#now i just got to put it all together and then into a pdf and i can put it up on my ko-fi store

[riveluart]

⏳️

[gender-trash]

(i am seriously late in posting about this due to The Problems BUT whatever! its here now!!)

somewhere around late november 2022, i asked my dad "hey are there any out of print technical books you'd like a reprint of for christmas?"

he linked me to a dubious black-and-white pdf of Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. now, i wound up checking out a copy through link+, and the original edition is a really nicely put together book! the chapters are themed around various types of measurements (length, angle, etc), and they all have these cute little diagrams which the endpapers reuse in a lil repeating pattern... the image captions are done in this really lovely dark red that did not scan for SHIT... tons and tons of diagrams and illustrations and images (both color and b&w)... just, all around, a fucking nice book!! (see also @morrak's post about it here.)

and that made me feel kind of bad about the crappiness of the pdf, which is where the Problems began. i used my phone to take pictures of all the photos and color diagrams in the original and went about replacing them in the pdf, using what turned out to be the world's worst pdf editing software (i also got through replacing all the image captions in chapter 1 of 5 before my dad convinced me to give up). i did NOT finish the pdf editing before christmas 2022 (i was going somewhat off the deep end, because both my housemates were away visiting family and i had zero external structure in my life so it was just me and my cat and this stupid FUCKING pdf wrecking my sleep schedule together); i poked away at it for most of the rest of my time off and then got so goddamn sick of it i put the project away for months. "it'll be a birthday gift instead", i said optimistically (my dad's birthday is in april! it should have been enough time!)

gentle readers, i did not finish the pdf editing by april. mostly because it was such a miserable slog that i put it off until the last possible moment and then tried to make up for it with another death march.

hating both myself and the project again, i decided i was Not going to let myself typeset Anything Else before it was done, and then took a break to bind my immortal (using the renegade publishing typeset! i didn't do any typesetting!!). SURELY, i said, i can finish this in time for christmas 2023.

i'm sure you know where this is going.

in my defense i DID finish the pdf editing by christmas, despite first doing every other possible procrastination project (including a second edition of the little second century warlord book), because by this point my dad had managed to convince me to lower my standards. on the evening of the 22nd i kicked off the print job and said to myself "this will finish printing overnight and then tomorrow i can work on sewing the textblock!"

late on the 23rd, after lots of babysitting and using at least one cartridge of every color ink in my printer, the print job was finally done. (my sweet and lovely cat wants SO BADLY to hunt and stalk the printer while it is printing -- more specifically, the printed pages, i think because they tend to make noise and move and then STOP moving. for this reason, the printer is kept in the craft room, because the cat can be shut out of the craft room and thus prevented from chewing on the pages when i have an all-day book printing job going. unfortunately the craft room was also being pressed into service as a guest room at the time so 80% of the floor space was consumed by an air mattress which i had to repeatedly trip over in order to reach the printer and replace the ink cartridges.)

then i went to my parents' house on the 24th and 25th and apologized to my dad (again) for not having the book finished. but this worked out well because we finished putting together my awesome new book clamp:

(the feet still aren't done being painted so they're just dry-fit on for now but you can still clamp books in it and that's what matters!!)

i came home, sewed the textblock (french link stitch over four linen tapes, with sewn endbands made of variegated embroidery floss over linen cord, and kozo paper glued over the spine)

... and promptly realized i SHOULD HAVE PUT IN MORE OF A GUTTER because some of the text was getting reeeeeeal close to the spine. "it's fine!" i said. "i just have to make sure it lays flat!! what better time than to try out K118 binding, a technique i have literally never done before and which people on the bookbinding discord notoriously have a hard time pulling off first try! i even have tyvek tape for it!"

so it turns out that tyvek tape isn't actually tyvek with glue on it, it's tape FOR attaching pieces of tyvek TO EACH OTHER, which maybe i could have guessed if i'd done even the slightest amount of research or planning. at this point i think it was the 27th and i was still angling to get this thing done by new year's, so no time to order Actual Tyvek.

fortunately, i had ALSO received An Package in the mail with yarn for a totally unrelated knitting project... shipped in a tyvek envelope.

i peeled all the shipping labels and stickers off my tyvek envelope, cut that shit up, and glued it on there.

and THEN it was time for gluing on covers, which i thought was going to be easy because i had actually thought ahead and ordered materials (specifically acid-free museum board), except when i cracked open the box of museum board i decided i Didn't Like It because the surface was too soft and easily dented, so i glued onto it the too-thin board material i'd previously been using (so that the cardboard goes on the outside of the book). this worked super well (the cardboard stuff has a tendency to curl up from the glue moisture, but the museum board doesn't!) and i'll probably use it on other stuff in the future.

i thought the blue bookcloth i used was kind of boring but i showed my dad the available cloth options and he really liked it, so... what do you know? i cut the piece i used on the back cover very slightly too short but it wound up being covered by the leather, so you can barely tell.

and the leather... a scrap just baaaaarely big enough from my bag of leather scraps from discount fabrics... and this the first time i'd ever attempted to put leather on a book... AND YET the only complaint i have is that i didn't manage to put an even amount on the front and back. it's reasonably square and straight!! amazing!!

i am super super happy with how this project came out (especially given the number of problems i encountered) and oh my god check out how much the spine bends

AND, AS A NEW YEAR'S PRESENT, I FINALLY MANAGED TO GIVE IT TO MY DAD

[sprintingowl]

Tales Of Crystals

Hey in the early 90s Hasbro put out a tabletop roleplaying larp for tween girls called Tales Of The Crystals, and there's a lot going on here, so I want to talk about it.

First, I want to give credit to @riseupcomus on twitter for doing a thread on it first. Riseup's thread is linked at the bottom, right after hasbro's pdf of Tales Of Crystals.

Now, what is Tales Of Crystals? Well, it's a journaling game. And it's an indie TTRPG. And it's a larp kit. And it's an audio game. And it's a cryptography kit.

It comes with its own map, rulebook, a cassette tape with multiple scenarios, a non-dice-based resolution system, four player roles, and a ruleset that's split up so that each of the four players is in charge of a different part.

If feels like a high concept, big swing indie title from 2024, but it's got thirty years worth of jump on the modern scene.

The basic premise is that the players are crystal bearers in the court of a fantasy kingdom, and there's an evil nation in the goblin swamp next door, and they have to guard the nation against treachery and ensorcellment and whatnot. It's not super duper fresh, but with how many things the game is juggling it's extremely reasonable that the plot's a little plain.

Each player's crystal comes with a power, and the powers are asymmetrical. The Leader gets the Crystal Of Shimmering Ice, which lets you oneshot enemies (nonlethally, by freezing them for a minute.) The Protector gets the Crystal Of True Sight, and can see through all lies and enchantments and mind control enemies for a minute (tbh this one is just better). There's a healing crystal and an invisibility crystal as well---and interestingly the invisibility crystal is given to the role responsible for journaling everybody's adventures. The game recognizes that at least one player of a fantasy larp for tween girls in the 90s is probably going to be a wallflower writer, and deliberately enshrines that role.

Tales Of Crystals has a solid core loop, with a deck of cards for prompts and a cassette tape for scenarios and a little circle with YES and NO marked on it that you can scatter your gems onto to get oracle answers to questions during play. It also has a LOT of gimmicks.

There's a tube of powder you can sprinkle on things to disenchant them. There's a mirror you need to read script that's been written backwards. There's three cryptographic cyphers at the back of the book. There's a box specifically for confining the evil Spider Crystal (after you've sprinkled it with powder to neutralize it.) This is a game of dozens of components, and it's a miracle the design is so tight that they all loop together so well.

Now, I don't have sales data (riseup might,) but I suspect maybe this thing didn't sell amazingly. It requires you to set up six or so distinct locations around your yard, pretty much needs a group of exactly four friends to play it, requires you to give clue elements to your parents---you'd have to be cool with it, your friends would have to be cool with it, your parents would have to be cool with it, and you'd have to have a big suburban yard in order to get a proper intended game experience. That said, its larp design is really stable, its gameplay is carefully thought out, and it includes a section at the start to encourage you to play safely and a section at the end to talk about your game together, journal your experiences, and to clean up the game components as a group when you're done.

This is good tech! And it even specifically recommends having a snack and relaxing afterward.

Tales Of Crystals doesn't use terms like bleed and session zero, but it's a good ways ahead of the curve on larp and ttrpg safety.

I didn't find the designer's name (they're listed as uncredit on BoardGameGeek, not mentioned in the PDF, and missing from the wiki page,) but they knocked this one out of the park. There's stuff in here that modern indie ttrpg designers could learn from---myself very much included.

So if you like ttrpgs, 90s magic, and stuff like Tamora Pierce and Sailor Moon, give riseup's original thread a look, and definitely check out the PDF link.

I'm thrilled this thing exists, and I hope more designers get to look at it.

[hellomynameisbisexual]

"We are challenging people to face their own external and internal biphobia. We are demanding attention. We are redefining 'anything that moves' on our own terms."

So declares the introduction to Anything That Movies, a bisexual zine that ran from 1991 to 2001. Founded by editor and photographer Karla Rossi, Anything That Moves got its name from the stereotype that bisexual people will sleep with "anything that moves," and it sought to redefine these and other assumptions about bi people in its decade-long run. Rossi didn't respond to Mashable's request for comment.

All 22 issues of Anything That Moves are now archived by a group of young bisexual people and allies. Not only does the archive introduce a new generation to a rare instance of bi-focused writing, but it's also shockingly relevant to issues bi people face today.

Discovering the bisexual zine

Snippets of the introduction have circulated the internet in recent years, and they're referred to as the ATM "manifesto" on its website. The words caught the attention of bi writer Kravitz Marshall, but he had never seen other material from the zine.

In 2020, Marshall found the Anything That Moves website, a relic of the early 2000s with an incomplete archive. He then bought issue #16 from Bolerium Books, a source for out-of-print books and material related to social movements. Marshall scanned each page of the issue and uploaded it online for free; he had planned on doing this for all issues of Anything That Moves, but acquaintances on a bisexual Discord server expressed interest in helping. The discussion grew so much that they created a separate server.

"It was the first time I became aware such a thing existed and I became very excited at the thought of finding and reading more copies," said Jo, a bi femme activist who became involved in the project and now helms the archive email.

The group found issue #2 via Reddit, but believed finding all the issues would be a difficult process — until a member of the now-inactive archive server was able to gather PDFs of every issue through her university library.

"It was thrilling and such a relief," Marshall told Mashable, "because had this not happened, we might've had to do it the hard and expensive way."

"It happened so fast," Jo recalled. "I just remember about seven bisexuals, including Krav and myself, putting our heads together to figure out the best way to get our hands on all these copies and how to share them with the rest of the LGBTQ community."

Now, the work of Marshall, Jo, and a group of bi people and allies is gathered in the archive.

Joy and heartbreak of Anything That Moves

Reading through the archive is, personally, an ambivalent experience. Anything That Moves began before I was even born, and I feel kindred reading this decades-old work; it's like reading discussions I've had with bi friends back to me. The articles, reviews, fiction, and poetry in discusses visibility, (non)monogamy, the inclusion of trans people in bisexuality — to name merely a few topics still pertinent today.

Despite the joy of reading this bi-centric work, however, it's telling how little has changed since 1991.

Jo, who grew up in a conservative area, found the zine refreshing and comforting. "Even when you discover/read/watch anything regarding LGBTQ history, it’s very rare for any specific focus to be given to the bisexual community," they said. "Finding Anything That Moves was a shock to my system."

Marshall was touched by the "unfiltered life" within its pages. "There's urgency, there's knowledge, there's joy, there's righteous rage, there's lust," Marshall said, "and you don't have to go searching between the lines for it — it grabs your shoulders and shakes you until you reach the back cover."

Despite the joy of reading this bi-centric work, however, it's telling how little has changed since 1991.

For Jo, the experience of reading Anything That Moves has been both special and heartbreaking. "A lot of the subject matter is stuff that the bi community has been dealing with forever," they said. "The same stereotypes and heterosexism that bisexuals faced nearly thirty years ago are still very prevalent today."

"It really hits you that virtually nothing has changed about the outside perception of bisexuality and bisexuals," Marshall agreed. "Almost every single issue we grapple with now is a hand-me-down."

He pointed to a piece in the inaugural issue called "This Poem Can Be Put Off No Longer" to display his point. Here are the first few stanzas:

The first several stanzas of "This Poem Can Be Put Off No Longer" by Susan Carlton, featured in the first issue of 'Anything That Moves.' Credit: Anything That Moves / Susan Carlton

The poem continues, but the point is clear from the start: Bisexual people aren't believed for who they are. They're belittled and told to "choose a side," that they're bisexual for attention. It's difficult to think that this poem is over 30 years old.

The poem "truly could've been written yesterday... or 50 years ago," said Marshall. "How long do we have to keep screaming the same things to the world over and over until people stop pretending we're speaking another galaxy's language?"

Stigma against bisexuality still persists today, and impacts people's lives: Bisexual people are more likely to be anxious and depressed; they're also more likely to experience intimate partner violence.

The stagnancy of the world's perception of bisexual people infuriates Marshall, he said, but it's imperative to still talk about these issues. "You can't just stop talking about these issues, so you just say the same things, because the world that needs to listen to you refuses to move on. And I'm not a fan of repeating myself," he said. "You just feel like you're going crazy."

The solace of Anything That Moves, however, is that even though progress has been slow, fellow bisexual people can relate to the shared experience detailed in its pages.

"How long do we have to keep screaming the same things to the world over and over until people stop pretending we're speaking another galaxy's language?"

After Jo came out, for example, they internalized that being bi made them "second-rate." They didn't feel welcome in cisheterosexual circles nor LGBTQ circles, a common feeling for bisexual people who feel like they're straddling both. Searching for issues of Anything That Moves, part of bisexual history, helped Jo connect with other bi people. Being able to meet others facing the same issues, and sharing this historical information and searching for more, has made the biggest impact on them and their identity.

"I don't feel as alone as I once did because bisexuals of today wanted to learn more about their bisexual elders," they said.

Those who have found the archive have also felt that connection. The archive team has received waves of emails, messages, and followers — some wanting to help, others thanking them.

"For the most part, people are just delighted to finally get to read the magazine," Marshall said.

Even this positive feedback echoes the sentiment of the time. Readers wrote to Anything That Moves, and some of those letters are published in subsequent issues. "You can see so clearly how life-changing these publications were to some people," Marshall said, "so thank God it was brought to the world."

"It's something I definitely needed when I was a closeted, bisexual teenager."

The archive has helped current bi readers ground in their bisexuality, Jo said. The archivists even connected with some former Anything That Moves editors, who discovered them through the project. "I'm just happy we got a chance to say thank you for everything they left for us to discover," Jo said.

There's still work to be done for the archive, like transcriptions for easier reading and sharing. Some people involved even planned on making an original virtual bi zine, Marshall said, but due to personal commitments, the idea fizzled out within months.

"I still hope it'll exist one day," Marshall said. "If by some miracle the future grants me that wish, I won't reveal its title, but I find it pleasantly cheeky."

For now, of course, there's nearly two-dozen issues of Anything That Moves. Jo believes the zine is a gift.

"I want to be able to share this gift with anyone else who may need it," they said. "It's something I definitely needed when I was a closeted, bisexual teenager."

[foundry-fabrications]

Finally, was starting to think I'd never get anything released! Y'all ready to ROCK?!

Now, just to get this out of the way, I was really hoping to have something else done for y'all by now, that thing being the update to Flesh and Bone I mentioned in my last update post. Mechanically, it's done and has been for a while, and I'm VERY pleased with how it's coming along. However, it's proving to be a frustrating challenge to get it formatted with artwork that doesn't look awful. So, I took a much-needed break to work on something else and it's going on the back burner. It'll be out when it's out.

So what's this new thing I bring before you this day? With my main D&D campaign wrapping up, I've been working on a absolute TON of custom stuff for a new character, so that's taken up a lot of my creative energy. Now that we've had our first session and my work is done, I can pretty it up for y'all!

As one may surmise, I'm playing a heavy metal bard, so I put this together based on a combination of an existing college of metal I found on D&Dwiki and Matt Mercer's college of the maestro. The metalheads among you may have also noticed that yes, each feature and solo are named after metal songs, a lot of bangers too. Having run a combat with it, I'm already really happy with it mechanically and since it's my newest character it will be getting LOTS of playtesting. 

Another thing to mention is the little sidebar at the end. For this campaign I'm playing the 2024 playtest version of the new bard so that's what this was originally built for.  However, since most won't be playing it, I reworked it for the existing bard and added a way to "update" it for the new one for those who want it. For future content I would like to do something similar depending on how extensive the changes are, but we'll see how things shake out.

Anyway, I'm really pleased with how it turned out. A little sparse in the art department, but I think the theme I picked does a lot to carry it. Plus, I genuinely couldn't come up with anything that looked better, so hey, I'm not gonna let perfect be the enemy of done.

Anyway, that's all I got for now. So glad to actually be working on stuff again. Stay safe, don't forget to love each other, and I'll see you again soon.

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[bomberqueen17]

sewing other things

OK so. I have talked about the Loftus Bralette so much on here that one could be forgiven for chuckling gently when i said I should sew other things. But I do actually have several other projects I've been wanting to work on. And i have actually cut some of them out.

Also when I was last at the farm my niece brought me some of her t-shirts and said "I really like this one can we cut it apart and re-sew it bigger so I can still wear it", and I remembered that her BFF's mom, who works at the farm twice a week doing the books and managing store inventory, owns a serger she didn't know how to thread, so I texted her to ask if I could borrow it and indeed she had accidentally unthreaded it and there was a stuck lever and needed me to fix it anyway, and maybe I mentioned that on here but I did actually make my niece a couple of tunics while I was last at the farm. Including hand-sewing a whole bunch of details on the last one while the family was driving on a road trip one weekend.

So I brought all that stuff home with me and was hoping to get to work on it this week. All I've sewn has been the bralettes but I still have today. We'll see what I can get done.

I measured Farmkid and she's ten years old so her shape isn't the same as that of an adult woman, but she's five feet two and like 130 lbs, and some of her measurements put her in a women's size 12. So. She expressed interest in a garment I wear frequently, a Studio Tunic from Sew Liberated. I printed off the pattern in a size 12 and have assembled it, but I'm stuck deciding what fabric to use for her. I should decide that today. She's ten, her favorite color is ostensibly yellow but she mostly wears pinks and purples, she's a grubby kid who wipes her hands on her shirt and always winds up with stains on the belly of her shirt still, and she wants this tunic I think largely so she can cram her tablet into the pocket and go climb trees while listening to audiobooks on speaker. So I want a bright color but not too pale, and I want a tough fabric but not unbreathable, and I'm just. Deciding, still.

Probably what I should do is use some undyed fabric I own, and then bring my supplies and let her tie-dye it. I have a couple other things I could tie-dye, or will by then. That would be a fun bonding activity. I don't know if I'll have time to do it this trip though. So maybe I'll postpone the project and ask her for help once she's on summer break. (Good luck catching her, kids these days have so many summer camps.) As a bonus I bet I could loop her BFF and BFF's Mom in on the tie-dyeing, they're both into that shit.

Hell we could do ice-dyeing, the farm has a 1000-lb ice machine that is very frequently turned on (weekly for the market, biweekly for chicken processing-- there could be ice available at pretty much any time lol).

So anyway. I know she wants me to make a tunic out of a trio of large-print cat shirts she's outgrown, and she wants to wear it for her 5th grade moving up day ceremony, and I looked at it while I was home but I haven't done it yet. I need to get my shit together.

What I might do is print off a size 12 version of the t-shirt pattern I own, it's just that it's designed for busty women because I'm a busty woman, and she's Not, yet (oh, she will be. soon. but not yet.) so I have to kind of. Well, I own a pattern for a swing tunic that's close to what she wants actually. Oh, I should just print that one off. (The joy of the Cashmerette Club subscription patterns is that you get all the sizes, 0-30, and I've now made a couple of them for smaller friends, because like. I mean I own the pattern! PDF patterns are so great because you can reprint them in the smaller size instead of trying to trace it off. I never ever got the hang of tissue paper patterns.)

Yeah here this one, the Wexford Top/Dress, would be easy enough to kind of carve out the bust curve a little and make it fit a kid, because it's not meant to be that fitted. I'll just sort of use that as a general guideline and then make the cut-out-and-patchworked t-shirts fit into that approximate silhouette. The way I made the other tunics for her, I just used a shirt whose neck and shoulders still mostly fit her. But these cat shirts she's thoroughly outgrown, so making a new neck/shoulder area would be best.

Orrrrrr.... I could use one of the zillion old t-shirts of mine that I've saved to cut up. The neck/shoulders of a fully adult-sized garment are no longer too big for her. That's easier.

I also have a bunch of garments I want to make for myself, as I don't seem to buy clothes much anymore (I can't bring myself to pay $40 for a dress off the clearance rack that won't fit me and will mostly be polyester and won't be that interesting and will pill the first time I wash it). The Club's latest pattern is a skort/shorts/skirt dealie, and I need more shorts all the time-- I've largely given up on underpants and just wear boxer-briefs or anti-chafe shorts and I just don't see the point now of wearing a pair of panties and then shorts over the top under my skirt. Like. Just wear the shorts! So being able to choose the materials and print and look of that would be pretty great. And the Cashmerette one is inseam-less, like my favorite anti-chafe shorts are.

So I have cut out a pair of just the shorts in a clearance cotton mesh from Dharmatrading, and I even have the correct elastic for the waistband, so that kind of rules. I will sew those up as soon as I get a chance. I would like to make several skorts as well, probably from synthetic ponte or something, but my ideal would be to get some decent merino/nylon jersey and do a few from that. You never see merino skorts but I would wear the shit out of those.

I also have a lovely underpants pattern from the Club from ages ago, and while I rarely wear underpants of that style anymore, I would like having some cute matchy ones to go with the bralettes. Also, I have a shitton of foldover elastic, and I suspect I could use foldover elastic in some of the bralettes I want to make, so I want to get proficient in its use, and there are directions for applying it in the underpants directions, and it seems like a good way to practice. So I cut a muslin of those from the same cotton mesh as the shorts, and just have to sew the pieces together.

I also want to make myself more pretty dresses, and I have parts of a new Studio Tunic for myself already cut out, but not the rest.

And I recently made myself the button-up shirt from the Club, I know I posted about it on here. And I wanted to immediately make myself several more, and I got out some fabric and prepared it and cut out one pattern piece and then ran out of time. So yesterday I finally cut out the rest of the shirt from this fabric, a print from Mood covered in tiny dinosaurs. So I have that all ready to go in a plastic baggie too, just waiting for me to have time to sit and sew it. (Once I do that, I would really like to make myself a dress version of it from the cool green not-quite-seersucker I got from that remnant bolt at Promenade Fabrics in New Orleans.)

AND. i also have resolved to make my BFF, the one in Rochester who I lived with for a bit in the pandemic, with the little kids-- MM-- I am going to make her a sloper, before I see her next weekend, or maybe while I see her next weekend if i don't get to it in time argh, and I am going to at least try that on her and figure out approximately what shape she is so that I can put together a master pattern for her to make herself dresses from. I took her measurements ages ago, and she's a 14CD bust, a 16 waist, and an 8 hip in Cashmerette's sizing, and so I think just making a sloper with those sizes all graded together will be a huge start. And then we can mildly tweak the fit for her frame, and-- the thing is, she's always buying custom dresses on Etsy because what she wants is very specific and not usually available in stores, and then the dresses come and don't fit her so she has to get them tailored, and then they were just made of cheap quilting cotton from Joann's so they wear out after she washes them a few times, and she's had to add on pockets anyway because they didn't have them.

So I just feel like if I could get her a paper master pattern that fit her... heck i could even just make her dresses if *I* had the pattern. It would be easier and more efficient. I could do the basic construction and then turn over the pockets and embellishments to her, which is what she does anyway. So that's my goal there, and we'll see if I can reach it.

Anyway. If only I didn't have to work at all and could just sew all the time. I am not the first person to say this, LOL.

I have a lot of irons in the fire but at the moment am trapped under a cat so those irons are not going anywhere.

[paluding]

Introducing... The Tattooer!

[This version is OUTDATED! Please, check the new version here. I updated the workflow, skipping a lot of unnecessary Photoshop editing. It's way faster! I'll leave this old version and files up though, for archiving purposes. But yeah I still totally recommend you use the new version!]

Finally! I’ve been working on this for so long and I couldn’t wait to share it. This is a series of Blender template files already set up to quickly bake textures from The Sims 4 to The Sims 2. Really neat for cc creators! The different Blender files will allow you to:

-Bake body textures from TS4 to TS2 (Female) -Bake body textures from TS4 to TS2 (Male) -Bake body textures from TS4 (Female) to TS2 (Male) -Bake body textures from TS2 (Female) to TS2 (Male) [Bonus!] -Bake head textures from TS4 to TS2 (Face + Scalp) [Experimental]

Check the file names to see which one is which, and the resolution of the baked texture it will give. Download! SFS / GD

Everything you see in the render above was converted using those Blender files. I only did a couple tiny edits to the eyes and lips to fix them. These templates were made mainly to bake and convert tattoos, but there’s more you can do with them if you get creative. I have to say, these are NOT perfect. Check out the eyebrows on the render above. They look a bit wonky compared to the original, don’t they? I left them as is to keep your expectations with these as realistic as possible. Results may vary depending on what you are trying to convert, so! With that in mind, this is all the stuff you will be able to convert almost seamlessly from TS4 to TS2:

-Tattoos. -Other body details such as body hair, scars, freckles, supernatural/occult details… -Body painted underwear and swimwear, as well as some other clothing that’s mostly painted on the body. -Socks, stockings and maybe leggings. -Even skintones! In some areas they will look weird, so I recommend editing and blending them with other existing TS2 skins. -Makeup. Kinda bad but hey it works! Eyeliner and anything that is around the eyes looks terrible for now, but other stuff like blush may look just okay. -Eyebrows and maybe beards. A bit of hit or miss with those. -Hair scalps. Very useful when converting some hairs! Although keep in mind part of that texture might also need to be baked on the face mesh, you know, that hairline makeup stuff.

Got your attention? Nice! Editing some of the textures from TS4 to match the UV mapping in TS2 using a 2D editing program can be incredibly hard. That’s where texture baking in Blender comes to the rescue!

It is recommended you download Blender version 2.91.0, which is the one I use. Don’t worry, it’s free! There’s also 3 Photoshop actions you will need to set up the textures for baking and then putting them back together, because unfortunately Blender doesn’t support transparencies in that baking process, so that takes a couple extra steps to make it work, but I think it’s still pretty fast and easy. And just in case Tumblr manages to blow up or something, I decided to include a pdf with the upcoming tutorial that will guide you step by step with all this process, so if this post gets deleted somehow (I really hope not!), you will still have that pdf as a backup archived.

You can download Blender here. Personally I recommend picking the fourth option, “blender-2.91.0-windows64.zip”, which is a portable version and doesn’t need to be installed. You will also need Sims 4 Studio to extract the original Sims 4 CC textures you want. As for Photoshop… I’m not going to tell you to buy that subscription service and give Adobe some undeserved money, so… yeah, there might be some other options out there to get it (very legit, yes yes).

So, before we begin, let’s clear out some questions you might have. What the heck is this texture baking thing and what does it do? Well, let’s imagine you have a projector and point an image into a blank wall. Then you pick up some brushes and start painting and copying that projected image in that wall. Texture baking is kinda like that when it comes to 3D models. You align two models and match them as closely as you can in shape and form, and once you adjust some parameters and values, Blender does the rest for you: it will give you a new texture for a new model with a different UV map. These files I’m sharing have everything already set up, so it’s a matter of plopping in that Sims 4 texture and you will get that new texture for TS2 in just a few clicks.

This tutorial assumes you know literally nothing about how to use Blender, so if you feel uncomfortable with it, worry no more! This will guide you with pictures showing where you need to click and explaining what is happening. For Sims 4 Studio and Photoshop the process might be a bit less detailed, but still this should be pretty beginner friendly. For this tutorial, I will use some tattoos as an example. Alright, enough with the rambling. Let’s get started!

·EXTRACTING TEXTURES AND EDITING THEM WITH PHOTOSHOP: First things first, you will need to extract as pngs all the textures you want to convert from TS4 using Sims 4 Studio. Once you’ve done that, open them up one by one in Photoshop and run the “No transparency” action. This will remove the alpha channel from the image, getting rid of all the transparency. Go ahead and save a png copy of it. Then run the “Make Alpha” action on those same swatches (from the beginning, make sure you’re not running the action on an already edited swatch!), which will only show the alpha channel of the image in black and white, and save another copy of that. You should have 2 textures for each tattoo swatch. For the “No transparency” action I like to name it BASE (And your swatch number or name), and for the “Make Alpha” action I usually name it ALPHA (And that same swatch number/name). I recommend saving them in different folders named BASE TS4 and ALPHA TS4 respectively to keep it organized. If you want to make this much faster in Photoshop, there’s an automation option in it that allows you to run an action through a batch of files in a folder and then saves it all. I won’t cover how to do it in this tutorial, but you should be able to find it easily on Google by searching something like “Photoshop automate batch”. It’s really powerful and will make your workflow with actions much faster. Definitely recommend learning about that!

·BAKING THE TEXTURES IN BLENDER: PRELIMINARY STEP 1: CONFIGURING BLENDER’S GRAPHICS SETTINGS: Open your preferred Blender file depending on what you’re going to bake and the desired resolution (in this example I’m going to use the AF-body-4t2-1024 file). Before we start messing around in Blender, there’s one thing you should set up. It is a onetime step, and once it’s done, you won’t need to do it again. So, does your computer have a dedicated graphics card? If you don’t know or you’re not sure, just skip to the next step. Configuring Blender so it uses your graphics card instead of your CPU will make the baking render much faster, so it is recommended you set it correctly. If your computer has a dedicated graphics card, click File (1) > Preferences (2) > and on the window that pops up click System (3) > and select CUDA and make sure your graphics card is there and tick it (4). I have an Nvidia Graphics card but your case may vary. Once you’re done, click on the tiny button on the bottom left corner and Save Preferences (5).

PRELIMINARY STEP 2: CHOOSING THE RENDERING DEVICE: Click on the tiny camera button on the right, called Render Properties (1), and on Device (2) select GPU Compute if it’s not already selected. If you’re not sure if you have a graphics card or not, just select CPU. Then select the Material Properties tab (2) and Save your changes, either by pressing Ctrl + S, or clicking File (4) > Save (5). Okay, time to get into the good stuff!

·STEP 1: LOADING YOUR TS4 BASE TEXTURE: In the Material Properties tab, click the folder icon that says Open (1) and on the window that pops up, navigate through your folders and select your first texture. For now we’re going to bake the BASE texture, so go to that folder where you saved the edited “No transparency” image. To navigate easily, the 3 buttons on the top right (2) are for the display mode. They will show your files in list mode, vertical and horizontal, and the one on the right will display the file thumbnails, pretty useful if you want to easily see your images. And the icons on the left side (3) will let you go one folder back and forward, go to the parent directory, and refresh the folder in case you just dropped something new in there. Double click on the image you need and that will load it into the Sims 4 body model, named “ts4 body”.

·STEP 2: SETTING UP YOUR SELECTION AND BAKING THE TEXTURE: On the top right of the screen, you will see the names of the 2 models in the scene. Hold the Ctrl key in your keyboard and left click on the “ts2 body” model (1). If you did it correctly, you should see “ts2 body” in a yellowish orange color, and right down below, “ts4 body” should look more like a red orange. If not, try again by clicking first on ts4 body, and then while holding Ctrl click again on ts2 body. Then switch to the Render Properties tab by clicking the tiny camera icon (2) and click Bake (3). Depending on your screen resolution, you might need to scroll down a bit with your mouse to see the Bake button. Wait a few seconds for it to finish. You will see the progress percentage down on the bottom of your screen. Don’t panic if you notice your computer fans start ramping up, that’s completely normal! As I said in the beginning, using your GPU will bake the textures much faster than the CPU.

·STEP 3: SAVING YOUR NEW TS2 TEXTURE: Once it’s finished, switch to the UV Editing Mode by clicking “UV Editing” on the top of your screen. And there it is: your new texture! You might have to scroll up your mouse wheel a bit to zoom in and see it in all its glory on the left side of the screen. We’re still not done yet though. You need to save it to yet another new folder (always try to keep your stuff organized!).

You can save it by pressing Shift + Alt + S, or clicking on Image* (1) and then Save As… (2). That will pop a window where you’ll need to navigate again and save it somewhere. Give it a proper name (3) and hit Enter to save it… well, Enter doesn’t always work for me for some reason, so if that happens just click Save As Image (4). In this case, I personally like to call it something like “BASE TS2”.

·STEP 4: GOING BACK TO STEP 1: Alright! So you have your new baked base texture, but we still need to bake the alpha channel to give it its transparency. In order to go back to step 1 and start the process once again, click Layout (1), go back to the Material Properties tab (2), select “ts4 body” (3) and click on the folder icon (4) to open and load the alpha texture you did in the beginning in Photoshop.

Then it’s just a matter of repeating the process from step 2: bake the alpha channel and save it again as a new image (watch out, don’t overwrite your previous image!). This one I like to name “ALPHA TS2”. When you’re ready to move on, close Blender without saving. If you see a small check telling you it will save some images, make sure you uncheck it, so you will be able to use it again in the future from the starting point with no issues. I don’t think it really matters if you accidentally save your progress in these files, but I like to keep it clean and fresh so I can do the process where I left it from the beginning the next time I open it. And in case you mess up and save somewhere, you can always just delete the .blend file and download the template files again.

·FINAL STEP: PUTTING EVERYTHING BACK TOGETHER IN PHOTOSHOP: We’re almost done! Open Photoshop and drop in both your 2 new baked textures, “BASE TS2” and “ALPHA TS2”. Keep both layers on top of each other and aligned. For that you can enable the snapping in View > Snap to… > All. Rename these layers so the Alpha layer is “ALPHA” and the Base is “BASE”, and make sure ALPHA is on top.

Then run the “Final Baked” action and now for real, it’s finally over! You just fully baked and converted these new textures. Congratulations!

So, to summarize, here’s a small guide with all the steps of the workflow I developed. Once you get the hang of it, baking and converting one swatch of a texture just takes a couple minutes. It really is that easy!

One small note though, some of the baking blend files save the textures with a resolution of 2048x2048 pixels, as clearly stated at the end of their file name. That’s way too overkill, because TS2 only properly supports up to 1024x1024 for most of its textures and you should always resize your final product to that max resolution. I just made those 2048 versions because there might be some really tiny and slim details on some tattoos that may look a little too blurry when baked into a 1024 resolution, so for those cases use that if you want and then resize them in Photoshop. In the Resample mode of the Image Size menu, there are a few options to choose. For the fine details, I like the Nearest Neighbor (hard edges) option, which, even if it looks a bit pixelated, it still preserves most of the texture and quality.

For anything else, I would just directly bake them using the 1024 versions in Blender.

And for the folks who feel comfortable playing around in Blender, this is just the beginning! Texture baking opens a LOT of possibilities, so feel free to move stuff around and edit the models to your liking! If you notice the baked textures look warped or stretched somewhere, or don’t like where some textures are placed in the S2 body, poke around that area moving stuff and then give it another try. The main objective of the baking process is keeping both overlapping models as close in shape as possible. You may also edit and save new copies of the templates, or make new ones from scratch using mine as a reference (keep a close look on those Baking settings and values, I think they work pretty well) and share them if you want to. Go ham, do whatever you want with them! I have plans on making templates to convert body textures from Sims 3 to Sims 2, but for now it’s not on my priorities, so we’ll see when that happens.

Whew! Hope none of this was too confusing. Need help or have any issues with these? Please ask/message me and I’ll be glad to help when I’m able to!

Credits for the CC used in the render demonstration: -Skin by Sims3Melancholic -Eyes by Northern Siberia Winds -Eyebrows by PeachyFaerie -Tattoos by xtc -Top by SerenityCC

And the Tattoo I used for the tutorial can be found here, by ValhallanSim

Last but not least, a huge, special thanks to @elvisgrace for all her help testing this for me. I’ve never shared Blender files, so hopefully everything works as intended and everyone can use them with no weird issues. Fingers crossed! And thank you for reading! Hope you have fun playing with this new toy hehe.

[vampylily]

Transcription of Fall Out Boy's interview with Rock Sound

Since I was going to read the article anyways, I thought I'd transcribe in case it'll be more accessible to read for others. The interview with Pete and Patrick goes in depth on the topics of tourdust, evolving as a band, So Much (For) Stardust, working with Neal Avron, and more.

Thank you to @nomaptomyowntreasure who kindly shared the photos of the article! Their post is linked here.

PDF link here. (more readable format & font size)

article in text below (and warning for long post.)

Rock Sound Issue #300

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

WITH THE TRIUMPHANT ‘SO MUCH (FOR) STARDUST’ CAPTURING A WHOLE NEW GENERATION OF FANS, FALL OUT BOY ARE RIDING HIGH, CELEBRATING THEIR PAST WHILE LOOKING TOWARDS A BRIGHT FUTURE. PETE WENTZ AND PATRICK STUMP REFLECT ON RECENT SUCCESSES AND THE LESSONS LEARNED FROM TWO DECADES OF WRITING AND PERFORMING TOGETHER. 

WORDS: James Wilson-Taylor

PHOTOS: Elliott Ingham

You have just completed a US summer tour that included stadium shows and some of your most ambitious production to date. What were your aims going into this particular show? 

PETE: Playing stadiums is a funny thing. I pushed pretty hard to do a couple this time because I think that the record Patrick came up with musically lends itself to that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. When we were designing the cover to the album, it was meant to be all tangible, which was a reaction to tokens and skins that  you can buy and avatars. The title is made out of clay, and the painting is an actual painting. We wanted to approach the show in that way as well. We've been playing in front of a gigantic video wall for the past eight years. Now, we wanted a stage show where you could actually walk inside it. 

Did adding the new songs from ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ into the setlist change the way you felt about them?

PATRICK: One of the things that was interesting about the record was that we took a lot of time figuring out what it was going to be, what it was going to sound like. We experimented with so many different things. I was instantly really proud. I felt really good about this record but it wasn’t until we got on stage and you’re playing the songs in between our catalogue that I really felt that. It was really noticeable from the first day on this tour - we felt like a different band. There's a new energy to it. There was something that I could hear live that I couldn't hear before. 

You also revisited a lot of older tracks and b-sides on this tour, including many from the ‘Folie à Deux’-era. What prompted those choices? 

PETE: There were some lean years where there weren't a lot of rock bands being played on pop radio or playing award shows so we tried to play the biggest songs, the biggest versions of them. We tried to make our thing really airtight, bulletproof so that when we played next to whoever the top artist was, people were like, ‘oh yeah, they should be here.’ The culture shift in the world is so interesting because now, maybe rather than going wider, it makes more sense to go deeper with people. We thought about that in the way that we listen to music and the way we watch films. Playing a song that is a b-side or barely made a record but is someone’s favourite song makes a lot of sense in this era.

PATRICK: I think there also was a period there where, to Pete’s point, it was a weird time to be a rock band. We had this very strange thing that happened to us, and not a lot of our friends for some reason, where we had a bunch of hits, right? And it didn’t make any sense to me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. But there was a kind of novelty, where we could play a whole set of songs that a lot of people know. It was fun and rewarding for us to do that. But then you run the risk of playing the same set forever. I want to love the songs that we play. I want to care about it and put passion into what we do. And there’s no sustainable way to just do the same thing every night and not get jaded. We weren’t getting there but I really wanted to make sure that we don’t ever get there. 

PETE: In the origin of Fall Out Boy, what happened at our concerts was we knew how to play five songs really fast and jumped off walls and the fire marshal would shut it down. It was what made the show memorable, but we wanted to be able to last and so we tried to perfect our show and the songs and the stage show and make it flawless. Then you don’t really know how much spontaneity you want to include, because something could go wrong. When we started this tour, and we did a couple of spontaneous things, it opened us up to more. Because things did go wrong and that’s what made the show special. We’re doing what is the most punk rock version of what we could be doing right now. 

You seem generally a lot more comfortable celebrating your past success at this point in your career. 

PETE: I think it’s actually not a change from our past. I love those records, but I never want to treat them in a cynical way. I never want there to be a wink and a smile where we’re just doing this because it’s the anniversary. This was us celebrating these random songs and we hope people celebrate them with us. There was a purity to it that felt in line with how we’ve always felt about it. I love ‘Folie à Deux’ - out of any Fall Out Boy record that's probably the one I would listen to. But I just never wanted it to be done in a cynical way, where we feel like we have to. But celebrating it in a way where there’s the purity of how we felt when we wrote the song originally. I think that’s fucking awesome. 

PATRICK: Music is a weird art form. Because when you’re an actor and you play a character, that is a specific thing. James Bond always wears a suit and has a gun and is a secret agent. If you change one thing, that’s fine, but you can’t really change all of it. But bands are just people. You are yourself. People get attached to it like it’s a story but it’s not. That was always something I found difficult. For the story, it’s always good to say, ‘it’s the 20th anniversary, let’s go do the 20th anniversary tour’, that’s a good story thing. But it’s not always honest. We never stopped playing a lot of the songs from ‘Take This To Your Grave’, right? So why would I need to do a 20-year anniversary and perform all the songs back to back? The only reason would be because it would probably sell a lot of tickets and I don’t really ever want to be motivated by that, frankly. 

One of the things that’s been amazing is that now as the band has been around for a while, we have different layers of audience. I love ‘Folie à Deux’, I do, I love that record. But I had a really personally negative experience of touring on it. So that’s what I think of when I think of that record initially. It had to be brought back to me for me to appreciate it, for me to go, ‘oh, this record is really great. I should be happy with this. I should want to play this,’ So that’s why we got into a lot of the b-sides because we realised that our perspectives on a lot of these songs were based in our feelings and experiences from when we were making them. But you can find new experiences if you play those songs. You can make new memories with them. 

You alluded there to the 20th anniversary of ‘Take This To Your Grave’. Obviously you have changed and developed as a band hugely since then. But is there anything you can point to about making that debut record that has remained a part of your process since then? 

PETE: We have a language, the band, and it’s definitely a language of cinema and film. That’s maintained through time. We had very disparate music tastes and influences but I think film was a place we really aligned. You could have a deep discussion, because none of us were filmmakers. You could say which part was good and which part sucked and not hurt anybody’s feelings, because you weren’t going out to make a film the next day. Whereas with music, I think if we’d only had that to talk about, we would have turned out a different band.  

PATRICK: ‘Take This To Your Grave’, even though it’s absolutely our first record, there’s an element of it that’s still a work in progress. It is still a band figuring itself out. Andy wasn’t even officially in the band for half of the recording, right? I wasn’t even officially the guitar player for half of the recording. We were still bumbling through it. There was something that popped up a couple times throughout the record where you got these little inklings of who the band really was. We really explored that on ‘From Under the Cork Tree’’. So when we talk about what has remained the same… I didn’t want to be a singer, I didn’t know anything about singing, I wasn’t playing on that. I didn’t even plan to really be in this band for that long because Pete had a real band that really toured so I thought this was gonna be a side project. So there’s always been this element within the band where I don’t put too many expectations on things and then Pete has this really big ambition, creatively. There’s this great interplay between the tour of us where I’m kind of oblivious, and I don’t know when I’m putting out a big idea and Pete has this amazing vision to find what goes where. There’s something really magical about that because I never could have done a band like this without it. We needed everybody, we needed all four of us. And I think that’s the thing that hasn’t changed - the four of us just being ourselves and trying to figure things out. Listening back to ‘Folie’ or ‘Infinity On High’ or ‘American Beauty’. I’m always amazed at how much better they are than I remember. I listened to ‘MANIA’ the other day. I have a lot of misgivings about that record, a lot of things I’m frustrated about. But then I’m listening to it and I’m like, ‘this is pretty good.’ There’s a lot of good things in there. I don’t know why, it’s kind of like you can’t see those things. It’s kind of amazing to have Pete be able to see those things. And likewise, sometimes Pete has no idea when he writes something brilliant, as a lyricist, and I have to go, ‘No, I’m gonna keep that one, I’m gonna use that.’ 

On ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ you teamed up with producer Neal Avron again for the first time since 2008. Given how much time has passed, did it take a minute to reestablish that connection or did you pick up where you left off? 

PATRICK: It really didn’t feel like any time had passed between us and Neal. It was pretty seamless in terms of working with him. But then there was also the weird aspect where the last time we worked with him was kind of contentious. Interpersonally, the four of us were kind of fighting with each other…as much as we do anyway. We say that and then that myth gets built bigger than it was. We were always pretty cool with each other. It’s just that the least cool was making ‘Folie’. So then getting into it again for this record, it was like no time had passed as people but the four of us got on better so we had more to bring to Neal. 

PETE: It’s a little bit like when you return to your parents’ house for the holiday break when you’re in college. It’s the same house but now I can drink with my parents. We’d grown up and the first times we worked with Neal, he had to do so much more boy scout leadership, ‘you guys are all gonna be okay, we’re gonna do this activity to earn this badge so you guys don’t fucking murder each other.’ This time, we probably got a different version of Neal that was even more creative, because he had to do less psychotherapy. 

He went deep too. Sometimes when you’re in a session with somebody, and they’re like, ‘what are we singing about?’, I’ll just be like, ‘stuff’. He was not cool with ‘stuff’. I would get up and go into the bathroom outside the studio and look in the mirror, and think ‘what is it about? How deep are we gonna go?’ That’s a little bit scarier to ask yourself. If last time Neal was like a boy scout leader, this time, it was more like a Sherpa. He was helping us get to the summit. 

The title track of the album also finds you in a very reflective mood, even bringing back lyrics from ‘Love From the Other Side’. How would you describe the meaning behind that title and the song itself?

PETE: The record title has a couple of different meanings, I guess. The biggest one to me is that we basically all are former stars. That’s what we’re made of, those pieces of carbon. It still feels like the world’s gonna blow and it’s all moving too fast and the wrong things are moving too slow. That track in particular looks back at where you sometimes wish things had gone differently. But this is more from the perspective of when you’re watching a space movie, and they’re too far away and they can’t quite make it back. It doesn’t matter what they do and at some point, the astronaut accepts that. But they’re close enough that you can see the look on their face. I feel like there’s moments like that in the title track. I wish some things were different. But, as an adult going through this, you are too far away from the tether, and you’re just floating into space. It is sad and lonely but in some ways, it’s kind of freeing, because there’s other aspects of our world and my life that I love and I want to keep shaping and changing. 

Patrick: I’ll open up Pete’s lyrics and I just start hearing things. It almost feels effortless in a lot of ways. I just read his lyrics and something starts happening in my head. The first line, ‘I’m in a winter mood, dreaming of spring now’, instantly the piano started to form to me. That was a song that I came close to not sending the band. When I make demos, I’ll usually wait until I have five or six to send to everybody. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna like this. It’s too moody or it’s not very us. But it was pretty unanimous. Everybody liked that one. I knew this had to end the record. It took on a different life in the context of the whole album. Then on the bridge section, I knew it was going to be the lyrics from “Love From The Other Side’. It’s got to come back here. It’s the bookends, but I also love lyrically what it does, you know, ‘in another life, you were my babe’, going back to that kind of regret, which feels different in  ‘Love From The Other Side’ than it does here. When the whole song came together, it was the statement of the record. 

Aside from the album, you have released a few more recent tracks that have opened you up to a whole new audience, most notably the collaboration with Taylor Swift on ‘Electric Touch’. 

PETE: Taylor is the only artist that I’ve met or interacted with in recent times who creates exactly the art of who she is, but does it one such a mass level. So that’s breathtaking to watch from the sidelines. The way fans traded friendship bracelets, I don’t know what the beginning of it was, but you felt that everywhere. We felt that, I saw that in the crowd on our tour. I don’t know Taylor well, but I think she’s doing exactly what she wants and creating exactly the art that she wants to create. And going that, on such a level, is really awe-inspiring to watch. It makes you want to make the biggest, weirdest version of our thing and put that out there. 

Then there was the cover of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which has had some big chart success for you. That must have taken you slightly by surprise. 

PATRICK: It’s pretty unexpected. Pete and I were going back and forth about songs we should cover and that was an idea that I had. This is so silly but there was a song a bunch of years ago I had kind of written called ‘Dark Horse’ and then there was a Katy Perry song called ‘Dark Horse’ and I was like, ‘damn it’, you know, I missed the boat on that one. So I thought if we don’t do this cover, somebody else is gonna do it. Let’s just get in the studio and just do it. We spent way more time on those lyrics than you would think because we really wanted to get a specific feel. It was really fun and kind of loose, we just came together in Neal’s house and recorded it in a day. 

PETE: There's irreverence to it. I thought the coolest thing was when Billy Joel got asked about it, and he was like, ‘I’m not updating it, that’s fine, go for it.’  I hope if somebody ever chose to update one of ours, we’d be like that. Let them do their thing, they’ll have that version. I thought that was so fucking cool. 

It’s almost no secret that the sound you became most known for in the md-2000s is having something of a commercial revival right now But what is interesting is seeing how bands are building on that sound and changing it. 

PATRICK: I love when anybody does anything that feels honest to them. Touring with Bring Me The Horizon, it was really cool seeing what’s natural to them. It makes sense. We changed our sound over time but we were always going to do that. It wasn’t a premeditated thing but for the four of us, it would have been impossible to maintain making the same kind of music forever. Whereas you’ll play with some other bands and they live that one sound. You meet up with them for dinner or something and they’re wearing the shirt of the band that sounds just like their band. You go to their house and they’re playing other bands that sound like them because they live in that thing. Whereas with the four of us and bands like Bring Me The Horizon, we change our sounds over time.  And there’s nothing wrong with either. The only thing that’s wrong is if it’s unnatural to you. If you’re AC/DC and all of a sudden power ballads are in and you’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do a power ballad’, that’s when it sucks. But if you’re a thrash metal guy who also likes Celine Dion then yeah, do a power ballad. Emo as a word doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if people want to call it that, if the emo thing is back or having another life again, if that’s what’s natural to an artist, I think the world needs more earnest art. If that’s who you are, then do it. 

PETE: It would be super egotistical to think that the wave that started with us and My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco has just been circling and cycling back. I remember seeing Nikki Sixx at the airport and he was like, ‘Oh you’re doing a flaming bass? Mine came from a backpack.’ It keeps coming back but it looks different. Talking to Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD when he was around, it’s so interesting, because it’s so much bigger than just emo or whatever. It’s this whole big pop music thing that’s spinning and churning, and then it moves on, and then it comes back with different aspects and some of the other stuff combined. When you’re a fan of music and art and film, you take different stuff, you add different ingredients, because that’s your taste. Seeing the bands that are up and coming to me, it’s so exciting, because the rules are just different, right? It’s really cool to see artists that lean into the weirdness and lean into a left turn when everyone’s telling you to make a right. That’s so refreshing. 

PATRICK: It’s really important as an artist gets older to not put too much stock in your own influence. The moment right now that we’re in is bigger than emo and bigger than whatever was happening in 2005. There’s a great line in ‘Downton Abbey’ where someone was asking the Lord about owning this manor and he’s like ‘well, you don’t really own it, there have been hundreds of owners and you are the custodian of it for a brief time.’ That’s what pop music is like. You just have the ball for a minute and you’re gonna pass it on to somebody else. 

We will soon see you in the UK for your arena tour. How do you reflect on your relationship with the fans over here? 

PETE: I remember the first time we went to the UK, I wasn’t prepared for how culturally different it was. When we played Reading & Leeds and the summer festivals, it was so different, and so much deeper within the culture. It was a little bit of a shock. The first couple of times we played, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are we gonna die?’ because the crowd was so crazy, and there was bottles. Then when we came back, we thought maybe this is a beast to be tamed. Finally, you realise it’s a trading of energy. That made the last couple of festivals we played so fucking awesome. When you realise that the fans over there are real fans of music It’s really awesome and pretty beautiful. 

PATRICK: We’ve played the UK now more than a lot of regions of the states. Pretty early on, I just clicked with it. There were differences, cultural things and things that you didn’t expect. But it never felt that different or foreign to me, just a different flavour…

PETE: This is why me and Patrick work so well together (laughs). 

PATRICK: Well, listen; I’m a rainy weather guy. There is just things that I get there. I don’t really drink anymore all that much. But I totally will have a beer in the UL, there’s something different about every aspect of it, about the ordering of it, about the flavour of it, everything, it’s like a different vibe. The UK audience seemed to click with us too. There have been plenty of times where we felt almost like a UK band than an American one. There have been years where you go there and almost get a more familial reaction than you would at home. 

Rock Sound has always been a part of that for us. It was one of the first magazines to care about us and the first magazine to do real interviews. That’s the thing, you would do all these interviews and a lot of them would be like ‘so where did the band’s name come from?’ But Rock Sound took us seriously as artists, maybe before some of us did. That actually made us think about who we are and that was a really cool experience. I think in a lot of ways, we wouldn’t be the band we are without the UK, because I think it taught us a lot about what it is to be yourself. 

Fall Out Boy’s ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out now via Fueled By Ramen

[neurodivergentbraingoblins]

Story time about how being "inclusive" is often used as pretty jewlery to make workplaces seem less shitty than they are.

So I used to work for a place that did workers compensation claims. I was a data entry worker - essentially my job was to processes all incoming and outgoing documents and make sure they digitally got attached to the correct claim so other people could do their job.

I had been working at this place for about 6 months, and we had a MASSIVE turnover in people. Like over half my team/coworkers quit. Well, I just happened to be really, really good at data entry work. My pattern recognition skills and OCD compulsions were a perfect fit for this job. Even management constantly would say how impressed they were with the amount of work I could get done.

Here's the problem - the 2 other people who didn't quit during the turnover were my superiors. They had problems with the way I communicate (AuDHD). So instead of dealing with it, they openly harassed me in group chats. Our boss would see the chats and then call them out on it and tell them to stop.

Fast forward a few months later. Shit is getting crazy for our company as we were expanding. I'm getting harassed constantly by all my "teammates" and from higher ups. I go to HR about the concern and they decide to have me just directly report to our boss. But the problem wasn't solved. I still had to work with and ask questions to the team who obviously hated me. Simply because I communicate and work differently than I do. I was always willing to help them get caught up on work, but never the other way around.

So I've been at this place for about a year now and I'm testing a brand new method of cataloging data to the correct files. (Example- adding medical records for a specific person to their specific digital file so the adjuster assigned to the claim can review it). Turns out something broke with the process and over 700 files were lost.

So I get pulled into a very sudden meeting with me, the 2 teammembers who were my superiors and my boss. They are freaking out trying to figure out how to fix this. When I could finally get a chance to speak I told them I had backups of most of the files. They all went silent and just stared at me.

I explained that the way the process worked gave me anxiety because of this very potential issue. Once the files were uploaded to the claims, they were deleted from the storage location. Gone permanently. I didnt want to be the one responsible for losing important documents if something when wrong, so as a precaution (and a newly developed OCD compulsion) I would save most files to a different folder as a backup (usually just the files I had to convert from one format (ex: word doc) to a PDF).

Turns out I ended up saving the company thousands of dollars and thousands of work hours. My boss literally said to my face "your OCD saved the day! You're a hero!". The very next day everyone was back to being upset at me for how I did my job 😅

Well, over the course of my year there, management put together a COMPANY WIDE MANDATORY meeting about inclusivity and anti-discrimination. Of course I attended and I was having to hold back tears and laughter as everyone made all these promises to not judge people and to be open to "other working styles". The meeting was a 5 hour long meeting with different games and activities. You could tell the company execs were so proud of themselves for the meeting.

The very next day I received the perfect example of what NOT to do from my own boss who helped lead the company meeting! Essentially she heard a rumor that I was setting up meetings with other departments to work on things that hadn't been approved through the proper channels. She pulled me into a virtual meeting and, I kid you not, lectured me for 5 minutes straight about how that wasn't allowed. When I finally got a chance to speak I calmly told her I'd never done anything like that before. I admitted that occasionally I would ask someone else questions in a random email here or there when it related to what we were talking about. But I had never done any of the things she just accused me of and lectured me about. She was "assuming the worst and the negative instead of something positive" which was one of the core values we had spent almost an hour on at the meeting the day before.

I immediately went to HR crying. What was the point of that ridiculous mandatory meeting if the company superiors were still going to discriminate against me??? Well after a year of putting in hard work for them, fighting against all the harassment they threw at me, and doing my best to advocate for myself I ended up quiting. It was an amazing paying full time (40hr) job that fit my skills perfectly. But I had to quit because I couldn't stand listening to them say "we love your OCD and it really helps the company, but you need to stop doing things that way. It is really annoying and takes too long. Plus your coworkers don't like it. But keep giving us those same results! You really are our best worker!"

My OCD was turned into a joke. Something that was only okay when it benefitted them, but a disgusting trait to hide away when it didn't.

Tldr: I gave a year of my life to a company that outwardly toted being "inclusive" while simultaneously being harassed for my OCD and AuDHD symptoms. All while being told my "OCD saves the company money but like, can you please stop doing things that way? Thanks!"

[kindlyanni]

Hello 👋

New reader here! Of both of your comics, though I admit I'm more into The Witch Door. Funfact: I don't know why, but my brain keeps calling it The Witch Next Door... which wouldn't be totally wrong, in a way, but still.

I've never really been into vampires, but the story going on in Transfusions Book 2 is getting more and more interesting, so I'll keep reading it ^^ And I'm fascinated by the dedication throughout all those years, almost fifteen years!, along with the evolution of the storytelling, the style itself, the layout, etc. That's impressive.

I'm also very glad to read stories set in Finland, which isn't a place I've come across often in mainstream media. I like to discover a new country this way.

Now, I've got a few questions, some maybe silly, sorry 😅

1. Is coffee like a thing in Finland? Or is it your own habit showing up? Because your characters sure drink a lot of coffee every time! I am used to a certain drinking coffee habit in my own country, although I'm a tea person, but I don't know, it seems to be a very, very strong habit there.

2. I prefer waiting for chapters to be completed to read them. Is there a way to know when one is done? Do you announce the last pages on this blog?

3. I love the incorporation of Finland folklore and myths in The Witch Door! Would you happen to have any book recommandations in English to learn more about it?

4. Is there or will there be a physical copy of The Witch Door at some point? (No, I'm not well into it at all, that's not true...)

Thank you and have a nice day, night, or whatever time is it when you see this :)

Hi there!

I get that vampires are not everyone's cup of tea. I am glad to hear people like TWD, as it's the newer and probably less known webcomic of mine. :)

Is coffee a thing in Finland, you ask? Finns consume the most coffee per capita in the world, according to some studies, or we're in top 2 at least. ~4 cups/day average. In Finland coffee breaks are mandatory at work places. In Finland coffee is a form of socialising, of hospitailty. If someone comes over you at least offer to make coffee for them. Many Finns drink coffee several times a day. Fun fact, I started drinking coffee when I turned 30. Didn't like the taste before that. I make 3 cups after waking up and take my time drinking it. I try to take breaks from drinking coffee every now and then though. Jousia drinks a lot of coffee, like a lot. It's because he also works when he's sleeping so he's always tired, but at this point it's a bit of an addiction.

Sometimes.... I usually make "chapter ended" posts on instagram, because I don't post weekly updates there, but I could start making those kind of posts on here too, it makes sense. If I just remember to do that. But you'll also know when chapter is over when I start posting chapter extras between chapters. :)

Unfortunately I don't know any Finnish folklore/mythology books in English. If someone else does, feel free to drop recommendations in the replies!

I can't say. I don't know. I might put together pdf's at some point!

Thank you, have a nice day as well :)

[maxislvt]

She Drains Me Slowly

Summary: As much as you loved Wanda, you could no longer tolerate being her puppy. The way every vampire in a 20 mile radius gawked and fawned over you like some teacup poodle was beyond humiliating. Even with the promise that no "low level" vampire would put their hands on you, you still found yourself being stroked and cooed at by complete strangers very often. There was only so much you could take before you would snap. You decided to give yourself a break, but your owner had other plans.

Tags: aggressive behaviors, series typical manipulation, mommy kink, nonsexual pet play

A/N: no more than 20 of y'all could've seen this when it first came out. so I'm posting the final part again! Hope y'all enjoy it. I will take drabble/headcanon requests for vampire!wanda :)

Series Masterlist

You had lasted all of three weeks before you were officially done with Wanda's antics. You loved her, you truly did, but she was starting to become suffocating. You couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without her around and her rules were absolutely insane. What was once sexually liberating and tastefully degrading was now dreadful and distasteful to you. You didn’t want to be a doll or a pup or whatever nickname Wanda could come up with to make you fall back into her arms. No more pet names, no more rules, and definitely no more collars. Just time to exist as you were without Wanda constantly looking over your shoulder. As much as you wanted that, you were deathly afraid of how your lover would react. Wanda had become increasingly volatile and possessive. The slightest misstep or the smallest hint of disobedience would land you a punishment. Logically, you decided to just leave the second you got an excuse. Thankfully, it came quickly. You had to get some books for your classes in the upcoming semester. Though you would usually just find a free PDF online or borrow some from the library, you had to get some fresh air and head back into town. You missed your friends. Wanda never officially barred you from calling or texting them, but it wasn’t the same as spending time with them in person and it wasn’t easy to do when she literally stood behind you the entire conversation.

Your plan was simple. You would be a good pet all morning until Wanda left for work. Then, you’d get ready and leave. Maybe you’d talk to some friends after you got the books, but you wouldn’t spend more than a couple hours in town. It was a long walk from where Wanda lived to the edge of town and then an even longer walk from the gate to the library. You wouldn’t have time to do everything you wanted, but something was better than nothing at all.

The start of the day was pretty off. Wanda guided you through your morning like normal, she seemed more dominant than usual, but you thought nothing of it. You and Wanda ate in complete silence. That was the first red flag. Wanda would normally ask you about whatever your latest fixation was or give you the rundown of her schedule for the day. The second was her lack of guidance when you two went to brush your teeth and clean your faces. Wanda was most dominant during that time. She’d put toothpaste on your toothbrush and guide you through the intense facial routine she had set for you. Today, she just guided you to the bathroom and left you to your own devices. You never realize how poor your self-care skills were until she reprimanded you for almost washing your face with moisture and then putting on toner after your sunscreen. The worst of it was Wanda had almost no care for getting you dressed. She haphazardly threw your outfit together and was strangely rough when dressing you. To say your feelings were hurt was an understatement, but Wanda seemed to be nothing but a blood sucking brick wall. You held your tongue and decided it would be better for the both of you to just let her leave.

Wanda leaving was by far the worst “best” thing to happen all morning. She lingered around for hours just stomping and huffing as she washed the dishes, gathered her keys, and put on her shoes. Occasionally, you two would lock eyes and she’d have this weird expectant look on her face. You would turn away out of confusion then she would sigh obnoxiously loud before finding something else to do. Eventually, she stormed out the house in a quiet rage, making sure to slam the door hard enough to shake what felt like the entire house.

Finally, you were alone.

There was an unmistakable, but now unfamiliar burn in your chest. You were abandoned. Alone, frustrated, and nearly naked in what now felt like a stranger's house. You wanted to cry, but decided not to waste time. Your body dragged itself from the couch, through the living room, and finally to your closet. The grandness of where you were had been lost on you until that moment. The distance was nothing when you excitedly ran around it, but now it seemed endless as your feet dragged you across it. Dressing yourself had a weird melancholic freedom to it. You didn’t think too much about what you put on as long as it fit comfortably and actually covered your body, it was good.

You found yourself storming out the house the same way Wanda did. Angry and without care for anything else. You stomped through the house and slammed the door just as she did. It didn’t carry as much weight since she wasn’t there to see your acts of aggression, but it at least made you feel better. You found yourself stomping all the way down the hill and to the gate. It was a difficult feat and you felt ridiculous, but you held your ground. You stopped at the gate to catch your breath. Just as you were about to attempt to yank off the lock and run off, you heard footsteps. Your blood ran cold and you were frozen in place.

“That was a good show, puppy. For a moment, you really had me thinking you were actually trying to escape.”

The mere sound of her voice made your throat tighten up. Her voice had a deceptive sweetness to it that you were all too familiar with. It terrified you. Your grip on the lock tightened. All you had to do was pull it and walk away. You were leaving for a good reason. There was no reason for her to be upset with you, all you had to do was explain yourself. Yet, something was screaming at you that Wanda wouldn’t listen to you. Your body wanted to run. So that’s what you did. Shaking arms steadied themselves and pulled down with strength that surely wasn’t yours. Your legs bent, ready to speed off the second there was enough space in the gate for your body to slip through.

Instead, your body tumbled back from a push that seemingly came out of nowhere. Your head hit the ground in seconds. If it had anything other than grass and dirt, you surely would’ve cracked your skull. Your trembling arms struggled to lift you up off the ground. Your vision was slightly blurred, but it was clearly Wanda in front of you. It was like she magically appeared in front of you. “Wanda, I was just-”

“Just what? Just running away like some untrained mutt?” Her grip on the bars of the gate was strong enough to make the metal bend. “I feed you, bathe you, and keep you happy and you try to leave me,” She shouted before slamming the gate behind her. Wanda walked over to you and grabbed you by the front of your shirt. It was tight enough to restrict your breathing. There wasn’t a word in the English language to describe how angry Wanda was. Your plan to escape wasn’t a secret by any means, but she had given you a chance to be honest with her and you still decided to be sneaky and underhanded. She lifted you up with god-like strength so you were face to face. “There isn’t anything — or anyone — that you need that’s outside that gate. You hear me?” She wasn’t satisfied with the meek nod you had given her in response. “I said, do you hear me,” She repeated with more emphasis. “I have no problem breaking stupid mutts like you. So I suggest you behave yourself.”

“Yes ma’am. I’m so sorry, I promise I won’t act out again, I just needed to get my–” Your rambling was cut off by Wanda tightening her grip on your shirt. Your hands gripped onto her wrist as you were forcibly dragged back up the hill. Wanda had never been so careless with you. Even with the roughest punishment, she was careful to never push your boundaries. Now, you were just a rag doll for her to take her anger out on. “Please, I just wanted to get some books for my classes.” Lying to Wanda was always a dangerous game. She could find out the truth at any given moment and then your fate would be in her hands. It was your fault. That’s what you had convinced yourself. If you had just been honest with her, maybe she’d let you go. Wanda wasn’t cruel unless you forced her hand.

Wanda practically threw you against the floor of her house. She gently closed the door this time before turning towards you. Her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek. “Don’t worry about that. You won’t be leaving this house without me any time soon,” She asked through gritted teeth. She slowly stepped forward. For a moment, the corners of her mouth turned upwards. The sight of you trembling and attempting to escape her was addictive. She stepped forward again. Then she took another one. And another one. Then two more after that. And before she knew it, she had you trapped between her and the front of the couch. She slowly bent down so the two of you were face to face. Her hand snaked to the back of your neck and gripped it tightly. “I don’t wanna treat you like a mutt. I want you to be my good puppy and my perfect doll, but I have to punish you when you act out.” Her hand moved to the front of your neck and slowly began to squeeze.

Most people would’ve fought back. Clawed at her hands and tried to kick her off. Yet, you stayed still. You let Wanda’s strong hands wrap around your throat and selfishly steal your breath away. Even when your vision became speckled with black spots. You took your punishment like any good toy would. Any praise or degradation from your owner had fallen on deaf ears as your body lulled into unconsciousness. Death very well could’ve been knocking at your front door, but you were strangely okay with that. If Wanda wanted you dead for your betrayal, so be it.

Wanda finally let go when she was sure you had been knocked out. There was nothing but silence. Had you not been right in front of her, she would have thought she had been sent to the past. Back to when she was cooped up in her mansion with no one to share it with. Her hands cupped your face. It would’ve been sweet if you weren’t passed out by her own doing. It was just possessive now. One hand pushed you forward into her chest and the other stroked your hair. “Oh puppy, you don’t have a clue how much you mean to me.” You were the love of her life. Even if she demoted you all the way down to a mutt and would strip you of any freedoms she had given you once before, she still loved you. It was just a kind of love you would have no choice but to get used to.

°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°

When you woke up, you were surprisingly comfortable. Wrapped in fluffy warm sheets and surrounded by the relaxing scent of lavender and french vanilla. Had your legs not been throbbing from bruises or your neck not burned from being choked, you would’ve thought your failed escape plan was just a bad dream. Your hand blindly reached out for the warmth of your owner. You knew she wouldn’t be there, but you held out hope. A sigh escaped your lips as you forced your aching body to sit up right. There was no telling how long you’d be in trouble, but you would rather start your punishment now than hold it off. Walking to Wanda’s room felt. Your body weighed like a ton of bricks and your vision seemingly failed to recover from being knocked out, but you pushed forward regardless. Fortunately, your treacherous journey was cut short. The second you walked past the door to Wanda’s study, everything felt better.

She knew you were standing there, but decided to see what you would do. Maybe you’d start crying and beg her for forgiveness or maybe you’d keep up your little tantrum of independence and demand she apologize to you. Though you had repeatedly shown that you couldn’t be trusted, she wanted to give you the chance to redeem yourself naturally. Her eyes stayed focused on the monitor until you tugged at the sleeve of her suit jacket. "Is something the matter," She asked innocently. She knew exactly what was wrong. You wanted to be coddled and cuddled like you were the most precious thing on Earth, but knew it wasn't the treatment you deserved. " Use your words. I know you're just a mutt, but mommy doesn't understand pointing and pouting."

The use of such an honorific caught you off guard. Wanda had never used one before. She was your owner, but she never called herself that and you weren't obligated to refer to her as such. "I..Can I sit there? On the bed, I mean…Can I sit on the bed, please?" You tensed up underneath the hand that touched your face. It wasn't as warm and adoring as you were used to, but you were overjoyed to be touched again.

Wanda forced you to bend down to her eye level. "You can sit, but I need you to be extra quiet so I can work. Okay?" She normally wouldn't accept just a nod as confirmation, but you were clearly too shaken up for any proper discipline. Her chair rolled back so you could comfortably lay down in the bed underneath her desk. It had gone unused since she rarely worked from home. "This is a bed meant for a puppy and not a mutt, but if you behave I'll let you keep it." Wanda gave you a quick kiss on the lips before she pulled her chair back up and went to work.

Despite the trouble you put yourself in, not much changed. Wanda still checked on you every few minutes and mandatory snack breaks were just as consistent. What used to be cookies with milk were now bowls of fruit paired with water because "only good puppies get sweet snacks" as your owner bluntly. Wanda's break was usually reserved for "playtime" but she decided it was better to clean up what mutt she brought home instead.

Part of you worried that it would be a repeat of earlier. That you'd be carelessly tossed around and left to your own devices again. Fortunately, Wanda could extend her kindness to even the most disobedient mutts. She ran your bath with the same bath and bubbles you had grown to love. Your underwear and the tight fabric around your chest were removed with such care, you almost forgot why you wanted to run away.

Wanda guided you into the bathtub, taking extra care so your disoriented body wouldn't slip. Normally, she would get in with you, but there wasn't enough time for that. There was barely enough time to properly attend to you, but she was more than willingly to keep a few stuck up vampires waiting if it meant taming your disobedient soul. The pristine white suit jacket was carelessly discarded on the floor. She carefully unbuttoned her blouse and rolled up the sleeves. A smile spread across her face at the way you excitedly extended your arm out for her to wash. "You wanna be mommy's puppy again real bad, don't you," She teased as her fingers squished your cheeks.

You giggled at the strange affection. Your heart soared at the softness, but something in the back of your head had convinced you there was no need to talk. It was soft and corrosive. If you just played with the bubbles and let Wanda do whatever wanted, everything would be fine. Wanda would only be mean if you were mean to her. Just be good, that's all you had to do. For a moment, you wondered where the voice was coming from. You looked to Wanda, assuming she could hear it too, but all you got in return was a dotting look. It warmed your heart just enough to forget about the voice. "I'm sorry about this morning…I should have asked first."

Wanda let out a disappointed sigh. "You really should have, I don't want you to run off and get sick like last time." There was a purposeful air of nonchalant to her statement. She glanced up briefly, happy to see the confused expression on your face. "You remember when we were both really mad at each other and you ignored me for a super long time," Wanda said with faux innocence. It was her fault you had been upset, no sane person would say otherwise. "Then you got super sick and I had to sneak in to help you feel better. You got sick because of our connection." She reached into the tub and grabbed your hand. Her thumb carefully rubbed the bit marks she left weeks ago. "If we stay apart too long or get mad at each other, we'll both get sick and I don't want my mutt to get sick. Then they can't become a puppy."

Had this happened any earlier in your relationship, you would've shriveled up and demanded she talk to you like an adult. Yet, you found an odd comfort in her belittling tone of speech. "Oh, I didn't know that…I'm sorry," You whispered, suddenly ashamed and embarrassed of your previous behavior. You shifted slightly so Wanda could continue bathing you. "I won't go if it'll make you sick." It was an insane promise to make. You couldn't just not go to college. Though your parents were always supportive of your decisions, they certainly wouldn't be happy to see their money go to waste at the whim of a suitor they had never met. Plus, graduating college had been your dream since you were old enough to think — you couldn't just give up on it now with no regrets.

Wanda laughed at your blind dedication. "Oh, sweetheart, I would never make you drop out. We just have to make some arrangements so I can keep up with you," She cooed before kissing your cheek. "I'll have someone go and do all that boring stuff so you can stay with mommy until you have to go back." Wanda left no room for disagreement, which was fine since you didn't have any. Cleaning you up was a destresser that she couldn't go without. Even if she couldn't dress you up like a doll or even collar you like a puppy, taking care of you was fun.

So long as the two of you were connected, you would be anything she wanted.

[thiaquiche]

Feedback Fest 2024

Since the @transformativeworks is holding a Feedback Fest in honour of International Fanworks Day, I figured I’d join in the fun and put together my own reclist for the occasion! So, in no particular order, here’s ten fics I love and why you should read them! I’ve got a wide spread of fandoms here, so hopefully you’ll find something interesting. I have all of these fics downloaded, so if you’re seeing this in the future and a link to something you’re interested in ends up broken, just let me know and I’ll gladly send you a pdf.

Something’s Wrong with Danny Fenton Vol. I by Perfectly_Inconspicuous

Danny Phantom. Mature, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Gen. 55 065 words.

Danny Fenton.

The enigma of Casper High.

It's the first day of the winter semester when she notices him.

She notices him for what feels like the first time. Maybe because at this point he's the only alternative kid other than her.

Or maybe because boom, there he is: the locker next to hers.

--

A No One Knows AU where Danny transfers from a different school to Casper during Junior year and ends up befriending Sam and Tucker. Written for Invisobang 2021!

Why you should read it: This fic packs a wonderfully creepy, unsettling atmosphere that really makes this horror!Danny premise come alive (ba dum tss), and makes the development of his friendship with Sam and Tucker feel all the warmer by comparison. It’s incredibly gripping.

Soldier, Poet, King by Stargaze_Sunflower

Ducktales 2017. Teen and Up Audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply, Gen. 104 510 words.

Dewey has always felt like something was missing from his life. Something big. And really, it's just like him to get caught up in a kidnapping plot and stumble across the puzzle of his life on complete accident, and now he's got more pieces than he knows what to do with. Luckily, he's got help in the form of new friends, his moderate skills with a sword, and the determination to believe in the impossible.

This gives a whole new meaning to 'Found Family'.

Why you should read it: This fic is an awesome medieval fantasy romp, and it’s just plain fun.

Friendship Games by WhiteBAG

Milo Murphy’s Law. Teen and Up Audiences, Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings, Gen. 42 662 words.

Milo and his friends enter the Friendship Games. Dakota and Cavendish time travel to fight the monster.

Why you should read it: Without saying too much, the way the time travel plot winds back on itself is just so much fun. Even now that I’ve left the fandom, and haven’t read this fic in a long time, I still find myself thinking about it.

More Than Legacy by PanellaDePonce

Pokémon. General Audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply, Gen. 11 637 words.

It was time at last for the 150th Annual Convention of Pokémon Sciences to begin. Every year, the brightest minds in the field would gather together to present their findings to an eager audience of burgeoning scientists and casual enthusiasts alike. 150 years ago it started in Jubilife Village, and today, the conference is held in Jubilife City.

Before the conference begins, however, many of the leading researchers gather together to argue and debate, verbally slap fighting and throwing around their theories and ideas. Lucas found this tradition tiring, annoying, and most of all, incredibly boring.

Little does he know, something very interesting is set to happen at the meeting. Something he wouldn't want to miss.

Why you should read it: This thing made me BAWL. I was fucking SOBBING. Waaaaaughhhhhhhhhhh

Give Me Healthy Coping, or Give Me Death by Prince_Enby

OMORI. General Audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply, F/M (past Hero/Mari) and Gen. 5420 words.

There was something weird about how Kel was acting, Hero thought. Hero's thoughts were all over the place these days, though, so that observation probably didn't mean anything.

Still, though, he was curious about that glint in his brother's eyes. It was the look of a man on a warpath - and all over a bowl of soup.

Weird indeed.

Why you should read it: This fic is chicken soup when I’m sad, and I wanna share the comfort, plain and simple.

Mari Suzuki’s Overly Busy Afterlife by ShardOfHope

OMORI. Teen and Up Audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply, M/M (Basil/Kel/Sunny), F/F (Aubrey/Kim), and F/M (Hero/Mari). 127 480 words.

Mari never left Sunny after the accident. She forgave him and promised she would stay until he was ready to tell the truth. Until he was strong enough.

Four years of staying with her gremlin shut in brother has made her slightly regret that promise. Well, more then slightly.

A retelling with a ghost, and a brother with no survival instinct.

Why you should read it: This fic is riotously funny. Like, wheezing on the floor funny. Rolling around, falling down the stairs and breaking your neck funny. (Yes I did have to force a stairs joke in there. Sue me, but sue me after you read this fic.)

Coming to Light by Candyland1030 [DeviantArt]

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. PG. 2819 words.

What goes around comes around. Sooner or later, everyone has to pay the piper.

Why you should read it: This is my favourite fic for seeing Bill Hawks get his comeuppance. A delicious dose of justice for a guy who got off far too easily in canon.

Theo’s Surreal Mountain-Climbing Adventure by CelestialHorizons (TerminalMiraculosis)

Celeste. Teen and Up Audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply, Gen. 5519 words.

Madeline has been able to dash her whole life. She thinks this is rather mundane. Theo disagrees.

Why you should read it: Extremely funny depiction of speedrunning, also Theo is simply best boy. You agree. Read it.

An Empire of Ice by TimeCloneMike

Frostpunk. Mature, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Gen. 4621 words.

The Great Frost has come and gone. That was the easy part. Rebuilding human civilization? That's when things start to get difficult, even with automatons to do all the heavy lifting.

Why you should read it: Both oneshots are great, but I especially recommend the second chapter. The story of Project Legacy saving New Manchester in the actual game has always been touching to me, and this fic’s depiction of the rescue of New Manchester’s last scout gives me warm fuzzies every time. Both parts of this fic add a human element to the game’s more zoomed-out storytelling that I deeply appreciate.

Marital Bed, by MadameReveuse

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask. Mature, No Archive Warnings, Multi (Randall Ascot/Angela Ledore/Henry Ledore). 3526 words.

A comedy in two parts.

The Masked Gentleman imagines all the ways in which Henry and Angela Ledore might have backstabbed him. Later, Randall sees it all with clearer eyes. Maybe his fantasy can still come true - in an altogether better, lovelier way. With himself included.

Why you should read it: I don’t normally talk about, let alone recommend, sexually explicit fics, but I read this one recently and just fell in love with the characterization. Considering sex in the context of Randall’s misguided hatred and Angela and Henry’s deceptive marriage adds an interesting layer to their whole *gestures* everything, and I found all of the headcanon ideas presented very plausible. However, warning for Azran Legacy spoilers offhandedly mentioned right at the beginning.

Bonus:

This awesome Miracle Mask AMV that has been so stuck in my head lately, lol. Editing’s great, song’s great, all around great. (Don’t watch unless you’ve finished Miracle Mask though, it’s spoilers.)

[java-dragon]

Bookbinding/Fan binding for beginners by... a beginner PART ONE

SO YOU WANNA BE A FANBINDER EH!?

RIGHT! so it felt like maybe it might be sorta kinda helpful to put something about a 'how to do the thing' together. Buckle in this is going to be a ride and a half. Edit as of November 16th 2023 The Master List for EVERYTHING is

HERE

SO, first thing is first- if you're fan binding there is a bit of etiquette to follow. But it is just good manners to ask permission to fan bind the fic you're interested in. See if the author has a FAQ available where they state the Yay or the Nay. Submit a DM or a comment. But as a note of disclaimer- this is for PERSONAL USE ONLY. THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE SOLD ANYWHERE. LOOKING AT YOU ETSY FAN FIC SELLERS THAT CAN GET EVERYONE INTO A FUCK TON OF TROUBLE. That is a breech of fair use laws. Don't breech fair use laws. Don't be a dick.

If you happen to have a EPUB or PDF copy of a fic that has been deleted and you wish to bind it or if you receive no response to the author in question, nod your head, know that you did your best and proceed on with the project and make your fic to put on your shelf. Sleep well knowing you did your best and you can do nothing else.

But if you receive a Nay- don't be a dick honour the author's choice and plop the fic on your ereader and call it good.

Now that we got that all out of the way. ONWARD!

MATERIALS! Musts: (The optional materials will be marked as "OP") Access to a Word processor Printer with duplex printing (It prints on both sides of the page) Fic Printer Paper- regular printer paper is FINE if you're being budget conscious. But if you'd like to splurge:

Hammermill Copy Paper But the Most bang for your buck is Church's Paper

Please note: These are US based links, and I am going from what and where I am located you might have to go to a local paper shop. If you want your book to feel very book-like see if your paper shop can take 11 x 17 paper and cut it in half for you which yields 8.5 x 11 paper on the short grain (paper has a grain there is a stiff side and a floppy side, much like fabric, by cutting the paper in half it makes it more 'floppy' and thus more book like)

a punch cradle I use one made by HoneyMinCo - or some sort of punch guide

Awl

Glue- Elmer's Glue All, Tacky, Lineco , PH Neutral all will do what you need it to do

Waxed linen thread

Curved Needles

Book press- you can make these for cheap with wooden cutting boards, bolts and wing nuts.

A brush you don't mind getting glue all over or you can use a silicone face mask brush like this hell I even use my fingers at times

box cutter or any sort of cutting tool, rotary tool

scissors

metal rulers help

spacers (Not necessary but helpful to have you can also DIY this for cheap) OP

Davy Board/Chip Board/Book Board AKA dense AF cardboard

and some sort of thick paper- like a cardstock

bone folder - butter knives also work in a pinch

Recommendations:

For Printers- Epson ECO Tanks are the best bang for your your buck ink wise and has duplex printing. Inkjet and colour options. Some binders swear by laser printers for speed and the general look for the final product but use what you have. Just make sure you have extra ink on hand.

The upfront costs can be pretty steep but a lot of the materials can be steep but you can get crafty and raid a dollar store and charity shops.

Up Next- How to get a Fic from AO3 to your word processor and how to format a document to get it ready for printing and likely more links, and some people to watch on TikTok or Youtube.

Edit: 11/1/2023:

There is a Fan Binding Starter Kit Found here

[brightwitchbrews]

Woohoo! She's done!! I've been working on this kit for a while now 😊

Embrace your inner siren with the Sea Witch Pocket Grimoire, a printable collection of illustrated grimoire cards and tiny notebooks, all contained in a pocket-sized junk journal style folio.

Easy to print and assemble, this kit is perfect for any witchy journaler seeking to connect with the power of the ocean.

Available in my Etsy store, or on Patreon at the Teatime Daydreamer tier!

etsy.com/shop/brightwitchbrews

patreon.com/brightwitch

✦ KIT INCLUDES ✦

✧ 1 x junk journal folio with pockets (95 x 146mm when assembled, 7mm spine width) ✧ 8 x grimoire art cards (85 x 120mm) ✧ 2 Notebook Cover designs (85 x 120mm when assembled) ✧ 12 x Notebook Page spreads (6 x double-sided foldable sheets, 24 x total pages)

File formats:

✧ A4 size (can be scaled to print on US Letter) ✧ PDFs of high resolution art ✧ 300 DPI, CMYK colour

✦ THE PROCESS ✦

As a graphic designer, I adore paper craft! I recently saw a junk journal folio on Etsy and it just looked like the absolute cutest thing ever!

I really wanted to try making one myself, and get back to those roots with this little witchy kit.

I also really wanted something I would use myself. Something that would be practical, portable, tactile, and delightful for any practitioner drawn to the magic of the ocean. Something that can be easily constructed, and serve as a small reference for teatime witchery!

After some trial and error, first with some plain-paper mockups, then with final printouts, I finally got all the pieces ready.

I hand illustrated each piece of artwork in this pocket grimoire kit using acrylic ink on watercolour paper. I then scanned each art piece, cleaned them up in Photoshop, and put everything together in Illustrator!

I really hope you enjoy this kit for some teatime paper craft witchery!

love & seashells, Sarah Louise

[fernsnailz]

also if it's not bothering i'd like to ask you if you have any tips on how to make a zine/fanzine? i've been wanting to for a while but i am unsure how to and it feels kind of intimidating

yeah no worries! the good news is that personal zines are pretty easy to make because you can put basically anything into one and make it any length/size you want. they also come in a lot of different forms - you can make one that's just a digital pdf, post some loose pngs online, draw it out on some sheets of paper that you staple or fold together, have it printed at a professional printing service, or create an entirely new method that works for the zine you're making. it's up to you and depends on what resources you have or what zine you want to make - which is always the first step! start with an idea or general theme you want to make your zine about, which can be quite literally anything. is it a fanzine about some characters you like? a personal comic? a various collection of your art, writing, or other creations? again, can be literally anything.

i can help most with digital zines because that's what i've made and participated in so far. really the biggest hurdle with any zine is just making the stuff that goes in it - i was very ambitious to make dance in fire over 30 pages, especially since it was my first solo zine. i say start small, zines can be as few as four pages if you want. if you do want to make a longer zine, something i did that i highly recommend is finding old sketches or unfinished/unposted art that you can use as a starting point for some pages. or just keep them in an unfinished state! sketch pages are always a welcome addition imo.

another thing i recommend if you're making a long zine (though is entirely optional) is keeping a tracker with the pages you want to make or have already been completed. this is part of what my tracker spreadsheet looked like for dance in fire - just a way for me to log when things are done, what things needed to be changed, any info i wanted to keep written down. this was a HUGE help for me personally since i was dealing with a lot of pages of just. stuff.

with digital zines, you don't necessarily have to make every page the same size, but i suggest sticking to one page size to keep everything cohesive. for dance in fire, every page is about 7x10in (with a little bit extra added for print bleed). once everything is done, there's a couple of different ways to combine everything into one pdf. sometimes you can export multiple canvases as a single pdf depending on the drawing program you're using - my version of clip studio can't do that, so i uploaded 37 individual pngs of the pages to an online pdf converter and just downloaded that lmao

last thing to figure out is where to host your zine - if you have a pdf, there's a few online file hosting platforms you can share them on. i used itch.io which is mostly for indie games and creators, some other people i know use github. these are good places to host your zine if you want to sell it, but you can probably also do that on ko-fi or patreon if you wanted? idk i don't have experience with those

that's all i got for now! there's some tricky stuff to figure out if you're printing a digital zine, but i'm still in the process of figuring that out myself so that might have to be a guide for another time lol

[foundry-fabrications]

Happy Halloween everyone! It's that time of the year again and that means it's spooky project time! Those who have been with me for a while know that every year for Halloween I put out some big thematic project for my favorite holiday. For this year, I wanted to keep the rework train going and rework a previous year's project. And that project is my Corpseweaver class!

Before we get started I just want to take a second to shout-out @dm-clockwork-dragon and his Necroficer class, which helped inspire many aspects of my own take on the "Frankenstein-ing" monsters together concept.

I also want to mention that I still have a huge GDrive folder of 100+ creepy creatures and malign monsters pulled from across the internet to inspire your own amalgams!

In a way I got lucky this year. I started reworking my corpseweaver MONTHS ago so I already had a lot of it done. I was hoping to have the basics done in time for a campaign I was going to be in but time got away from me and I ended up playing something else so I've just been slowly working on it over time. Before October even began the entire base class and one of the subclasses were mechanically done, which left only two more subclasses to finish and I needed to rewrite all the fluff text which was honestly pretty cringeworthy in my opinion.

So what are all the changes? IT'S A LOT! I reworked how the class collects resources and the amalgam creation system completely from the ground up. The old systems were overly complicated and REALLY bookkeepy so I simplified them. Now you get Flesh, Bone, and Exotic from creatures and you use those in specified amounts to make amalgams and make alterations. The system for doing so has been greatly streamlined. Now you have a dedicated stat block that all amalgams are based on and that gets modified throughout the creation process.

Another major change is that the base class is no longer a spellcaster, so all those features have been moved to a subclass of their own, the Skaab Scribe. I didn't like how based in normal magic the old class was as I always wanted it to be more focused on mad science, alchemical formulas, and occult ritual.

And one of the last huge changes is that the Soma Smith has been removed from the class completely and will likely never return, though the name does live on as the Fleshwarper has been renamed. As much as I liked the idea of the old soma smith, I felt that it didn't fit the class upon further examination. Its whole deal was about creating new life basically from scratch and that's not what I want this class to be about. That's actually a theme that I kept seeing in the flavor text throughout the class as I've been working on it, creating new life, and it's a goal of mine to remove it wherever possible. The class does not create life, it reanimates the dead, and in my mind those are very different things.

So yeah, on that note those are the biggest changes but obviously everything got touched in some way. As with many of my reworks, this one is an overhaul on a grand scale, and one I'm honestly quite proud of.

As for the updated aesthetics, however, I have mixed feelings. Overall I think they fit the class much better than the default theme I was using before but there's a lot of visual jank that I'm not a fan of. I also would have liked to use better artwork but I had so little time to finish this as it is. I was also forced into using GM Binder for this project instead of Homebrewery because the theme I chose doesn't work with HB very well so that was less than ideal. For smaller projects it's not a big deal but for something this huge all the weird little issues I have with GMB start to compound and get frustrating. It's not a system I like but it has its uses sometimes.

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