Cabinet of Curiosities

he set up the most beautiful teepee of sticks that anyone has ever seen and brought out the big guns by also setting up a log cabin arrangement of the thicker logs to make sure they'd have a good burn time on this fire. the mathematical precision in the angles and choice of thickness? gorgeous. stunning. he even shaved off wood shavings for tinder instead of using paper or pre-bought firestarter. if he wasn't afraid of fumbling it and ruining it, he would have used flint. as it is, he got it with one match, and he KNOWS how good this fire creation he just did is.

and yet it is spent on an audience that simply does NOT appreciate any aspect of it because his city kid ass truly might be experiencing a firepit for the first time. ilya has no frame of reference for how sexy shane's firestarting skills display just was.

ilya already mad firepit time has to happen at all because shane already said no sex on the patio furniture so this planned chunk of time is already a wash and ilya was then so mad about shane immediately going to fuck around with sticks that he didn't pick up on the no being one of the "convince me to say yes" variety 😔

he confessed it later in their relationship together because by that point it was funny that he had tried so hard to impress her with his fire skills at bonfires and hangouts and it just hadn't worked because she just. hadn't really noticed at all. and now it's a playful/teasing thing ("oh? you're building a fire? david, we're already married." "yuna, i'm starting a flirting fire can you come look at it, please?"), and shane who hasn't consciously decided to copy his parents but also hasn't gotten the full story of them dating and WHY they mention david building fires so often (because ewwwww parents being in love which means kissing. GROSS.), but he's seen his mom standing by or sitting and watching and both of them looking so content and happy and his mom teasingly complimenting his dad on how well he builds fires.

and then he tries it on ilya and it just. doesn't work. excuse me, please be impressed by this fire i made. from watching my parents, this is supposed to work. play your part here, please.

and now i'm feeling extra-soft imagining yuna and david coming over one night and seeing shane keep glancing at ilya as he's making the fire and understanding EXACTLY what he's trying to do here.

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

(It's fine. No one was hurt, just some people's dignity.)

no more national debt tracker I want america's butter debt tracker.

Blood of Christ

Supporting roles from America's sweethearts corporate cranberries and hotdogs

Wisconsin's version of the Candy Land game

this sounds like a bad supervillian's origin story

I texted this screenshot to aforementioned bestie, who replied "I wish I was there" and "what dreams are made of"

shoutout to a real one. braver than any marine

BUTTER SPILLS??? PLURAL?!?!

I need dimensions of this river. I need to know its path, its flow, its everything.

That's a big oopsie. But at least no one was hurt and we can all sleep soundly tonight knowing that there is no terrorist organization targeting America's vast dairy reserves.

and i'm just like?? he is THE shane hollander. he is where he is because he is THAT fucking good. even ilya says that shane is the better hockey player.

and he doesn't get to be openly proud of that.

we see the difference in interviews between him and ilya in the show. ilya gets to be confident and smug about his skills (which is earned! he's ilya fucking rozanov!! shane's only true competitor to always challenge him on the ice!), but shane has to SO carefully toe the line of being confident but not cocky because he is a minority in this sport and doesn't get the grace a white man would. shane KNOWS he's good. he KNOWS he's the fucking best at this. but the closest he gets to come in an interview is saying, "i'll listen if he catches up to me," which has an underlying current of "i'm better than him" but isn't him openly getting to say how good he is.

shane doesn't need to be humbled. he is not out here bragging about himself constantly (not that ilya truly is, either, but shane doesn't get to be openly proud of how good he is in the same way around other people). so i don't love that there's sometimes a sense of, "this is good for him" when he has to give up something he fucking EARNED with hard work and talent that he already doesn't get to be openly proud of already.

especially when like. it's noted that ilya has been the captain of every team he's ever been on. he was initially (playfully, but every joke has a little truth in it) annoyed at svetlana saying that he should wing shane instead of being center. (and also?? the teamwork went fucking CRAZY when they were in this arrangement. when ilya allowed himself to set down the expectation he's been raised under that he HAS to be in charge of the team and has to be the star or he's a disappointment, he had fun and it went GREAT.)

and again!! i am speaking on behalf of #myshane and #myilya and also with the caveat of hockey doesn't exist without expectations and politics and ilya has seniority on the team which is a factor in this beyond pure skill, but *i* feel like the arrangment that actually supports both of them growing is ilya winging shane and shane keeping center. we know shane and ilya are each other's main competition and the only people who can truly match each other, and we know from what ilya's said that even he thinks shane is the better player, so in my head, shane IS the best center of the two of them, but ilya has better flexibility in being able to move to other positions. and i feel like it honestly could be really good for *ilya* to be able to set down the expectation he's been raised under that he has to have The Big Role or he's failed.

conversely, i think shane's best potential growth happens off of the ice and involves interpersonal relationships and learning how to connect to people. i think shane is by nature very self-focused because he is so painfully aware of himself and how he's appearing all of the time (partially because he fucking HAS to be), and this does tend to contribute to him keeping himself apart in a lot of ways on an emotional level. and it's not that he doesn't care about other people or that he's not interested in getting to know people (hayden invited him to come home to dinner and we see him ending up doing things like going to the aquarium with him and his kids on the weekend and rose invited him to sit down with her and they chatted for hours and then started dating! he can ABSOLUTELY do it when he has a direct "come sit down and let's get to know each other"), but i think it doesn't come naturally to him already, and he's usually so tied up in his head about his own shit that it takes conscious effort for him to look around. i feel like the better point of growth for him, then, is learning how to build strong relationships with people on the team as friends instead of as just teammates even if the other person doesn't initiate.

So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and “found family” often (though not always) ends up as a sort of…middle ground between that point and the “Only Romance Is Important” idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, and—at least in some ways—a found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.

In practice, I think that….even when we know that we don’t see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate “familial” with “important” (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least it’s a lot easier to make that case—and also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that “just friendship” might not.

…which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. That’s the highest-status box there is! Don’t you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??

But Friendship—philia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses it—isn’t a weaker form or “first stage” of other loves. It’s its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to “legitimize” it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.

(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! There’s a fandom I’ve gotten into recently that—as not infrequently happens—has a central relationship you could easily consider “father-son,” “best friends,” or a mixture of the two, and there’s variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as “best friends” in my own interpretation, but…a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the “father-son” camp. And even though I’ve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few years—mainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions I‘ve formulated while thinking about them—I still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! They’re very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, they’re still in my brain.)

The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own right—which stinks, because it’s great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. It’s also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.

The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of “Family” so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until it’s started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when we’ve lost the verbal distinction between “relationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connection” (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the “found family” definition of “any group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and aren’t related.”

Go back to part 1: Pattern and sewing

Now it's time to add closure so you can figure out the waist and make adjustments:

So many people want my pants, and trust me: you can have them!!

Caveat: this is a traditional Japanese garment with a long history and made to be worn with kimono. I'm not Japanese and know nothing about the history of monpe or the crafting techniques involved, I literally just looked at the diagram @/prince-rosalium posted, looked at some monpe other people have made, thought well that's not hugely different from the European medieval clothing I know how to make, and went from there. I have altered - westernized! - my monpe to be worn without kimono, so they do look different from true monpe, but still have all monpe advantages, which are splendid and manifold.

I’m splitting this post into two shorter ones, to preserve my sanity.

Part 1: Pattern and sewing

Part 2: Adjustments and finishing

Ok, here we go. Monpe write-up part 1 after the readmore:

Tracing a neat straight line, adept and sure, The falcon heeds the calling falconer; Things hang together, and the center holds; Mere symmetry is ordering the world, The sea-bright tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence proceeds; The best have strong convictions, while the worst Are full of resignation and are sad.

so they eat, have handsy time on the couch, smooch smooch, first names, and oh. OH. gotta. gotta go. oh god. bad bad. death is coming. bad. bad bad.

and shane doesn't even realize at first what's happening because he thinks it's just the first names getting to him (and it is. partially.), but he's like. halfway back upstairs when what's ACTUALLY happening hits him.

i think this is…actually the most extreme stupid dove nest I’ve seen.

Imagine you're coming home after a long day of hunting, and the first thing you hear is your seven shitty kids screeching at you for no reason, how pissed off would you be, I'd immediately fly away too

Imagine you're the oldest of seven and a fucking HOA member broke into your HOUSE and SHIT AN EGG and is BITING at your siblings, but your dad shows so you try to tell him the problem but you're very little and you don't speak English and he doesn't speak English either so you can't communicate that a fucking GOBLIN is in your HOUSE and the only reason he doesn't know is cause his ASS was on that bitch's HEAD and he must've assumed it was one of your brothers and sisters but it was actually that FREAK WOMAN who got in, and now your dad is flying away 'cause he has no idea what's going on

Imagine you're a parent and you've calmed down and gone to get McDonald's for your seven kids, and you come home expecting to get cheers because you know the D's are always a winner, but when you fly back in through the door the kids are all still screaming, and it's not even excited screams but you don't know what's wrong so you just look into the camera like you're Jim from the Office

Imagine you're one of the small middle children and probably the one that this HOA WITCH was BITING after she broke into YOUR HOUSE and SHIT an EGG and you tried to be a good host by cuddling with her to congratulate her on her egg but then she started BITING and taking over your ROOM and threw out all your GOOSEBUMPS books and your eldest sibling couldn't call dad so you all just had to wait, and then dad comes home but your STUPID FAMILY won't stop SCREECHING to explain what's going on so your dad leaves but then comes back and he's brought McDonald's which is like yay but there is an INTRUDER, and finally your dad looks around the house and notices BITCH BIRD KAREN IN YOUR BEAN BAG CHAIR, and you're like ok dad can handle this but then you learn he's more scared than you?????

Imagine you're a dad and you just got home with McDonald's and WHO THE FUCK IS THAT IN MY HOUSE but luckily you have seven children and the mean one is willing to fight this bitch and you're just gonna chill in this corner until this problem is resolved even if your other kids are straight-up judging you

Imagine you're Kevin McCallister and you're doing Home Alone except you're not home alone 'cause your dad is home too but he's not helping, he's just holding a bag of McDonald's, so you have to be the head of this house at eight years old 'cause you're home alone emotionally but this FREAK ON AN EGG isn't leaving so you decide to screech at your dad and he's more scared of you than she is

Imagine you're a dad and your child has publicly shamed you in front of your other kids and this ASSHOLE KAREN and you decide you're not gonna take this shit anymore so you tell your kids that you paid for this McDonald's with your hard-earned bird money and they're gonna damn well eat this, so everybody stop looking at that side of the house and just eat your fucking french fries but then that fucking MONSTER starts BITING your only child willing to go into battle so you recognize this is a lost cause and throw the burgers on the counter and you remember you're an ADULT so you grab your car keys and fly the fuck away