#i just think that typesetting sucks

[banqanas]

me @ the process of subbing videos

[anogete]

Hi. Update of random shit in case anyone cares.

The scary test I was stressed over in the fall when I was posting my last fic? It was the CFP (Certified Financial Planner) exam. Yes, I passed it. The designation requires a bachelor's degree, so I had to go back to school to finish my last 10 classes. Then I had to take 7 more classes that are pre-reqs for the exam. Then I spent probably 700 hours attempting to cram everything you could think of related to personal finance (my god, there is a metric shit ton) into my head. The designation also requires 5,000 hours of experience in the planning field (which I thankfully already had). By the time I passed the test, I was no longer proud of the accomplishment, just relieved to have it behind me.

Work was intensely busy in November and December. I got little reading and no writing done.

I have a WIP featuring the Darcy/Rumlow pairing that has been languishing on my computer since 2020. To be honest, I've mosty forgotten what the conflict driving the plot was going to be. I think I was trying to tie it into the events of Wandavision. Took place after the show and had Monica Rambeau and Darcy kinda sorta working together and trying to figure out what, if anything, crossing the barrier that Wanda had thrown up did to them. Of course, Rumlow is alive and scarred and back with the good guys. And also really annoyed that his recent gunshot wound stuck him on desk duty watching the nerds complete their physicals as part of employee onboarding. Darcy doesn't want to have gym class with Rumlow, and Rumlow doesn't want to be there either but he's also kinda into the sassy brunette who tried to sweet talk him into passing her without making her run a mile. In the chapter or two I did write, the banter between Darcy and Rumlow was so fun, so I'd love to go back to it and try to move it along.

I got sucked into reading Draco/Hermione fanfic recently. Blame those damn Snow edits from the latest Hunger Games movie. Guys, I have never read those books or seen the movies, but blonde Tom Blyth is looking like the fanfic Draco of my dreams. How dare. This rabbit hole led to me deciding I needed to write a Dramione piece. It's maybe 6 pages and has gone nowhere even though I have a vague idea of the plot. My muse is struggling.

I found my old folder of all the fic I wrote in the past 20 years. There are still a couple hockey fics I haven't posted to AO3. There are also Anita Blake fics (I was a hardcore Anita/Edward girlie) and Harry Potter fics (don't cancel me but I used to write Snape/Hermione; NO student/teacher stuff though). I think I have an old Doctor Who fic featuring Nine/Rose (yes, I'm a Nine girlie). And a very old Forgotten Realms fic that paired Catti-Brie up with Jarlaxle. Look, I don't know. It was ages ago. With the exception of the hockey fics, I do not think any of these are of the same quality I've posted on AO3, but I've been toying with the idea of trying to clean them up and posting them so more of my work is archived together instead of spread over various fan sites. Does anyone have any interest at all in reading this shit? Like, at all?

I decided 2024 is going to be my book binding era. I bound isthisselfcare's Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love a couple weeks ago. I did all the typesetting with the help of some macros. Printed it, folded the signatures (the booklets that comprise the book), sewed them together with waxed linen thread, glued the text block together with some mull, and used chip board and book cloth to make the case. It feels and looks like a book, y'all! I could do a better job with lining the signatures up when punching the holes for sewing and with the measurements on the case, but overall I am pretty proud of it. If anyone is interested, I can link a nice tutorial series on TT and/or post progress pictures I took during my book binding experiment. I have to say, it's exciting to have the ability to put my fav fanfics on my physical bookshelf.

[swordsmans]

i came out to have a good time and im honestly feeling sooooo attacked right now (we are holding hands and screaming together)

as for progress pics!! i dont have any glamor shots because like all of these are wips but uhhh the perona notepads are gonna be a perona version of these with a red binding compound

the sheets are pressing under some weights rn so i think that counts as progress! (and the new g5 versions have a light purple background instead of white, you can kinda see a test print in the corner lol)

the notebook im sewing is a pink/purple/silver cover version of this one i finished last night! its tri-color on the inside like the one i made for ozo because ive got a lot of fill leftover and it was pretty fun

aaannnnd dani has already seen the syw corpse notebook so i dont mind sharing that haha. what basically happened is i messed up the back cover of her book? but didnt want to waste the material, so i ripped it up and made some minor changes to the cover, then rebuilt it as a notebook!! so its basically a hardcover version of the paperback sketchbooks im making lol. this means i have to start the actual book's cover from scratch though [[wailing]]

and the ao3 stickers look like this, i just need to print more because i stick them in my planner when my friends and fave authors post new fics and there have been so many updates lately ive run out!! (T^T) (this is a very good problem to have lmao)

i dont have any updates on the PP typeset because id get sucked in the minute i opened it i think lol you see why i am in crisis?? i want to be doing all of these things at once. and also start 6544233 new projects because i currently have three more textblocks sewn and painted of other fics that i also need to give time and attention to

truly i live in a hell of my own making (its awesome)

[spockandawe]

Hello, your work is beautiful! Forgive me for I've fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole and I'm not sure if this is an appropriate question, but I was wondering how you gathered and typeset the text for all the danmei/baihe you do? On ao3 there's an epub & other download options, but on most danmei translations I've seen there isn't.

Sorry if this is a silly question or I worded it weirdly! I've been wanting to get into bookbinding for a long time but it seems like such an overwhelming hobby to get into haha

It's plenty appropriate!!! So there's a variety of different methods I've used depending on when I was making the book and how the translations had been shared online. It's kind of a nightmare in how there isn't a one size fits all solution. And after jjwxc did that whole thing about offering to pay (mainland citizens) for translations of novels, a lot of the options got more complicated, unfortunately. And locked google docs are a thing I understand, but I hate them so so so much, I'm in this hobby because The Ephemeral Nature Of Internet Posts And The Looming Fear Of Lost Media, and locked google docs are a nightmare.

(the practical parts of making books are also overwhelming, just because there are so many pieces that go into it and so many ways to do it. I recommend sealemon on youtube as a good place to absorb the basic elements of how a book is assembled, then das bookbinding once you feel like you've outgrown sealemon. or on tumblr there's renegadepublishing as a place to see a lot of other fanbinders post their work, and they also have a number of resources on the process!)

Once or twice, I've functionally retyped a novel. This sucks. I don't recommend it at ALL if you have better options. You almost always have better options.

The usual approach is that I've gone to a website, copied the text chapter by chapter (usually adding footnotes as I go, it's easier to do them four or five at a time than to wrangle like sixty when you have a huge document and 'footnote 1' x30 to place). This is tedious, but meditative. I don't mind putting in the work at all, I frequently harvest ao3 stories that are being turned into anthologies in a similar way.

Some sites are now password-protected. If you have the brain space, identifying groups you're interested in that have sites like this and doing the steps you need to get into their discord group or whatever and have access, that's a GREAT chore to cross off the list. Some groups make this very easy and you can do it on the fly, and some groups are a fucking NIGHTMARE, and it can be hard to tell which is which from the outside.

Some websites have copy protections as well. Some of them will let you copy and paste, but a paragraph or two in the middle will be jumbled up a bit, just a simple cipher. I think it may just be shifting the letters, not even swapping them at random. There may be a coding way to get around this, but I barely know the first thing about coding, so I copy and paste and retype these paragraphs by hand. Some sites bluntly refuse to let you copy and paste, or screenshot, and I resent these sites deeply because a huge part of the fun of reading these things is sharing choice bits with friends to try to bait them into the pit with you. Circle back to this with the same solution as I'm about to get into.

And then there are the locked google docs. At certain points, there have been workarounds, like loading the whole page and then disabling javascript, which lets you select and copy. But last time I tried that, the workaround no longer worked. There are other people who care about this kind of thing, it's a question that comes up on forums, but much like questions about how to break amazon's drm stranglehold on kindle books, old solutions frequently stop working, and I have no idea what the current best practices are.

BIG CAVEAT here, that.... I get it. Translation is hard fucking work, and it's really easy for other people to put in a fraction of the same effort to scrape a translation and repost it. Or worse, sell it. I think translators deserve MASSIVE credit for what they do, and I try to support them the same way I support authors whose books I work with. I don't want to divert any traffic or appreciation from them, but at the same time, I've got google docs, I know it takes about two seconds for me to delete any given document I've ever posted. I am here because I adored mxtx and was very afraid the translations of her books would disappear someday and would be unrecoverable, which is kind of sadlarious in retrospect.

But that worry still applies very much to a lot of other talented authors who haven't been licensed, and hell, it applies to the fan translators who were forced to take the hard work they did for free offline after licenses were secured by someone else! It's a niche community thing, but I witnessed a SCRAMBLE to preserve those documents before they disappeared from public view! I don't think the ExR mdzs translation was perfect, but nuking it from the internet is still a huge loss, and nuking the newer in-progress translations was fucking heartbreaking. It still upsets me to think about that too hard. And for translations tucked behind copy protections, yeah, it's harder for scrapers to steal and repost, but it also becomes so much more difficult for someone with archival intentions to preserve the silly things.

So..... there are sites where free epubs of books can be found for the downloading. I'm not advocating for or against piracy, I passionately do not want to take a moral stance on this, every person has to work it out for themselves. Don't ask me why I own gideon the ninth as a purchased hardcover, audiobook, and kindle book and as an illicit epub and mobi. Maybe I need five copies of one book, don't look at me. But standards for uploading on these sites are kind of lax, and once, I noticed that hey, waitaminnit, these don't look like published translated novels, these look like scraped fan translations. First, they were, second, when jjwxc did the thing, this became much, much more relevant to my workflow.

I'm not going into specifics on my blog, because really, I am very anxious not to divert attention or credit from translators. These ebooks are usually not formatted with much love or care. The footnotes are generally a formatting nightmare or missing completely. When a translator site jumbles the text via copying and pasting, a lot of these don't correct it, there's just a patch of gibberish. The places translators post are usually MUCH more pleasant ways to actually read the goods. But. In the event that the original translator suddenly yoinks their page, if there's that kind of emergency, I can still decode that cipher and reconstruct the original goods. It's not usually PRETTY to format these things, but it's still easier than retyping a whole novel, which I am stubborn enough to do, but I'm pretty sure that's how I killed my last laptop's keyboard.

I won't go into more detail than that on the public-facing part of my blog, but hopefully that's enough to go by! I can answer private questions as well off anon, but I do realize that I should have probably expected questions like this sooner, considering my hobbies XD I wanted to make it very clear why I'm doing this, and elaborate on the tricky line to walk between supporting the fans who do this hard labor for free and (understandably!) don't want their work stolen, and preserving these works so that they can't just disappear overnight. I am constantly aware (and lowkey anxious) that it would be easy for someone unfamiliar to take a glance at what I do and accuse me of being a dirty filthy pirate who's ready to destroy this community with my Thieving Ways, but I have a genuine passion for the archival aspects of this hobby, and it really is a driving force in what I do. Capturing and formatting these cnovel translations isn't easy, and if I wasn't passionate, I would have stopped ages ago. I do it because I think it's important, I think it would be genuinely tragic to lose these stories, or to lose variations on these stories when fan translations are taken down in favor of official ones, and I passionately want to see them preserved.

[three--rings]

Book #11 of Binderary:

(Did the number jump? IDK maybe there's two books tumblr doesn't get to see yet.)

Okay another Book Saga on this one.

This is a collection of my Strangers to Love series of YOI fics. I originally intended this to be a standard half-letter sized book, but decided it'd be a nicer thickness at smaller size and wanted to do something different so I tweaked the fonts a little to be better and made it quarto sized.

Which meant I had to cut my bookboard to size myself, which I gave up as soon as I realized I could order bookboard pre-cut cause that shit sucks. And I did the first version of the case and it was too small. Okay okay, fine. Did it again, and it was great, but I CASED IT IN BACKWARDS AGAIN. I hate myself.

This time I had used wheat paste rather than methyl cellulose so I wasn't able to cleanly separate the endpages and had to cut them. Using a VERY sharp knife and I slice through the cover. FUCK.

Third case and I tried to reuse the board from the previous one but they didn't take my methyl cellulose and PVA mix very well and ended up not sticking and looking bad. But at this point it was almost the end of the month and I wasn't making it a 4th time.

So here.

The series is set in three cities (Sochi, Detroit, and Sapporo) and so I used the skylines of those cities as decoration in the typeset. For the cover I wanted to do something different so I smushed the three skylines together and printed that on the bookcloth along with the title. Which was a pain because trying to get it to all line up across the entire bottom wasn't easy...

The textblock had to be cut to size by hand with a utility knife which was such a pain that I didn't want to give up on it after I'd done it. I smoothed out the edges with a sander. (I need a guillotine before I do more little books really.) The font ended up a little too small for my aging eyes, though it's readable, just not very comfortable.

I may one day redo this as I love the design idea and not the execution but ugh, not anytime soon.

While I'm introspecting, it's interesting to think it's been six entire years since I wrote this. I considered it some of the best fic I've written, but reading bits of it now, I can see so much that I would have written differently now. So I guess I have actually grown as a writer, which is NOT what it feels like.

[silvertsundere]

Silver Talks AniManga (28/07/24)

not much to say up here, but hero will end next week so expect some yappin then (I'll try to keep it short tehe)

Anime

The Elusive Samurai Ep4

still a good ep, despite the lack of sakuga tho I know it's not realistic to always expect that. Also the CG isn't that terrible, even when shown close up like in some shots the ep had, so won't take that much to get used to it. The typesetting on this episode sucked tho, it was a different person from the first 3 eps and it was instantly noticeable. Hopefully they clean it up next week or they get someone different to do it

Manga

My Hero Academia Ch429

well that certainly wasn't the confession scene I wanted but it was still a good scene, I'll just hope they're together if there's a timeskip 🙏 crazy to think there's only 1 more chap left wah

[konstell8]

Was no one going to tell me that my beloved Lorem ipsum text block actually has a rad history and meaning???

So basically in the 1500s people would make little booklets to show off available fonts, and would use bits of old Latin Classics as the placeholder text. (Cause they were popular and cool and Latin was a language that like worked the same amount across the continent or whatever. Bc no one really spoke it but it looked good. Idk.)

That aside, the Lorem ipsum text block doesn't like, mean anything really, even in Latin. But! It's not totally nonsense.

It's actually sort of jumbled together from a Classical Latin text, De finibus bonorum et malorum ("On the ends of good and evil") by Cicero. Maybe someone's cat walked over the printing press or something.

From Wikipedia: "The first two words themselves are a truncation of dolorem ipsum ('pain itself')."

That's??? Fucking metal???

(My beautiful girl "Ain itself." Incredible.)

Wikipedia also has a section that highlights the bits of the text (with translation) that was put into the Lorem ipsum block, and if you read it, it's basically Cicero saying "There's nothing wrong with having nice things just cause it's nice and also there's nothing wrong with avoiding pain because it sucks. Just like, if it gotta be like that, it gotta be like that. Don't be a dumbass." Which is pretty cool of him, I think.

I can't believe I took three whole years of Latin in school and no one told me about this.

anyway my sources are Wikipedia and Britannica, links below if u wanna see for urself

and if u have any more info to add please share it i need to know, it's actually really essential that u tell me about it

[acetechne]

Condensed Milk - A Dirty Money Comic pt 8

[ part 1 ] [ part 2 ] [ part 3 ] [ part 4 ] [ part 5 ] [ part 6 ] [ part 7 ] [ x ] [ part 9 ] [ part 10 ]

Did ya miss me? :)

I had like 75% of this page done before I left the province and got stuck for two months, haha, so I finished some up today. If you could make it to the stream, thanks for coming :) I have the next two pages sort of sketched and typeset, I’m still not 100% happy with the ending on the latest page (and I’ve got an epilogue that I was supposed to finish writing on vacation, oops.)

a great chunk of Ben’s dialogue on this page was contributed by the incorrigible @quatschmachen as well as a certain line of Bertie’s.

This comic would be a lot shorter if Bertie could just suck it up and say “i missed you” but he can’t. it would also be a lot shorter if Ben didn’t like teasing him so much.

I think there’s a contrast in attitudes towards home provinces here that I tried to poke a little, I get the impression in NL it is “yes it’s rough but it’s home so only we are allowed to talk shit about it” and here in AB I think we have the (somewhat American) “love it or leave it” attitude where of course it’s the best place to be and you’re lucky to be here and if you’re suffering it’s your own fault!.

The image behind Ben in the penultimate panel is Moraine Lake - I had it stuck in my head all day and then I realized it’s because it was the random background on my browser extension so I was literally looking at it all day.

[gender-trash]

last november/decemberish i made the egregious mistake of asking my dad if there were any out-of-print technical books he wanted me to print and bind as a christmas gift, especially given that i now have a wide-format printer; turns out the answer was "yes, many," and he sent me three crusty-ass pdfs of which i selected the least crusty.

however

it pains me, deep in my soul, to turn out a work product with my name on it that's That crusty, and some of the photos etc. (originally meant to be full-color) weren't parseable anymore. so i got my grubby hands on a copy of the original via interlibrary loan (there were EXACTLY three copies in the link+ system which covers a bunch of public and university libraries in the bay area, and i ended up with santa clara university's, which was kind of neat because Back In The Day i took a bunch of physics and math classes at SCU) and manually photographed every image in it on my phone (best camera i have). then i spent approximately the week prior to christmas in a deathmarch slog 1. de-skewing, color correcting, and pasting in all the photos in god's worst pdf editing software (xournal++), 2. retyping all the image captions (originally printed in this lovely dark red that got viciously mangled by b&w scanning) and screenshotting them + pasting them in, and 3. for those photos that are sufficiently clean or unimportant that i don't need to edit + paste in replacements, but that have large black areas in them, covering them in semitransparent white rectangles so i don't wind up printing big black areas on my poor inkjet.

needless to say, this is the worst, most tedious process i can think of except for actually re-typing and re-typesetting the entire book in latex, a process which tempts me every time i work on this albatross around my neck. i only got through part 1 of 5 before christmas so i gave my dad a different book (bought from the bookstore, like a loser) and the promise that i would Definitely have it done by his birthday.

and then i stopped working on it for several months because IT SUCKED AND I HATED IT SO MUCH

and then partway through april i was like "oh shit, his birthday is in two weeks". so now every evening is this cold war with myself where sometimes the project wins and i piddle through another section of part 2 and sometimes procrastination wins and i do a medieval twin-cord binding of my immortal. anyway his birthday was technically today but we are celebrating it next week so i have a LITTLE more time to get the bitch done

whenever i complain about it to my dad he's like "just give up!! just print it as-is!" (accompanied by profuse apologies because he didn't mean for me to go to anything like this much effort) and on the one hand it would feel like giving up but on the other hand i would be FREE OF THE ENDLESS TORMENT but on the third hand there would be a VERY visible delineation halfway through the book where you can tell i Just Didn't Care Anymore

[koppiki]

Chapter 18 Released!

I'm in a bit of a weird state with all of this because I'm so far ahead (I just pretty much finished chapter 20 the other day)... it's almost like I've forgotten about these chapters. Like, "wow wasn't this plot point a really long time ago???" but it just hadn't been typeset yet.

Anyways, chapter 18. There's a lot of fun stuff in there! For one, I think my two friendos on the cleaning/redrawing went absolutely HAM on everything here. The sfx are great! I don't know if it's immediately obvious, but we've also started using a ton of new fonts. Hopefully the variety is nice.

Page 48 is a really good example of this-

Wow! How nice! Both in the font variety and in the typesetting.

Speaking of, I think the new font we found for Fuka (as he is a different font in Japanese in much the way Grey is) is really good. It conveys how loud he is without being harder to read/too out of place.

Another side note- I think the typesetting on this panel looks REALLY good. Like, it's so subtle but...

That sort of... y'know, variation? It looks SO NICE! I love making some words bigger (I specifically asked for it here, you see).

Also, if you think the word "humane" is a weird choice... it's all I had! Plus it's a 1:1 translation from Japanese (far as I can tell, there's no differing context between English/Japanese there), so... it's fine. It's supposed to be weird (I believe the strangeness/ill-defined nature of it is mentioned in ch 19?).

Gosh, looking back on it... this chapter has some really nice landscape-ish spreads. Like, just that sense of cluttered-ness is so great.

Shinozaki sure is cute, isn't he?

Look at my beautiful boy here (side note, just learned that you can panel images on Tumblr, as shown above). Yuuyake's so cute, too. What a big dork she is. I love her earnestness too. Gosh, I can't wait to get to volume 6... there's so much GOOD STUFF THERE! SO many good faces, so much good paneling... but I must hold off a bit. Have to revise 19+20 still (I'm sure I made a bunch of mistakes).

Eh, whatever! I'll worry about that when we come to it. Speaking of worrying about things, we've been thinking of redoing a lot of the earlier chapters. Not to be too harsh, but... they kinda suck. Like, not badly, just... they're okay. Not to mention how I'm sure I mistranslated a bunch of stuff. It's okay since it was a learning experience. Getting through all that was necessary!

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve what we did. Might do that after finals.

I've said a good amount here, not that it means much of anything in the end... I just need this outlet so I don't endlessly gush about Shinozaki-kun to literally everyone I know. What a little creature I am, huh?

[1001albumsrated]

#22: Marty Robbins - Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959)

Genre(s): Country

I believe this is the first album in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die to be a meme (or at least I think it's the first, I'm painfully online but not exactly TikTok-pilled so someone 10-15 years younger can chime in if the kids are going wild over Ramblin' Jack Elliott or something). Regardless, it's funny to see this one come full circle. This album did serious numbers in its day (certified platinum!) and almost singlehandedly made Marty enough money to fund his NASCAR career, one he maintained for decades despite not being particularly successful as a racer. (As a complete aside, wouldn't it absolutely rule if celebrities did that today? Imagine if Drake paid his way into playing in the NBA or something and just sucked the whole time. Just a wild thing to conceive.)

Anyways, the album: this is the pop country of the time, and while a far cry sonically from Taylor Swift, et al, it remains very accessible and fairly far removed from the rougher edges of "authentic" country & Western music. Marty Robbins was no cowboy, having grown up in the suburbs of Phoenix in the 20s, but he did grow up around tales of the Wild West in a time when cowboys were superheroes. That being said, the inauthenticity doesn't offend me here. The songs are clearly fictional, pastoralized depictions of the West, but he sings them honestly. There is some great songwriting and storytelling to be had here as well; Big Iron is the obvious standout in retrospect (and, of course, the meme song), but El Paso was the lead single at the time and did serious numbers, running up both the pop and country charts.

By pure serendipity I bought a copy of this album on LP a few months before starting this project. My copy is a fairly unexceptional 70s repress, but this isn't exactly an audiophile recording so I didn't think it was worth my time and money to seek out an original. It's not an album I'm in the mood for all the time, but it's a fun listen and I'm happy to have a copy of it around.

Also, because somehow I made it this far without mentioning it, I like the graphic design of the cover a lot, despite its slight tackiness. It's simple, but the color is eye-catching, the photography has a nice motion to it, and the typesetting is simple but effective. I enjoy a complex design, but sometimes simple is iconic; it makes for something memorable here.

That brings us to the big question: MUST you hear Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs before you die? I think so. My patience for pop country (of any era) is very, very thin, and this is one of the few crossover albums I think is really worth the time. Country isn't really my "home field" so I won't soapbox too much on what did and didn't make the cut, but I know enough to know there are some odd exclusions in a similar vein to what's missing in jazz (as previously mentioned, Hank Williams is a particularly obvious missing link), so it's a little hard to stomach a crossover album being included with some core essentials missing. But in a vacuum I have no gripes about this being here, and I think from a historical perspective it's useful to see what did well in the mainstream, particularly when it has enough staying power to stand on its own two legs musically if you choose not to consider its commercial success. That's a lot of words to say check this one out; it's a lot of fun and you may find yourself liking it even if you're one of those awful "everything but rap and country" people.

Next up: another jazz classic, with Dave Brubeck's Time Out!

[frogsandfries]

I better get holiday pay tomorrow.

I'm exhausted today, and I took a nap. I did, however, not die of food poisoning like I thought I might (do not ask, I will not elucidate further than to say, food is expensive).

I had to reprint the Life Debt Ritual because I forgot to hit 'duplex' when I ran it through the book binder. Oh well, there is no wasted paper on this house.

Though......... I've gotta say, paper making moved to like the bottom of my list when I had to start paying for my insurance.......I was thinking I might use a fine nylon screen and a layer of cheese cloth? But really, I need some kind of tarp and a small card table for the patio. And my deckle. I want a very specific 8.5×5.5 deckle because I'm thinking about just using my recycled paper for my sketchbooks. But I have ample paper, a blender, buckets and basins.

I have to find a new credit union. The one I've been using sucks.

I'm going to finish, or try to finish, proofing Mirrors this week, before typesetting any further. I know I took a week off for DoT, and it was a good break--I tried some new typesetting stuff that I brought over to Mirrors, and spent all evening cleaning that up--but I still need to finish getting my word counts to figure out where I'm splitting the book. I just hit four hundred pages, though I'm wondering where I skipped some page numbers lol. The tricky part is, these later chapters get bigger and bigger, and the changes that I made to my formatting are a little more generous with my margins.

I also think I have some thoughts on embroidering the spine for Manacled. This whole thing kinda started with Manacled, and here I am shoulders deep in typesetting and printing--everything but getting my text blocks into covers. It's fine, I can't afford cover fabric anyway. I guess my problem is wanting to be a fancy bitch about it and use a different pattern for every cover.

I'm getting this bright yellow, cheap book cloth off Amazon for my sister and I'm putting her books in dust jackets. Eventually, one of these years, I'll probably eventually buy some fabric medium. Although, I'm terrible at painting imo.

I'm just not really sure how to decorate the book covers. A dust jacket feels kinda lazy. Isn't the point of hand-making books to put some life and personality into it? But my personality has always been very......sparse, minimal? Like, I never really doodled in my notebooks or on tests or even on the covers of my binders or notebooks. I didn't see the point. At least for Manacled, I'd like to do something shadow-box-y/3D-y for the covers and paste the summary onto the back, but what's the best adhesive for that? Yes Paste? Rubber cement? Do I still give them dust jackets for protective purposes?

All I can really do is take the covering process one book at a time--and make sure I have plenty of grey board or davey board.

[deanisbisexual]

i would like to formally apologize to misha collins for making fun of the cover of his poetry book. after spending the entire afternoon typesetting [redacted] i have tried designing the exterior of the book and i’m ashamed by the results lmao

[dq-journal]

undefined

Hi there! Kind of off topic but kind of on?

I have been interested in translating a lot of DQ Media that a lot of people just...haven’t. Let’s be real the DQ fandom is not as big in the West as it is in JP and I did not really get that until I moved to a more American neighborhood.

So, in all honesty, I would like to get back into translations works, and on that note going to school again. I would only need to take maximum four classes, which in all honesty is not bad for schooling.

Where does the announcement part come in? Well, I need to pay for school, because I am not going for a degree or a certificate of any sorts I cannot use government financial aid (which sucks because I have literally exactly how much I need there) In order to fix that I am taking translations requests, edit / tumblr banner requests, and art requests. Its kind of a really big deal for me, I feel really weird going back to school at 30 and would like to get it over and done with, it feels like I am so out of place.

So, send me what it is you need ! Any little bit helps, so it doesn’t matter how tiny the request is. Please note! That if you are asking me to translate more than a paragraph of text you do need to outright commission me for translations

https://ko-fi.com/robotpigeons

                                                 Q and A

What Languages Do You Speak?

I speak Japanese first, which is why you may notice some translation issues with my English, please forgive me. But I live in America and have spoken English for about 15 years!

Will You Translate a Whole Manga

❌❌❌❌ Nope nope nope. I will not. While I can translate it, it takes cleaning, typesetting and all sorts of work that I simply cannot do with the time that I have. So unless you are bringing on a team for me, I will not. What If I Have a Team?

That would have to be discussed one on one honestly, I do not quite like tumblr translation teams, have not had the best of interacting with them. I don’t like being made fun of for my english and that tends to happen... a lot here. So, one on one maybe, please message me and we can discuss.

Do you take art commissions?

I do! I also will make a small slime for any donations that come through the ko-fi! Right now all work is digital, while I do have a lot of physical works as well shipping is not the greatest in my area and is honestly not cost effective to the buyer.

What if I have other questions? Honestly, I do not get a lot of actual questions or responses to my things here so you are welcome to message me or send in an ask. Asks don’t actually pop up for notifications for me, so it ay be a second before I get to it.

So why not just get an actual degree or certificate?

In all honesty, I have been through college twice. I did not think there was any point in me taking 10 art classes for a medical degree and no point in 3 geology classes for a music degree. I disagree strongly with them wasting my money. I want to learn the things that actually matter to me and what will apply to me, not 1300000000 math classes for a translation degree.

More than that? There is not actually a college near me that offers what I need, and I strongly do not trust online get a certificate here sort of things. Soooo yeah that’s about it?

I hope you will consider commissioning me! Right now I would like dragon quest content to commission but I am willing to take SMALL works for other fandoms. Please do not send me whole pages of novels or an entire manga...

[lalaurelia]

2021 Fic in Review

It's more than a month overdue, but whatever. Getting sick and bonking my head pretty hard ought to give me some leeway.

So, let's see how 2021 was for my writing.

total number of completed stories: 1 game, 5 fics, 3 fics in collab. Game's a collab too, but since all the text and game code in it are mine, I'm counting it.

total word count: 22123 words, not counting the collabs. If we're throwing WIPs into this, that's about 15K more. Oh, and there are also stories I've only written in Russian, that's prolly about 4K more. A lot of writing, and not much to show for it, huh XD

fandoms written in: Gotham and Gobblepot. I've a one-track mind.

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected? I always hope to be writing more. But the past year has been difficult and a little soul-sucking, so I'm counting any writing I've done during it as a major win. And, like, I didn't expect to be making a game, which was a very fun and interesting experience that I really hope to repeat someday.

what’s your own favorite story of the year? I don't have any particularly strong feelings about any of the written ones... except maybe the Halloween WIP. But I'm really happy with how the game turned out.

did you take any writing risks this year? The game, really. I've always loved games, I've always wanted to make one of my own. This one is a bit of a testing sample, seeing what was possible, what I could do with it considering plot/relationship/game mechanics. I now know more and could tackle something bigger and more complex.

As for fics... no. I'm trying ways of writing that are new to me, but I don't consider them risks, that's just experimenting. No one but myself would probably notice anything XD

do you have any fanfic or profit goals for the new year? Finish at least some of the WIPs. Maybe print some of my oldies in a book form, but page layouts and typesetting are very fiddly, so I'm not sure how well that would go.

best story of the year? One day I will figure out what "best" is. If it's best written, I don't have one. It's a WIP. It's prolly always gonna be a WIP lol

most popular story of the year? The game and Nothing But Roses share the top spot~

story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: To be honest, I expected Swimming Lessons to be accepted a little better. But oh well. It's not like I can affect readers' preferences.

most fun story to write: It's either the game or I'm shutting up about it XD

story with the single sexiest moment: Well, Black and Gold is alright as things go. But you know it by now. It's either the game, or a WIP lol

sweetest story: Stubborn String. It's kind of based on a memory I find sweet, so.

“holy crap, thats wrong, even for you!” story: You know what, I'll never have anything for this one, because there are no wrong things to write about. It's fiction. There may be something wrong about the execution of your theme and the way some things are addressed, but nothing a person with critical thinking can't get over.

story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters & most unintentionally telling story: The Halloween WIP. Funny, how Jim and Oswald still manage to surprise me when I write about them. I love this.

hardest story to write: That's another WIP. I'm not sure I even want to finish it, to be honest, but... I suppose I should, as a challenge, because it expands on the idea that I do not like. I just. I don't see much point to it other than I've promised I would write it. I've somewhat conflicted feelings about it.

biggest disappointment: Wanted to finish WIPs. Ended up too overworked to write consistently.

biggest surprise: The game. I loved it. I'm amazed we made it. It was difficult in a very satisfying way. On the not game-related note, I'm just happy I'm trying new writing things, they do urge me to write a little more.

I'm not sure who to tag, but if you see this and want to give it a go (if you haven't already), do it, and feel free to tag me :) I'd love to see how other writers tackle this stuff.

[shih-coulda-had-it]

20/29 platonic nanahiko

20/29. [Platonic] Carrying while half-asleep and crawling into bed | Nana & Sorahiko | WC: 1,203

//

Sky High Agency’s spare cot had been outfitted for a single individual of average height.

If a person surpassing two hundred centimeters needed a nap, then they crammed themselves against the wall and hoped for sleep to take them before the crick in their neck did. Whoever did choose to doze off in the back room inevitably woke up within the hour, skin chilled (thin blanket) and bones creaky (hard mattress). The lack of comfort in this set-up originated from a youthful, well-intentioned mind fighting a lazy, cynical one.

If you couldn’t sleep on the bed, then you wouldn’t sleep on the bed!

A lose-lose situation all around for the towering pro-heroes of Sky High.

This was the first issue that came to Gran Torino’s mind when thinking about the agency.

Well, no. The real first issue was Shimura’s recent habit of working herself into an early grave. Her productivity had skyrocketed since the death of her husband, but all that busy work had a drawback. Instead of Sorahiko snoozing at his desk, it was Nana, head bent and pen held lax in her gloved fingers.

He didn’t have the heart to tease.

As quietly as he could, he left his desk and their secluded office space to check that all their civilian staffers had clocked out. Toshinori had been promptly bullied out by nine o’clock, so Sorahiko was confident that no bright-eyed, solemn-voiced teenager would be present to lecture his mentors’ approach to self-care. Still, sometimes the more soft-hearted civilians relayed their concerns to the agency’s single intern, forgetting that Toshinori was only sixteen and ill-equipped to save his mentors.

Sorahiko returned to Shimura’s side, bent a little, and jostled her elbow. He said, “Work is over.”

She mumbled something like, “I work for life.”

He restrained himself from snorting, but endeavored to at least get her sitting upright. Shimura was heavy, from her muscles to her hair to her head, and she groaned in protest over the movement. She butted her forehead into his ribs. Idly, Sorahiko plucked the pen from her grasp and set it on the table. Next week’s forms were next week’s problems.

“I don’t want to go home,” Shimura complained.

“I’m not hauling you to mine.”

“Pft. Stingy.” Shimura stood and leaned against Sorahiko, who expected the weight and received none, because Shimura used Float to hang off his cape.

“Hey,” he warned, watching her feet lift off the floor. Shimura tugged, inched higher, swung herself sideways and lifted her legs.

Noting her sly smile, Sorahiko immediately clued into her idea of a bridal carry.

He shifted her into a fireman’s lift just as her weight returned. Canceling Float so abruptly caused Sorahiko to stagger; Shimura yelped and kneed Sorahiko’s chest, one fist flying down to thump against the small of his back.

“Drag me back in public like this and I’ll beat you up!”

“Oh no,” Sorahiko deadpanned, turning for the door. He heard her furious yawn. “You and what burst of adrenaline?”

“Jet-head—!” The crack of another yawn. A sullen silence followed, no witty retort answering his question. Sorahiko managed to exit into the hallway when Shimura admitted, “The house is so empty, Sorahiko.”

He stilled.

“I had to clean up Kotarou’s crayons. He didn’t believe me about packing up what he loved because he wouldn’t be able to come back and get it,” she rambled. “And then I had to cook dinner, and as bad as I was a cook for my family, it really is worse cooking for myself. Kinda sucks having to rate my own cooking a six out of ten.”

He exhaled, sharp. The glass doors of the entrance reflected two underpaid, overworked pro-heroes, one in need of a serious recharge. Sorahiko decided to open the spare room and brought them both into the cramped area with its single shitty cot and multiple filing cabinets.

“Sorahiko?” Shimura questioned.

Sorahiko set her on her feet. Brusquely, he said, “Catch a few hours here. I’ll wait.”

“Huh?” She cast a wary look at the cot, no doubt regretting her brash decision to deprive her best friend of all that was good in the world.

Then she shrugged, and unclipped her cape. That, her boots and her gloves, were all discarded, deposited on top of those dusty filing cabinets. Shimura yanked her hair tie out, shook out those long tresses, and stared back at Sorahiko.

She lifted an eyebrow, as if to say, ‘Well?’

“I’ll finish up a few papers,” said Sorahiko. He pointed at the cot. “Try and get an hour.”

“Ha,” she said, because she knew even fifteen uninterrupted minutes on the cot was a miracle. But she obliged; Shimura perched on the edge of the mattress, still a giant in her diminished state. “See you in an hour.”

Sorahiko inclined his head and crossed back over the hallway, determined to tidy up something. A paper for his teaching credential program, a permit for next month’s investigation outside the prefecture, or even the permission slips Toshinori kept ferrying to their office. He assumed they were permission slips. Maybe the brat was getting them to sign away the agency to his inheritance.

In the span of one hour, Sorahiko went loopy.

He didn’t like being sleep-deprived. That was why he tried to overcorrect with too much sleeping, despite Recovery Girl’s emphatic advice to not do that.

Characters began to blur, and his handwriting grew sloppy, more chicken-scratch than typeset. When Sorahiko caught his pen trailing into the ‘Leave Unfilled/Marked for Administration’ box, he deemed the night over and levered himself out of his chair.

“Hell,” he muttered, blinking at the spinning room. How late was it? Hopefully Shimura already slipped out of the office, but the likelihood of her doing that without alerting him would be… well, it would be high. Sorahiko tended to get tunnel vision once he got in the groove.

He stumbled into the hallway. A short nap. That was all he needed.

Peeking inside the spare room revealed Shimura’s continued occupation of the cot, but at this point, Sorahiko was going to settle for sitting on the floor and using the mattress as neck support. He circled around, shedding his gloves and his mask, stashing them with Shimura’s.

“What time is it?” Shimura sleepily asked.

“Late.”

“Mm. Get in here,” she mumbled. Her hand grasped the edge of his cape. Sorahiko, dazed and too tired to argue for his right to the cot, agreeably crawled on top of her. His limbs went for whatever space was available, which wasn’t much. His head nestled face-down; he crammed it between her shoulder and head. Shimura yelped.

“Hush,” said Sorahiko into the mattress. Oh, he always forgot the lack of pillow. This cot sucked.

“You’re squishing me.”

“Ugh.” Grumpily, he slid sideways and wedged himself between her and the wall, shoving at her until she also went on her side. Before she could yell about betrayal and falling off the edge, Sorahiko hooked his arm over her stomach and held Shimura close. “Better?”

“Boots.”

“Deal with it.”

“Gross,” Shimura sighed, and obligingly reached back and pulled Sorahiko’s cape over their chests, kicking the thin blanket down to cover their lower halves.