~The Place Where Nothing Happens~

"Getting a candidate into office is only about $15 grand and the incumbancy rate is 90%, meaning you get 18-20 years out of them. In this day and age, a US Congressman is one of the best investments a corporation can make."

I'd like to be able to say the writers were baing a bit on the nose with having the bad guy say that, but I could absolutely see some AI tech bro saying that word for word.

Write the ideas down. If they are going to be stories, try and tell the stories you would like to read. Finish the things you start to write. Do it a lot and you will be a writer. The only way to do it is to do it. 

I’m just kidding. There are much easier ways of doing it. For example: On the top of a distant mountain there grows a tree with silver leaves. Once every year, at dawn on April 30th, this tree blossoms, with five flowers, and over the next hour each blossom becomes a berry, first a green berry, then black, then golden.

At the moment the five berries become golden, five white crows, who have been waiting on the mountain, and which you will have mistaken for snow, will swoop down on the tree, greedily stripping it of all its berries, and will fly off, laughing.

You must catch, with your bare hands, the smallest of the crows, and you must force it to give up the berry (the crows do not swallow the berries. They carry them far across the ocean, to an enchanter’s garden, to drop, one by one, into the mouth of his daughter, who will wake from her enchanted sleep only when a thousand such berries have been fed to her). When you have obtained the golden berry, you must place it under your tongue, and return directly to your home.

For the next week, you must speak to no-one, not even your loved ones or a highway patrol officer stopping you for speeding. Say nothing. Do not sleep. Let the berry sit beneath your tongue.

At midnight on the seventh day you must go to the highest place in your town (it is common to climb on roofs for this step) and, with the berry safely beneath your tongue, recite the whole of Fox in Socks. Do not let the berry slip from your tongue. Do not miss out any of the poem, or skip any of the bits of the Muddle Puddle Tweetle Poodle Beetle Noodle Bottle Paddle Battle.

Then, and only then, can you swallow the berry. You must return home as quickly as you can, for you have only half an hour at most before you fall into a deep sleep.

I’ve always hated doing shoe and boot covers until my friend introduced me to this method. Turns out it’s not very well known how to do it! So I decided to take some photos while I did my most recent ones and make a tutorial for others to use. This tutorial can be used for socks, shoe covers, spats, custom boots, and anything else you can think of!

I’m only covering how to make the pattern, not how to sew it because I feel like that part is pretty straight forward.

Here we go~

Skill level required: beginner Time: ~1hr Materials: -shoes -saran wrap - tape -pen -paper scissors -ruler -butcher paper - a body - a friend!(not required, but VERY helpful!)

Here are your supplies! I used blue tape because it’s what I had lying around, but I would suggest packers tape. It’s a lot easier.

Ok, step  1! Put on your shoe and start wrapping your leg with the saran wrap. It sticks to itself, so this step is pretty easy. I am making suuuper high boots, so I have the wrap pretty high up. Only go as high as what you’re making to cut down on time& supplies. Also, be sure to get all around your shoe(and underneath if you’re making a custom sole).

 It is very important that you are keeping your leg straight from here on out. If you bend it, the tape and everything will move around and your pattern won’t fit as well as you’d like. So keep your leg straight!

Step 2, tape bracers. I suggest putting long strips down the center front, center back, and perpendicular in key spots(top, mid thigh, above/below knee, mid calf, ankle, foot arch, toes) these strips will act as support for the rest of the tape and prevent you from taping too tight.

Step 3, the fun has begun! Tape, tape, tape!! Looks good, right??

 WRONG! Here’s where it’s important to have a friend helping. It’s hard to reach everywhere unless you are very flexible.

Step 4,Be sure you have everything covered in tape before moving on to the next step. 

Step 5, mark your seams. I suggest doing a front and back seam, if not more.  Did some dashes up the front of my leg for where I wanted the seam, and then used a flexible quilting ruler to make it a straight line. Since I was doing this on my own, I couldn’t draw the back seam. I’ll show you how to do that in a few steps!

Step 6, cut it off. BE CAREFUL, PLEASE. Especially around your knees and ankles.

Step 7, you are now free from your sweaty leg prison!

Take your cast off your leg, but leave your shoe in.

Step 8, Now that it’s off, tape up any spots you may have missed, including the bottom of the shoe if you’re making the bottoms as well. Mark around the bottom edge of the shoe to get the correct shape, and cut it out.

Step 9, this is for if you didn’t draw& cut your back seam. Lay out your cast and fold it as closely in half as you can. I have the legs of a 6th grader, so mine folds very nicely without many bulges. If yours doesn’t, fear not! Just get it as close as you can to in half and we’ll flatten it out in a bit.

Step 10, cut it in half! Looking good so far! This is also where you can add extra seams and style lines if your character calls for it.

Step 11, we’re now going to transfer your pattern to butcher paper! If your pattern isn’t laying flat, here’s what you do…

*snip* that’s it! When you’re tracing your pattern, you just sketch between the opening to make it a smooth line.

Step 12, Finish tracing it out, and your pattern is done! Yaaaay we made it! Haha Mark the outside/inside in a way that you can tell them apart(I used O and I). Don’t mix them up!

From here, you need to add seam allowance before cutting it out otherwise it’ll be too tight!

That’s it! After that, the sewing part is pretty straight forward. I would suggest knit fabrics and maybe a short zipper at the ankle, but if you want to use a woven that’s fine; just add a bit more ease and include a zipper up the back from top to bottom.

—

It Is Expensive to Be Poor | The Atlantic  (via america-wakiewakie)

Reblog this forever. I’ll never forget how many of my students in the school I worked in with a 100% free and reduced lunch rate lived in residential motels and how many of them relied on the school to get breakfast and lunch and how often those were their only meals for the day.

Or how my friends who have older cars have to spend so much money repairing them but an older car was all they could afford in the first place.

And how you literally have no safety net because if you already fixed one thing on your car and something else goes a week later, you’ve already spent the little bit of buffer you saved up.

(via raindropprincess)

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

(via moniquill)