There is never

Song by Lydia Lefay on bluesky

Here is the tutorial, I don’t get paid doing this and I’m not an expert at this so please don’t think I can answer everything(ask others for help or look up "flying bird mobile" for other tutorials online).

I hope this explains everything enough.

The measurements for mine came out to 15 1/2 inches on the body from tail to beak tip ans the wings 13 inches long(you can make the wings longer if needed)

Please use the comment section below to ask and someone who has done this or understands the mechanics better can answer.

I know somewhere in KCD2 it's mentioned Hans (and therefore Henry) is 20 years old. But, as I'm still playing the first game, the impression I always got was older teenagers. But there were actually contradicting statements in the game regarding their age.

Henry is referred to repeatedly as "lad" and "boy" by various NPCs. His mother also says this early in the game (this is what I got in my playthrough):

Though, she can also say this in the same scene (different dialog option I discovered when writing this post):

"Nearly a grown man" but simultaneously "not a boy anymore but a man". Still, definitely in that older teenager range, especially at the time.

And Hans, who should be Henry's age, is mentioned in Bands of Bastards DLC to not be "of age" yet:

So, I wanted to get to the bottom of this.

This started as me just wanting to know how old Hansry were meant to be in the first game (the intention when it was published, that is), but then I went down a whole rabbit hole about the real Jan Ptáček's age and life in general, tbh, and it got a little out of control (looking through old German law books and Czech charters and land court records from the 15th century) to the point it stopped being about the games at some point. So, under the cut I included some my research and conclusions:

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

I should point out that technically there are all sorts of little guys living in your blood! The issue is that they’re all you. You have so many blood cells swimming about in there.

Watch this funky lil dude chase down an Unauthorised Fucking Thing (neutrophil eliminating golden staph bacterium)

I've been asked about how I choose my colors by a lot of people and I finally sat down and made a whole ass youtube video about it!

Yes, how you fold your fabric before putting down the pattern pieces and cutting matters, because it influences how the fabric drapes, and ignoring that can cause fit issues in ways you wouldn't expect

Yes, cutting an entire separate piece to sew to the edge to finish it is going to be better than turning the edge and stitching it on its own, because there are geometry issues in play that make it actually harder to just fold a curve to the inside.

Yes, cutting clips or notches into the seam allowance around curves should always be done, because those geometry issues will work on the seam allowances and keep the curve from laying flat (remember, clip when the curve goes in, notch when the curve goes out)

Yes, interfacing may seem completely superfluous and frustrating and an extra step to work with, but it adds rigidity and stability to areas that need it (especially under buttons)

Yes, using a fun quilting cotton print for lining looks nice, but the point of lining isn't to make the inside pretty as much as it is to make the inside slip smoothly over the layer under it, and quilting cotton is going to instead be prone to grabbing everything under it, so you really should use those annoyingly slippery lining fabrics

Yes, in general, you should use the kind of fabric the pattern tells you to use, because there have been centuries, if not millennia, of people throughout the entire world figuring out what fabric best suits what kind of garment, for reasons beyond aesthetics

I know that a lot of people new to sewing see these things and feel like they're things that just aren't necessary, because they skip them when they sew and the item ends up just fine. And if you don't mind the idea of your clothes looking homemade, then it is fine. But...if you're consistently skipping these things and end up unhappy with how homemade your items look, please consider that that result is at least partly because you're not following the entire directions

Is it as good as fabrics designed for shirts? No. (My personal favs for winter are a cotton sateen with some stretch, and for summer a nice linen, if you must know, but I often use cotton double gauze for summer, too.)

Can you make a perfectly good button-down shirt out of it that will last you 5+ years of regular use? YES. I've made several. It's fine. Wash the fabric with super hot water and dry on hot first to make sure it's not going to shrink on you. The shirts last longer if you hang them to dry but that's true of most things.

A "menswear style" button-up shirt will probably work out fine in even the sturdiest quilting cottons. If the shirt's goal is to be soft and flowing, then the weight of the fabric becomes more important.

"Button up shirt made from quilting cotton = fabulous" versus "Button up shirt that, If I had made it in quilting cotton, probably would have looked--and felt--like a tent"

Sometimes with a press cloth, depending on the situation. You can cut a piece of silk organza to use and it works nicely because you can still see through it.

And staystitching the curved edges is absolutely necessary if you're working with a soft drapey fabric and you don't want the neckhole to stretch out horribly.

It's worth learning to use a thimble, I promise it makes hand sewing so much easier.

And ffs, clean your sewing machine regularly, and oil it! AND clean your iron now and then when it gets gunky! You can buy these melty sticks of iron cleaner to do it with.

Some people may say that mockups and basting are for the weak, but it's the other way around. Skipping them is for reckless fools.

A recent commenter on my 18th century shirt tutorial said:

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks. 

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

(Branching out into historical costuming for everyday wear is like your one shot at variation, and even then, the ratio of men’s to women’s patterns on every website is frustrating to say the least.)

Twig and Tale on Etsy have a modest selection of slightly more unique men’s and unisex patterns, I’d really love to make their Pathfinder vest and Ridgeway shirt, among others

Merchant and Mills have a small selection as well, including their Billy gillet and unisex Landgate raincoat

Wardrobe by Me has mostly basics, but I do like their Ozark vest and utility jacket – and as a very small trans guy, I appreciate that their men’s patterns go down to a 2XS

Thread Theory is one of the places I absolutely have my eyes on for modern menswear – I’d particularly like to make their Gosling short-sleeved button-up, Jutland pants, and Belvedere waistcoat

Folkwear are absolutely inching into the desperately-needed much more unique zone – I have plans to make both their varsity jacket and vintage vests, and also have my eyes on their frontier shirts, sailor pants, shirts of Russia and Ukraine, and poet’s shirt

Black Snail Patterns does historical clothing patterns ranging from 1700 to 1910; I just nabbed their Victorian/Edwardian walking trousers and lounge jacket patterns the other day

Laughing Moon Mercantile also do historical patterns, likewise I am planning on making their Victorian shirts and neckwear (which has 15 different historical neckwear suggestions included) and Victorian notched collar vest

The Tudor Tailor do 16th century clothing, which might be a bit bold even even for historybounding for most people, but they do great work, and I highly recommend their bias-cut footed hose as well as their excellent books

(Last but not least, I would be remiss not to mention Norah Waugh’s The Cut of Men’s Clothes, which is a book and not a pattern retailer might be best for slightly more advanced sewers, but I did make a really excellent 1600s cassock using a pattern from it that has gotten a lot of compliments as everyday wear!)

it is with great sorrow /j that I replace my pinned PDF post with a little directory so people looking for crab info can find it easily.

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Buy the pattern (tumblr post) | direct link

Interested in commissions?

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Does it have a lining?

More about my process– drafting a pattern and learning to work with leather

One very important thing I want everyone to keep in mind as I go through what this all means is that this doesn’t really impact “famous” writers. The showrunners, the creators, the auteurs, the people you’ve heard of – the majority of this contract is about the MINIMUM concessions for writers, and most of the celebrity writers receive comfortably over minimum. It means a lot to me that they are fighting for us and raising awareness, but this fight is NOT about helping the multi-millionaires you associate with the film and television industry.

This fight is about making sure that writers – regular old writers, 9-to-5 writers, the people whose names you don’t really know but who form the backbone of the writer’s room – are paid enough to make a living. You should want this! If you care about diversity of all kinds in writer’s rooms, you should care about this because if lower-level writers are not paid enough to live, then only people with immense financial privilege are going to be able to take those jobs, and it will have a knock-on effect as people retire and/or move out of higher-level jobs and the only people who have the experience to replace them are those privileged people and so on and so on up the ladder until up and down everyone has been squeezed out.

I’ve seen posts going around with the proposals saved as an image, but I think those can be hard to read and don’t work with screen readers. Instead, I am going to link you to the official list of proposals on the WGA’s strike hub HERE. Click over to it and skim, or follow along in a different tab.

I’m not going to go over every point. Some of it is contract numbers stuff that is just the basic “every cycle we ask for a raise, they counter with a lower number, then we settle somewhere in the middle” that, while useful, is not what we’re really fired up about. Not to say that it’s not important! But I don’t think it’s particularly necessary for the general public to understand the granular details. So I have picked five categories of proposals (the mini-room proposals, streaming residuals, pension & health for teams, artificial intelligence, and the feature proposals) to explain more fully.

As always, my inbox is open for questions. Please note that while I am a member of the WGA, I am NOT on the Board of Directors or Negotiating Committee and do not speak for the WGA. These are just my impressions and opinions. Also if you want to support the strike, the most concrete thing you can do is donate to the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps anyone in the entertainment industry affected by the strike.

Let’s fucking get into it!