I don't like it when people assume or call ugky people pretty and are surprised that ugly people are actually ugly and nkt some insecure godess. I hate it when people call me pretty because they lie to my face. It makes me look pathetic. I am pathetic, but i don't want to look like that. People who call me ugly act like i don't know it, as if i don't have to look at myself every single day. I try to make myself prettier so people ignore my ugly insides but my insides shine through, ao i try to make my insides prettier but people ignore my pretty insides because im so ugly on the outside, so my insides turn butter and shit and look ugly. I'm not cute ugly, I'm not hot ugly, I'm not internet ugly, I'm ugly. And i try to ignore that and ':3!! :D!' Or talk to bots
the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.
capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.
now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.
and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.
and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.
and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".
it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"
Any tips on learning to make buttonholes? I've been putting it off for.... *checks notes* like three years.... but better late than never and all that. I don't have any fancy machines so I gotta do it by hand but that seems right up your alley.
Thanks!
It IS up my alley, yes, I do most of my buttonholes by hand!
I'm actually part way through filming an 18th century buttonhole tutorial, but I expect it'll be a few more weeks before I finish that and put it on the youtubes, so in the meantime here's the very very short version. (The long version is looking like it'll probably be about 40 minutes maybe, judging by how much script I've written compared to my last video?)
Mark your line, a bit longer than your button is wide. I usually use a graphite mechanical pencil on light fabrics, and a light coloured pencil crayon on dark ones. (I have fabric pencils too, but they're much softer and leave a thicker line.)
You may want to baste the layers together around all the marked buttonholes if you're working on something big and the layers are shifty and slippery. I'm not basting here because this is just a pants placket.
Do a little running stitch (or perhaps a running backstitch) in fine thread around the line at the width you want the finished buttonhole to be. This holds the layers of fabric together and acts as a nice little guide for when you do the buttonhole stitches.
Cut along the marked line using a buttonhole cutter, or a woodworking chisel. Glossy magazines are the best surface to put underneath your work as you push down, and you can give it a little tap with a rubber mallet if it's not going through all the way.
I'm aware that there are some people who cut their buttonholes open using seam rippers, and if any of them are reading this please know that that is abhorrent behaviour and I need you to stop it immediately. Stop it.
Go get a buttonhole cutter for 10 bucks and your life will be better for it. Or go to the nearest hardware store and get a little woodworking chisel. This includes machine buttonholes, use the buttonhole cutter on them too. If you continue to cut open buttonholes with a seam ripper after reading this you are personally responsible for at least 3 of the grey hairs on my head.
Do a whipstitch around the cut edges, to help prevent fraying while you work and to keep all those threads out of the way. (For my everyday shirts I usually do a machine buttonhole instead of this step, and then just hand stitch over it, because it's a bit faster and a lot sturdier on the thin fabrics.)
I like to mark out my button locations at this point, because I can mark them through the holes without the buttonhole stitches getting in the way.
For the actual buttonhole stitches it's really nice if you have silk buttonhole twist, but I usually use those little balls of DMC cotton pearl/perle because it's cheap and a good weight. NOT stranded embroidery floss, no separate strands! It's got to be one smooth twisted thing!
Here's a comparison pic between silk buttonhole twist (left) and cotton pearl (right). Both can make nice looking buttonholes, but the silk is a bit nicer to work with and the knots line up more smoothly.
I've actually only used the silk for one garment ever, but am going to try to do it more often on my nicer things. I find the cotton holds up well enough to daily wear though, despite being not ideal. The buttonholes are never the first part of my garments to wear out.
I cut a piece of about one arm's length more or less, depending on the size of buttonhole. For any hole longer than about 4cm I use 2 threads, one to do each side, because the end gets very frayed and scruffy by the time you've put it through the fabric that many times.
I wax about 2cm of the tip (Not the entire thread. I wax the outlining/overcasting thread but not the buttonhole thread itself.) to make it stick in the fabric better when I start off the thread.
I don't tend to tie it, I just do a couple of stabstitches or backstitches and it holds well. (I'm generally very thorough with tying off my threads when it comes to hand sewing, but a buttonhole is basically a long row of knots, so it's pretty sturdy.)
Put the needle through underneath, with the tip coming up right along that little outline you sewed earlier. And I personally like to take the ends that are already in my hand and wrap them around the tip of the needle like so, but a lot of people loop the other end up around the other way, so here's a link to a buttonhole video with that method. Try both and see which one you prefer, the resulting knot is the same either way.
Sometimes I can pull the thread from the end near the needle and have the stitch look nice, but often I grab it closer to the base and give it a little wiggle to nestle it into place. This is more necessary with the cotton than it is with the silk.
The knot should be on top of the cut edge of the fabric, not in front of it.
You can put your stitches further apart than I do if you want, they'll still work if they've got little gaps in between them.
Keep going up that edge and when you get to the end you can either flip immediately to the other side and start back down again, or you can do a bar tack. (You can also fan out the stitches around the end if you want, but I don't like to anymore because I think the rectangular ends look nicer.)
Here's a bar tack vs. no bar tack sample. They just make it look more sharp, and they reinforce the ends.
For a bar tack do a few long stitches across the entire end.
And then do buttonhole stitches on top of those long stitches. I also like to snag a tiny bit of the fabric underneath.
Then stick the needle down into the fabric right where you ended that last stitch on the corner of the bar tack, so you don't pull that corner out of shape, and then just go back to making buttonhole stitches down the other side.
Then do the second bar tack once you get back to the end.
To finish off my thread I make it sticky with a bit more beeswax, waxing it as close to the fabric as I can get, and then bring it through to the back and pull it underneath the stitches down one side and trim it off.
In my experience it stays put perfectly well this way without tying it off.
Voila! An beautiful buttonholes!
If you want keyhole ones you can clip or punch a little rounded bit at one end of the cut and fan your stitches out around that and only do the bar tack at one end, like I did on my 1830's dressing gown.
(I won't do that style in my video though, because they're not 18th century.)
Do samples before doing them on a garment! Do as many practice ones as you need to, it takes a while for them to get good! Mine did not look this nice 10 years ago.
Your first one will probably look pretty bad, but your hundredth will be much better!
Edit: Video finished!
youtube
And here's the blog post, which is mostly a slightly longer version of this post.
Okay so, I fully agree that q!Bagi is not obligated to stick by Cellbit or watch over him- and that it's healthy for her to grow closer to other people who make her feel happy and focusing on them could really help her start to heal from years of trauma she's gone though. I'm all for her finding people that feel like family when her brother doesn't right now. She is so much more then just his sister.
... but I don't agree with the common take that q!Cellbit doesn't care about her- I just don't think it's fair to take the way he's acting lately as truly reflective of how he feels towards the others, his mental health is at it's lowest, he's lashing out in self-destructive ways, and hasn't really had a moment to just take-in and process everything he's learned about the past that was taken from him with all the other stressful garbage going on. 'Course none of that is to say the weight of how he's treating people like his sister (and the others) should just be ignored and it's fully up to them to decide if they still want him around or not- I just don't agree with writing him off as not caring for her.
It's a painful, messy, complicated situation... but he knows she's been hurting for a long time- and I still believe that him hunting down fed members is as much for him as it is for her and everyone else whose been hurt by them even if Bagi openly hates what he's doing. He may not want to admit it, but I think he does care about her deep down- and he wants to push her away like everyone else (who isn't Baghera) right now.
I don't know if they'll ever be able to be a 'family' again let alone as close as they once were, but I think there's still some hope left that they can make something work... maybe.
... I also don't think she's ever going to truly 'give-up' on him because Bagi is simply a VERY determined person and not one to let her dummy little brother tell her what to do lol
thing about deltora quest that only occurred to me in hindsight is not only just how much jasmine carries the entire party on this quest but also how genre-defyingly brutal she is lol. like, this is a kid's series that hinges on riddles and puzzles far more heavily than combat - even when deaths occur, they're often the result of cleverness in some way rather than straight up combat ability. that said, let's look at the villain kill count at the end of book five of eight of the first series:
- lief: 1 - even there it's with a well-thrown bottle of cursed water rather than his sword.
- barda: 0 - i'm not counting that one unnamed sand beast, that's an animal not a villain.
- filli: 0 - he is a squirrel, this is unsurprising.
- kree: 1 - killed an invincible sorceress all by himself, good bird best friend.
- jasmine: 5 - dropped a tree branch on a mf, drowned two cannibals in quicksand, cut a giant snake's throat, shoved a dude down a pipe full of toxic mold (after having to be told not to cut his throat while he slept jfc).
idk it just suddenly struck me as really funny how this one character who isn't the protagonist is almost from a different, far more brutal story, and uses that fact to consistently be the mvp and save everyone else's asses. i need to read this series again it's been too long.
dropped a new t-shirt w rawpaw for their "dreams" challenge & the dream is LANDBACK WORLDWIDE 🖤
I present to you this sigil against capitalist realism (AKA the worst idea in human history: that an earth under capitalism is the only way for humanity to function.)
a different world is not only possible - it’s hundreds of years overdue.
shirt can be found HERE. 100% cotton, screenprinted in texas <3 grateful for any shares w folks you think may fw it.
decolonial symbolism breakdown & image description is below the cut~
a multipanel white illustration against a black background.
TOP L: a night flying moth with the words "LANDBACK" - reps change, fluidity, & adaptation (read up on the evolution of the peppered moth - so cool!)
TOP R: a shining blade with the words "WORLDWIDE" - a tool of farmers everywhere (the machete, Indian aruval, Filipino bolo, Afro-Caribbean panga) & global symbol of decolonialism
CENTER: a huge baobab tree with people dancing & gathering fruit underneath. its roots crush military weapons long buried underground - a tree of great spiritual significance across continental Africa & Australia, long used as gathering places, sites of shelter, abundance, and resilience in difficult climates.
BOTTOM L: flowers grow from tear gas grenades - based on Subhiyah Abu Rahma's garden, in memory of her son Bassem, unalived in 2009 when an IOF soldier launched one into his chest. bc “less than lethal” weap0ns will always be lethal in the hands of fasc1sts
BOTTOM RIGHT: a panther pushes out from a lush forest, gazing at the viewer - represents the human rights past generations have fought for, a reminder to not let down one’s guard, to never forget past struggles even if we live in relative comfort, and to never settle for anything less than total liberation. & lastly
BOTTOM CENTER: an orca sinking a yacht - because... well, I trust you get it by now.
smth smth about 'the thing that the character did that you thought was rly rly funny in the moment is actually linked to a terrible trauma that lies within said character.' or wahtever.
sadfrin! my take on him!! a special guy!! definitely not posting this for any suspicious reasons! no fic related reasons! on a totally unrelated note did you know i have an ao3? under the same name as my tumblr??
Oscurucho: Welcome back, brother.
Cucurucho: What.
Oscurucho: Not even a "Good morning"? How cold.
Here's Cucurucho and Oscurucho's long lore conversation from yesterday! The entire conversation lasted about 8 minutes, but most of that time was just silence between each exchange, so I edited out the long pauses and got it down to ~3 minutes. I also fixed the audio levels and added subtitles since I personally find it difficult to understand Oscurucho sometimes :'D
I hope folks find this helpful!
[ Subtitle Transcript ↓ ]
-
Oscurucho: Welcome back, brother.
Cucurucho: What.
Oscurucho: Not even a "Good morning"? How cold.
[They enter Cucurucho's office]
Oscurucho: I wanted to see if you're still as rigid in your beliefs as ever. You see, I've been thinking about our... Let's call it "philosophical divergence." You stand for order, for predictability. But where's the fun in that? You see, brother, while you build, I ponder the beauty in tearing down. It's not just destruction - it's rebirth. A chance to remake things in a more... thrilling image.
[...]
Oscurucho: You once had a backbone for our cause. Now, I see a softness in you, a sentimental weakness for those Eggs. Mere experiments, and yet - they've softened you.
Cucurucho: Your vision obstructs the path to perfection. You fail to understand the potential of the Eggs.
Oscurucho: Potential? They're but catalysts for change - for revolution. Without them, stagnation reigns.
[...]
Oscurucho: You chase perfection, I embrace the beauty of flaws. Your world is one of order, mine thrives in chaos. You wish for everything to run smoothly, I dream of watching it all burn to the ground. We may share a name, but our souls are worlds apart. All your efforts, all for what? Mere acknowledgment from a Duck who told you to do it? Imagine the possibilities - rather, show me where it is, and I'll do the rest.
[...]
Oscurucho: Speaking of possibilities, I couldn't help but notice how easily others can access the island. It seems your security measures aren't as impenetrable as you think.
Cucurucho: No. My island's vulnerabilities are of your own making. Do not mistake restraint for ignorance.
Oscurucho: Pity. But then again, I never really needed your approval. Just consider: Cucurucho - in your quest for order, have you not sown the seeds of your own undoing? Do you genuinely trust all your Federation minions?
Cucurucho: ...
Oscurucho: Perhaps it's time you question not just my intentions, but those who you believe stand with you.
Cucurucho: That is none of your business, I shall say. Now, leave me alone and try to disturb someone else.