to me. thank u mac ily
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I can understand how "modern person thrown into the past gets by pretending to be a healer/doctor" is as surprisingly common of a trope as it is. I mean I'm fluent enough at bullshitting to be pretty sure I could pull it off to impersonate a doctor in any time pre-1800s. If I have no idea what something is or how to treat it, I could just get the opinion of the other whatever-passes-as-medical-professionals around, but if their suggestions sound like bullshit I'm not doing it. And I'll beat the shit out of anyone suggesting bloodletting or mercury. With my healing stick. I've tied little bells on it, that jingle comically with every smack.
The awesome curative powers of my healing stick come from two separate sources: Placebo, and me using it to beat anyone trying to give my patients mercury.
Ooooh you reminded me of that protocol I wrote about how to reinvent penicilin with only alchemical tools. You know. Just in case I did end up dumped in the past and needed a stable income.
I am so glad you asked! I unfortunately lost the protocol because it was probably on my laptop, but I remember the broad strokes. So! In case anyone does end up stuck in the middle ages and can find a kindly old alchemist willing to lend you his gear, here's the revamped Penicilin (Re)Discovery Protocol!
0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.
We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.
Find some Penicillium mushrooms!
Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.
First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.
Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?
So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:
Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.
2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms
Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.
First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:
Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)
1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)
1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)
If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)
3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)
Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.
Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.
When you're done, you should have something like this:
Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.
Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!
You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).
3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms
If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:
Well, realistically, it will look something like this:
We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.
IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.
Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.
Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.
The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.
4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom
We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.
(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)
You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.
Ideally you get something like this.
This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.
Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.
Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:
This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.
So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.
The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.
Since I lost the original protocol I'm going to need to do research all over again how to do that with alchemy equipment (or at least a microbrewery), so that will be in the next installment.
Concept: generic fantasy adventure where the wizard has a crackpot assistant and he explains sadly that while Hreithbert is an excellent person for keeping the wizard tower tidy and the homonculi fed they're obsessed with cooking like ten million plates of inedible goop but it makes them happy so he permits it
And at the end of the story the big reveal is Hreithbert is a time displaced biochemist who has finally fucking refined their process for penicillin.
Donât lie, any wizard would love having ten million plates of inedible goop from their apprentice. The fact that he wonât let you lick them is the problem.
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Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> âThe government shouldnât be able to force anything on my body I donât want.â
Anti surveillance -> âI donât trust big government/big tech (big brother if youâre feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.â
Immigration -> âNext to all of us immigrated at some point, I donât see why the elites get to decide whoâs allowed to be where. Whatâs to stop them coming for me?â
Climate Change -> âBig oil shouldnât get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I donât want to be dependent on some big business to survive.â
State Violence -> âI donât want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!â
The vast majority of conservatives think of themselves as underdogs being repressed by the government/the elite, and they value personal freedom (specifically their personal freedom, they donât care about other people). The will almost always agree with leftist points if you can find a way to blame the problem on their vague enemies (useful, since rich people are the root of most problems), and tie it back to their ability to say fuck everyone else. NEVER appeal to science, theory, logic, or human goodness. Make it seem as if you are a paranoid lunatic who trusts no one. They love it.
#you need to tailor your arguments to people's existing values and priorities if you want to convince them #the flip side is that it's every bit as easy to tailor conservative arguments to convince a leftist audience #so don't get smug #you're not immune to this either <- prev extremely true
Ok, Have you in real life ever seen a bathroom that had its light switch Outside of the bathroom. Not like one of those fancy giant bathrooms where the toilet is in its own little room, but a normal sized bathroom where you could be in there doing your thing and someone Outside could just turn the light off on you?
This is so normal to me
Yeah but it's weird
Maybe? normal though.
Maybe? weird though.
No but I'm pro this being a thing
no and what the fuck why would that be a thing
Other
Button.
Voting ended on2h
In Real life. not in a videogame or movie because I've Only seen it in videogames and a friend has spotted it in a movie.
It is done! This is The Death of Translation, originally written in English by @landwriter, translated into Mandarin by @thirrith. Binding is dos-Ă -dos, with English version on one side and Mandarin on the other. Bookcloth was handwoven by me, on my rigid heddle loom :3
More under the cut!
Typeset: Fanbinders are Liars
Full stop, this typeset would not have been possible without Eth and all their patience, enthusiasm, and willingness to do even more translating! I reached out to them *checks watch* nearly a year ago in July 2023 (lololol), asking if I could use their translation of TDOT in a surprise bind I wanted to send along with Gloam's author copy of Flower King. They were kind enough to say yes, and even kinder to answer my questions when I reached out six months later in January, when I was finally able to start work on the typeset.
We talked about the many delicious things that are bound to come up when discussing translating not just from English to Mandarin, but also from digital space to meatspace. Some topics I had anticipated, like font questions, translating the colophon, etc. But even with the topics I thought I'd prepared for, there were still things that came up that both surprised and delighted: for example, while AO3's website allows for italics in Mandarin--
--my publishing program doesn't (or at least, it doesn't without needing to manually tilt every character by about 10 degrees). So as a workaround, Eth suggested changing these cases of italics to the font ĺć漡ä˝:
Through no one's fault but my own, this ended up being only slightly less work than manually tilting every instance of italics--I wanted to be sure that I got all of them, so I ended up doing a lot of double-checking manually anyway, instead of relying solely on the Search function. There was a lot of cross-referencing with the Word document that Eth was kind enough to provide, as well as squinting and general swearing. I also did the same for the uses of Latin script, manually styling each instance as Garamond to keep it consistent with the English edition:
The only other time I've had to do font surgery this intensive is probably for my typeset for Tell Me About the Big Bang, which I had to port over from a PDF. Folks, hell on earth. Do not recommend XD I remember squinting at my monitor as I had to visually confirm every instance of italics, thinking I will never do this again. Welp, four years later, here were are: fanbinders are liars, LMAO. At the very least, using Eth's Word document at least allowed me to search by styles, so it was a little easier on my eyes. đ
Is there a script that I might've been able to use if I was more code-savvy? Probably. But I figured going at it sledgehammer style would be the least hair-pulling way to get the job done, weirdly enough. Still, despite my best efforts, there are a few instances of PMingLiU to Garamond and PMingLiU to ĺććĽˇä˝ that I know I missed, and I know I missed them because I caught them after I'd printed/cut/folded/sewn/glued (cue more swearing), so Gloam and Eth, my apologies >.< please consider them artifacts of a uniquely handmade object ajslkdjfs
In addition to the fonts, there were also some other fun things Eth and I discussed, like how to translate the notes I usually provide on the colophons! In addition to information on fonts, I also usually include some variation of:
This private, limited edition published by chubsthehamster (Moonham Press, imprint of Renegade Publishing) in 2024. This is chubsthehamster's personal copy. Out of three existing copies, this is the first.
The thing that came up with this, which still tickles my brain to this day, was how Eth chose how to translate "Moonham Press, imprint of Renegade Publishing." To get a better sense of what word to use for "imprint," they asked what the relationship was between Moonham Press and Renegade Publishing, which got me thinking about the relationship between my lil imprint and the wonderful @renegadeguild:
What's all very funny about all of this is that we are now, in fact, going by the name "Renegade Bookbinding Guild," per our most recently updated Code of Conduct. While this renders the wording I asked for out of date (and thus, the wording that made it into the book out of date :'D), I think it's also a testament to how cool the work @renegadeguild is doing--like any artform, fanbinding is alive, with its own evolving language, communities, and ideas about the craft. And I love it, I love it so much. (Was this also a plug for our new-ish website? Perhaps).
There's more I could say here, but this post is already going to be long enough, so I'll move on for now! If you get anything from this section, it's that @thirrith is amazing and very patient and kind, and I'm so grateful that we got to talk shop together. Thank you so much for all your invaluable help with this, Eth! I hope the typeset, though undoubtedly flawed, does your hard work justice!
Binding: Or, SO Much Math. Like, So Much, Guys. (It was worth it, though!)
Whoo, boy! So math was never my strong suit in school, but when I set out to do this bind last year, that wasn't an issue. At first. The dos-Ă -dos binding, if anything, just requires a little bit of finagling on the usual case-bound format--a bit more math if you want to do an all-cloth cover, like I planned on doing, but nothing I couldn't work out with some trial and error. (My prototype below!)
Then came February, when I took a weaving class with my friend, and then everything kinda exploded.
My original idea was to use some green Duo bookcloth I had on hand (this color, actually)--for those of you not initiated into the Duo cult, Duo is a Rayon bookcloth with a very devoted fan following in Renegade. It's very pretty; the Rayon weave is one color, and the paper backing is usually complementary color, so it has this cool two-toned effect. Duo is in high demand in Renegade circles because sadly, the company that manufactures it went out of business last year. (Although I've heard rumors recently that there's another company making something similar, but the cloth has a really high purchase requirement and is, like, for businesses only I think).
Anyway, I also wanted to have a gold line around the whole book as a kind of bellyband/obi to further connect the two versions of the story (another reason why I chose the dos-Ă -dos format to begin with heh), as you can see from my scribbled notes here--
But alas! I knew going in that adhering things to Duo is often Problematic, thanks to one very painful experience trying to get some iron-on foil on another bind (the textured surface of Duo just makes it kinda hard to stick or paint stuff on it). So if I wanted a clean, continuous line, the remaining options were to either paint it on a strip of paper that I'd somehow...adhere to the cloth? Or maybe cut different slices of bookcloth and glue them on. I wasn't satisfied with either of those options, though.
Then--the weaving class. I made a scarf, and I love it and I loved making it. But the whole time, I'll not lie, my thoughts were elsewhere.
In short, my decision to weave my own bookcloth kinda came from a few different factors:
The desire to attempt to recreate Duo, that elusive beauty, the one that got away, etc. (I have several yards in my stash, but still). Others have also attempted to recreate it, and I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring.
My current spiral into the deep hole that is fiber arts (it started with crochet, then knitting, then sewing, then weaving, then spinning, and now I'm eyeing quilting! Please help me).
The gold line. It kept bugging me. And when I found weaving, I just thought there was something very neat about the process of actually making the cloth for a dos-Ă -dos binding from scratch, and especially for this binding. I wanted to bind a story about translation (or rather, the death of it, and yet still the necessity of it--how we must try to communicate, despite of, or perhaps precisely because of, everything that gets lost in the spaces between people, and the tragedy of that loss, and the beauty of what makes it through, and the love always present in the effort regardless), and also, the translation of that story. Weaving is a very meditative process, and with every pass of the shuttle, back and forth, building slowly but surely the fabric that would hold the story that Gloam had written and that Eth had translated, I thought a lot about translation, and the gaps between people, and how we choose our words not just when translating, but when we speak at all. From a design perspective, I used the same colors I would've used had I chosen the Duo bookcloth--green and gold--so the design wasn't too altered in terms of color scheme. But I think the choice to weave the bookcloth--the thing that bound it all together--made the project take on a completely new meaning for me, both in process and in scope, one that hadn't been there when I started. I saw the warp, perhaps, as the original story, laying the groundwork for the weft, the translation; or maybe it was the other way around, with the translation providing the scaffolding for its own, new meaning, choices that Eth had to make with this word or phrase or another building something new, something translated, and the original a live, moving thing that wove over and under each word turned phrase turned story; or maybe it was both. Maybe it didn't matter which was which, in the end. And as I wove, the thing that connected them, that gold line that had started all of this, slowly formed.
All that to say: Good God, was there a lot of math. So much math. That prototype pictured above was actually made specifically so I could calculate exactly how much I needed to weave, lol, because while I certainly had enough thread, I didn't want to have to warp more than once. I'd learned the basics in my class, but the training wheels came off here. I wanted to make my own custom fabric, which meant calculating things like ends per inch, picks per inch, loom waste, shrinkage after washing, the width of that damn gold line, how much I'd need for the hinge, the turn-ins, the boards--the whole nine yards (I didn't actually weave nine yards tho heh). It was all absolutely worth it in the end--so challenging and so, so rewarding!
(And my final reason for weaving the bookcloth? Not gonna lie, It was because I just wanted to see if I could do it LOL. I love trying at least one new thing with each of my binds, and this was it for this project. While I've been bookbinding for a few years now, I'm still very much a beginner weaver, and I'm so excited to continue to learn and experiment! Also, here's a video of me unwinding the cloth from the loom, heh. I used 10/2 Perle cotton in gold and green colors :3)
Also, turns out, you can back handmade cloth the same way you can any other cloth! I backed it using my usual heat-n-bond method, and with some Unryu Tissue in the color Forest. Since the cloth itself is a bit transparent, there are a bunch of really fun fibers you can see when it's held up to the light, but which aren't visible when the cloth is glued down to the boards. Still, knowing they're there still makes me happy :D
Finally, capping all this off, is one final, small detail I really liked: ginkgo leaf endpapers :3 this one's for me and Eth and Gloam specifically <3
Aaaand that's all from me for today, folks! Thus ends (several months late XD) my last Binderary project for the year. This was probably my most ambitious bind to date, and gosh it was so, so much fun.
And, of course, thank you so much to Gloam for sharing your story, and Eth for translating it. I can't wait for y'all to receive your copies soon!
This tiny book was created for a personal trade with a friend. Making it reminded me how much I enjoy tinies. This project was great,I got to use scraps from so many different decorative papers and bookcloth. Lots of black and gold for the Boston Raiders!
Magneticwave, thank you for writing this excellent fic!
Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.
Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.
Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.
"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you
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give me back my time and i will give you back your heart
Pairing:Â Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov
Rating:Â Mature
Word Count:Â 7733
Summary:
âLetâs make a deal.â
The words come out of his mouth without his permission but they make a flicker of a smile appear on Shaneâs face, private and fond. He nods, silently urging Ilya to keep going.
âIn ten years, fifteen,â he starts, gritting his teeth against his own anxiety. âWhen hockey is done and no one gives a fuck about us anymore and- and I have American citizenship. If- if we are both still single, then we can try.â
Shane goes still, hand dropping from Ilyaâs face and mouth parting. Ilya has a moment or two to panic that heâs somehow completely miscalculated but then Shaneâs expression breaks over an awed sort of smile.
âLike those romcom couples, huh?â
Ilya blinks. Itâs not what heâd expected Shane to say. âWhat?â
Shaneâs smile widens into a grin. âYou know those movies where like, two best friends make a pact that if theyâre both still single when theyâre forty then theyâll get married-â
âYou are proposing, Hollander? Is so sudden-â
*
In which Shane and Ilya decide to end things in Tampa, make a deal about someday, and end up on the same team together five years later.
We hope youâve had a restful week to recover from your con-crash, our team definitely needed it! Con weekend was an absolutely wild ride, but weâre so happy that folks seem to have had a blast. Weâve been keeping up with everyoneâs photo dumps, hauls, and fanart, and we honestly could not be prouder of the wonderful community weâve built.
(As with last year, image credit goes to the wonderful @fluoriteflygon!)
And now, for the standard post-con wrap-up.
Can I still get merch?
Yes, but not for long! Our merch store will be closing tomorrow, on Friday, August 14th at 11:59 PM (EDT). We will not be restocking anything before this deadline, so make sure to move quickly if youâve got your heart set on anything!
Get yours before the deadline!
When will merch orders be shipped out?
Due to recent changes in Canadian-US trade relations, we will be prioritizing American orders. All American orders will be shipped out by Monday, August 17th to avoid the 50% tariffs the Trump administration intends to impose on August 19th. All other orders will be shipped out by the first week of September.
Will you be shipping out Lost & Found items?
Unfortunately, we currently have no plans to ship out lost & found items. Unstable international trade relations and the rising cost of shipping have made this unfeasible at the current moment. If you lost something important at DashCon 2 and would be willing to pay for shipping, you can shoot us an email at [email protected], and weâll see what we can do. Weâre sorry that we canât do more, and thank you for your understanding.
When will the panel recordings be out?
VODs for all of the Virtual and In-Person panels are currently slated to release in September. Our incredible VirtualDash team has been hard at work editing over 100 hours of footage and will be getting the finished videos out the door as soon as possible. Captions may not be immediately available for all videos, but will be added over time.
Speaking of, our team is seeking volunteers to help write captions for all of the VODs. We're committed to providing human-written captions for all of our videos, so please reach out to [email protected] to help us make DashCon 2 accessible for all!
As with last year, VOD access is included for all volunteers, in-person, and virtual DashCon 2 ticket holders. VODs will also be available directly for purchase, with a portion of all proceeds going to the Rainbow Railroad.
DashCon 2 next year?
We absolutely plan to run DashCon 2 again in 2027! Weâve already started on the boring logistical work to prep for year 3, but donât want to make any certain promises before those details are settled. Weâre committed to making this con the best it can be, and right now that means taking things one step at a time. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our Substack or join our Discord to stay involved in all things DashCon 2! Weâll also be putting out a general feedback form soon, so keep an eye out for that.
In sum, thank you for all so much for another amazing year of DashCon 2. Weâre so grateful to be able to run this crazy thing for a second year in a row, and weâre excited to continue improving the event going forward.
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i was about to say itâs literally a thursday can we chill out but then realizedâ is THIS why everyone was driving like itâs their first time on the interstate this morning???
stay ahead, and donât get dead, and stay alive @conscious-naivete - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
