It's not when you get there, it's always the climb

Bind #2 - Complicated Creation

This was my first year participating in @renegadeguild's annual gift exchange, and I ended up choosing to bind two fics for my giftee @grimmauldplacepublishing.

The second book I bound was Complicated Creation by Elemental (@elementalsight)

I absolutely love how the chrome vinyl turned out on the covers - even if it was incredibly frustrating to weed the design. WORTH IT.

The endbands are custom dyed linen thread to coordinate with the bookcloth, and the edges were inked and then speckled with a thin, silver acrylic for a very subtle shimmer and speckled effect. The end pages were custom speckled as well with a trio of coordinating purple inks.

Additionally, I did a custom drawing for the fic of a stylized nine-tailed fox. It's featured on both the title page and in the text when Tamamo-no-Mae is introduced.

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that's okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece's black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified)

Beginner-oriented video on how to sail

This guy has so many videos on baking different types of bread. SO very many.

Coding in Python - one of the most flexible and adaptable high-level programming languages out there - explained through projects making video games

Learn to swim! (for adult learners. I don’t care if you live in Kansas or Mali or wherever. LEARN TO SWIM.)

Learn how quantum mechanics works. Then read some more about it

[Learn about quantum mechanics again, but in a more advanced engineering/mathematics class. Then read more about the math and physics of it]

Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver

Something I learned this year: how to sew a quilt (Here’s a very easy beginning pattern that looks amazing and can be done with pre-cut fabric!)

How to hit the ball in softball

Tutorial video on what is under the hood of most (gas) cars + weird engine sounds and what they mean

Full beginner mechanics technical training, if you want to go more in depth

Playlist on how car engine physics work if you want to go ultra in depth

Lecture series on architecture design through study of buildings

How (American income) taxes & tax law work (choose “audit course” at checkout for free class)

Pickleball for beginners (so you can finally join your neighbor/friend/distant cousin who is always insisting you join their team)

+ Para-Pickleball for beginners (for mobility aid users!)

School is so much more fun when there’s no tests:

American Law - Contracts

Shakespeare’s Life and Plays

Fairy Tales: Meanings, Messages, and Morals

Modern Poetry

World History [Part 1, Part 2]

Learn a language:

Arabic + Resource Guide compiled from Reddit (includes info on different dialects)

Chinese (Cantonese) (audio)

Urdu (frequently recommended course on Reddit) + Resource Guide

Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.

I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)

The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.

But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.

The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)

And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)

Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…

I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. It’s a relatively new thing.

I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!

I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Rice’s lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.

I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)

But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anne’s lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasn’t exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?

On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anne’s camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasn’t an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.

Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they could’ve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasn’t just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.

My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you weren’t allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to “preserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to have”.

Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.

(It’s one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious ‘f*** you’.)

Later on, they were apparently persuaded to ‘allow’ fans to write slash, provided in ‘remained within the nebulous bounds of good taste’.

The OTW Legal Committee’s mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.

We create and post educational materials about developments in fandom-related law on transformativeworks.org and on archiveofourown.org.

We assist individual fans when their fanworks are challenged, we answer fans’ questions about law relevant to fanworks, and we help fans find legal representation.

We partner with other advocacy organizations and coalitions in the U.S. and around the world.

We advocate for laws and policies that promote balance and protect fanworks and fandom.

And much more!

Back then, this could include anything from the ship they didn’t like (look up the ship wars from Potter fandom. The feuds were horrendous and hateful) to something as simple as a g-rated slash fic because “this of the children”. Hell, when strikethrough happened on livejournal, it was everything/anything which - sadly - also included a lot of fantastic support communities for queer kids and SA survivors and the like. All because the site decided to crack down on ‘lewd’/‘deviant’ content and didn’t pause to think what else might be tagged under queer and SA content.

A lot of the writers in a lot of the fandoms I was in included content warnings for slash because if people felt spiteful or hostile when they stumbled on it, they could report it to fic hosting sites and have it taken down for any number of excuses. I lost fics on fanfiction.net because some big weirdo deemed them as inappropriate and had their friends all report it at the same time.

So for the purposes of this, Shen Yuan's family is basically $10 Bananas levels of cluelessly rich. Shen Yuan has almost never had to look at the prices of anything he wants. He and his siblings all get an allowance from the family's main account, which increases when they reach adulthood, and in the interest of fairness his parents made it all the same size. So Shen Yuan gets the same amount of money for his daily living expenses as his older brothers with their penthouse apartments and vacation homes and private jets, at least from the family account (since he doesn't work, he doesn't actually make as much as them in total because they earn more on top of their allowances).

And the thing is, Shen Yuan genuinely just lives a lot more humbly. He likes people but what would he do with a vacation house? Anything really nice would probably require him to fly to get out there, and he gets sick as hell on planes. Living in the central city is also not great for him, because the air pollution is so bad. Having a whole house to himself would also be ridiculous. So he has a reasonable apartment, in a reasonable area, and he splurges every so often on purchases that make him happy and take-out food that he likes, and of course he pays a cleaning service to come in twice a week. Most people assume he's comfortably middle class and has some tech job he does from home, but he's been getting a lot more than he's been spending in his monthly allowances for years now, and the figures are big.

Enter into this environment author Airplane and his trash novels. Novels, multiple, because in this AU there's no PIDW, and instead after some alternate PIDW prototype got popular in the harem genre, Airplane decided to churn out a series of copy-paste shorter stories rather than recycling the same subplots in one massively long epic.

Shen Yuan of course discovers Airplane's writing and becomes as obsessed with it as ever, except this time he notices that if there are delays between new stories, they seem to clear up faster whenever he throws some cash at the problem. And also that the drops in Airplane's writing quality coincide with times when Shen Yuan was having health issues and not keeping up with his VIP purchases. So, he works out that Airplane's probably doing the writing for the money, and that when Peerless Cucumber isn't paying the most for it, Airplane starts listening to the other buffoons in the comment section more to try and entice them to pay his bills instead.

Peerless Cucumber leaves a comment on one of Airplane's latest stories that kicks off the two of them actually chatting, and Shen Yuan eventually gets to the point of offering to fund all Airplane's writing, in exchange for Airplane not doing his crap sellout stuff to appeal to other readers anymore. Airplane thinks he's joking or maybe mocking him. Shen Yuan asks how much it would cost. Airplane fires off a ridiculous number. Shen Yuan doesn't even blink and wires him the first payment. Then he gets annoyed because Airplane leaves him on read for a while, but that's because Airplane is staring at his account balance in shock.

Of course, it's Airplane who starts referring to Peerless Cucumber as his sugar daddy. Shen Yuan is just like "based on your sex scenes I don't think anyone would pay you for that" and Airplane's all "but you WOULD pay for my sex scenes ^_~" and Shen Yuan's like "technically I am actually paying you not to write that shit" and so on. Usual banter. The quality of Airplane's writing improves dramatically, a lot of his readership drops off but he does get new readers and gradually builds up an even bigger fanbase than before, and so on, it all goes pretty well. He eventually writes a few things that take off to the point of getting physical publications and international translations. Technically Airplane no longer needs Shen Yuan to pay all of his bills by that point but he's not going to tell Shen Yuan that! The contract's still good as long as he keeps writing!

Then one of Airplane's online acquaintances runs into some financial trouble and asks for help.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

Gordon turns around, notices that Batman is gone but the kid is not. Then Robin notices that Batman is gone, and promptly burst into tears because, “He left me! He left me behind!”

Jim Gordon is not heartless and he’s a father, he takes the kid into the precinct. He gives him a blanket and a snack. He tries to calm him down and asks if he knows a phone number that he could call for Batman. He gets a wobbly, “He doesn’t have a phone.”

Jim steps out of his office for a second to speak with an officer about turning the bat signal back on, and when he gets back to his office the kid is gone. The crime scene photos and forensic report from the joker attack yesterday are also gone from his office.

Meanwhile Robin is standing in the alley behind the GCPD, waving as Batman grapples down to meet him. He gives him a big smile and says, “I got the evidence!”

I had an idea for the AU where Narinder would be a child with godly powers (kinda like toh collector) just a kid loked up because he didnt know any better I imagine him being grumpy and trying to be serious. Hes not admiting, but he still likes to color with crayons, but it doesnt suit "god" :D

Aym and Baal was sent to look after Nari as care takers)))) I bet they would come up with a lot of fun games and activities for him hehe)) They also help little Narinder to plan his escape and stuff (truly loyal guys)

I say this with all the gentleness in my heart: It is okay for you to be a man. If you want to be a man, you can just be one. You also don't have to stop being a woman to be a man. Multigender people exist. You can be a man and a woman at the same time. Or you can be just a man, or a non-binary man, or non-binary, or something entirely different. You can do and be whatever you want and whatever makes you happy.

Becoming a man is not a betrayal of womanhood and feminism. And everyone who makes you feel like it is an absolute asshole, and you should not ever listen to them. You do not have to push your own happiness aside for other peoples' comfort.

If you want to be a man, try it out! See where it gets you. Maybe it turns out that you really weren't trans, or not a trans man but something else entirely, and that's fine, too. Maybe it turns out you are a trans man. In any case, following those thoughts might get you to a happier and better place in the end. And if you turn out to be happier as a man than you were as a woman, that is wonderful.

Please don't feel forced to stay a cis woman for feminism - any feminism that mistreats or hates trans men and transmasculine people is bad feminism. Being a trans man or transmasc is not a moral failure.

I know what it feels like. It can get better.

All of this also goes for trans men and transmasculine people who still struggle with such thoughts, of course. It doesn't just go away the second you realize you are trans.

MBTI has been proven completely ineffective at predicting anyone’s success at a particular job, and half the people who take it twice will get different results. Reputable psychologists do not recognize it, and the company that owns the rights to it uses it to scam people. People don’t adhere to strict binaries in basically anything. Very few people are going to be exclusively introverted or extroverted. It’s just astrology repackaged as pseudoscience. Shockingly enough, you can’t boil the complexity of the human experience down to a dozen Types of Guy.

The concept of IQ is flawed from the start— “intelligence” is an abstract concept that encompasses many different skills, from social intelligence to emotional intelligence to the very narrow kind of problem solving intelligence IQ tests generally measure for. It cannot predict how fast you learn, how much you know, or how logical and well read you are. It mostly measures how good you are at solving puzzles. Coincidentally, it’s also a pretty good predictor of income and education level, take a guess why. Most people’s IQ will change throughout their lives, because it’s inconsistent bullshit we’ve only held onto this long because we’re still kinda hoping we can breed the ubermensch. IQ tests and the way they attempt to categorize people are explicitly eugenicist and racist.

BMI was developed by a man known as the grandfather of eugenics, who first of all was a mathematician, not a doctor, and second never intended the formula to be used to categorize individuals. It’s intended to give a rough estimate of obesity in populations, and it’s not even good at that. It hangs around because of fatphobia and insurance companies who want it as an excuse to charge fat people more.

The study which determined people’s prefrontal cortex was still developing at 25… stopped measuring at 25. Evidence suggests your brain probably never stops developing. Stop infantilizing grown adults. This is a branch off from the larger mess of misinformation surrounding fMRIs.

Supercarrier: fandom flagship.  Everybody and their dog ships it.  The fandom is glutted with artwork and fic.  You cannot escape this ship.

Dreadnought: massively popular.  Nearly everybody ships it.  You can, with dedication, in theory, reach the end of the AO3 archive for the ship’s tag, but it’ll take a long time.

Cruiser: pretty popular ship.  Not everyone ships it, but everyone knows about it.  Has a good amount of fic/art, and probably multiple ask blogs.

Frigate: just plain popular.  Feels like it could use more fanworks.  New people to the fandom might not know about it, but they’ll stumble across it sooner rather than later.

Gunboat: bit of a rarepair.  It might have an ask blog or two.  A couple big name fans ship it.  Probably only takes a few weeks to get through the entire AO3 backlog, and one new fic gets added during that time.

Tugboat: rarepair.  Almost never seen except as a side pairing to a more popular ship.  You can usually get through everything on AO3 in a matter of days.  You’ve forgotten what it is to be picky about what you read.

Rowboat: less than a dozen people ship it.  You all know each other.  You exist in an endless cycle of the same five people desperately producing art and fic and one person who constantly contributes headcanons.

Raft: There’s two-to-four people who Ship It Hard and a few others who grab onto the side for safety when there’s drama on their usual flagship.

Barrel: There’s orphaned fic of it. There’s unsigned art of it. There’s headcanon asks on anon. Someone must ship it, but no one knows why or who they are. Your friend got a glimpse once before they ducked back down.