#posts i actually wrote

[fairydares]

This is without a doubt my top funniest Berserk moment. last line I expected from the Skull Knight in any panel ever

[underestimated-heroine]

The fact that radfems spread this post around is actually really interesting--infuriating, but interesting. Because what they've really done here is tell on themselves.

This is the shrimp guy story:

From an anonymous green text called "shrimp saved my life" [emphasis mine]:

>be depressed, suicidal xanax- addicted incel >one day I go to my /aq/fag uncle's house for some shit >he has pet shrimp, never seen anything like it before >he offers to get me some 53 KB JPG >throw them in a barely cycled tank with some shitty rock >several shrimp die >realize that I killed them with my apathy >realize I need to take responsibility for once in my life >do research, learn about water parameters and so on >eventually I have a beautiful planted tank with no more deaths >notice a female shrimp carrying eggs >haven't felt this excited about anything in almost a decade >the eggs disappear and I once again think I fucked up >a few days later I see a tiny transparent baby shrimp >l suddenly know how the shepherds felt as they gazed upon the newborn Christ >by this point I live and breathe shrimp >all my spare time is spent on shrimp research and watching shrimp videos >l spend most of the money I had saved from my last job on shrimp products >quit the Xanax to support shrimp spending >start putting effort into college in hope of getting a good job for my shrimp >grades improve, no longer facing the prospect of dropping out >relationship with parents improves since I am finally passionate about something and applying myself >l see genuine happiness in their eyes when I talk excitedly about my shrimp >for my birthday my mom makes me a shrimp cake >it even has fondant legs and little chocolate eggs >cry like a little bitch when I see it >mom hugs me and tells me she's always been proud of me >college dorm neighbours demand to see my shrimp >shit they're gonna think I'm autistic >they actually think my shrimp are really cool >they start inviting me to their social events >start interacting with girls, get told by girls for the first time in my life that I'm fun and smart >l think my shrimp would be proud of me if they knew >We're gonna make it bros. Even if you can't do it for yourself, do it for the animals that depend on you.

He did address his relationship with women. By finding a hobby and passion and working on himself--"touching grass"--he stepped away from the echo chamber that filled him with all this rage and convinced him women were to blame for all of his problems. As someone once wisely observed, "the cure is going offline and realizing it's just. really not that big a deal."

And that is what radfems have not done, so of course they didn't spot the quiet flashpoint of shrimp guy's personal development within his story.

Edit: it's been brought to my attention that the version of the greentext post I lifted the text from was censored by someone else. My bad for not realizing that, tbh it was done so well I thought shrimp guy had done it himself, but that's an important part of the post. I've gone back through and un-censored it. The reply which was spread around with the original post addressed the words themselves well, I think; however distasteful and fucked up the incel rabbit hole is, it doesn't diminish his growth.

[sineala]

Fic: Even the Score

Even the Score (36307 words) by Sineala Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Avengers (Comics) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Comic Book Science, Hallucinations, Temporary Amnesia, Medical Trauma, Blood and Injury, Happy Ending, Comic: Avengers Vol. 3 (1998) Summary: After Tony risks his own life to save Steve from the deadly Bloodwash gas, he's in bad shape, and he needs immediate treatment. Thanks to the treatment, he doesn't quite remember what's going on, but he does remember that people have been trying to kill him and that he can't trust the government. Since the Secretary of Defense did try to murder both of them today, Steve can't exactly tell Tony he's wrong about either of those things -- but, unfortunately, Tony doesn't remember who Steve is. And, even more unfortunately, Steve taught Tony to fight.

Written for @phoenixmetaphor for the You Gave Me A Stocking event for the You Gave Me A Home comics Steve/Tony server. It's Steve/Tony established-relationship v3 (Manhunt & Red Zone) h/c.

[epitomereally]

H/D Erised 2023 fic claim: True Love Gave To Me for @bicholsdrarrysideblog

It’s the first of December, and all Draco wants to do is make Christmas lovely for Scorpius. But then Harry Potter shows up, asking him to save the world, and it turns out they’ve almost saved the world a couple of times before. One-hundred and forty-four times, to be exact. Or: what happens after the time loop?

BICHOL, I had the absolute best time writing this fic for you. I spent about five million years trolling your bookmarks (which are hilarious & you have the best taste jfc), and lovedlovedloved pining Harry + doesn’t-believe-he-deserves-good-things Draco. Add in Scorpius and just a pinch of a plot and voila: this fic was born! Thank you so much again for pinch-hitting for Erised this year ♡

This fic took a gaggle of Christmas elves, angels, ghouls, and Krampus to drag over the finish line—@citrusses and @mallstars for their incredible alpha work, and @queenie-jinny and @sleepstxtic for pushing me to fix my tenses, catching all my typos, and generally betaing this fic on a timeline that I cannot even comprehend for myself. All of you are so so so appreciated.

a little Christmas snippet ♡

It’s only as he’s pounding on the door, Scorpius holding his hand in his most darling emerald wool cloak, that Draco begins to question his actions.

It’s too late though. Harry Potter answers it.

“Draco?” He’s still in pyjamas, red and covered in tiny fluttering Snitches. They look like childrens’ pyjamas magically sized up, with how Potter’s knobbly ankles show. “How’d you get past the Fidelius?”

Draco waggles his fingers, and says, “Loop magic?” Then he immediately remembers how absolutely idiotic Pansy looks when she does that and drops his hands to his side, lickety-split.

“Hi, Potter!” Scorpius waves.

Potter’s face lights up instantly, and the gnawing ache grows inside Draco. It’s just—how can anyone just wear their feelings on their face like that? It’s not fair: not fair to Draco, not fair to Scorpius, not fair to Potter. Not fair to Draco’s heart—144 days sounds like an eternity, but it doesn’t feel like enough for Potter to—for whatever Potter’s feeling, right there on his face, for the world to see. For Draco to see.

But Draco knows he made the right choice as soon as Potter squats onto his knees and starts chattering to Scorpius. Scorpius is unusually gregarious with Potter, and Draco wonders if perhaps the finger-waggly loop magic may actually have something to do with it—the easy way Scorpius takes Potter’s hand when it took him ages to warm up to Blaise when he’d returned from abroad. Or maybe it’s just Potter: his palpable warmth, the way he acts genuinely interested in what Scorpius has to say, how his smile lights up his whole face and his eyes say I could love you; let me love you.

for those who care: fonts are aquiline two and alegraya. painting is by bruno liljefors, vintervita trädtoppar med orrar

[see-mab]

I may have never been to therapy but I have watched the dead poets society an unhealthy amount of times

[poetricismic]

"Guess the world nor the people did me wrong...I was the one setting up high my expectations"

Poetricismic

[chronica11ysa1ty-117]

So surreal

Happy one minute

Not the next

What am I doing

What am i supposed to be doing

My life

Unpredictable

Messy

Damaged

Broken

[raks777]

Cease Worrying, Lord has got your future in His hands

[ethereal-string]

𝚂𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚊 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚏 𝚊 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚛, 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚊 𝚙𝚘𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚘𝚞𝚕 𝚘𝚏 𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚒𝚜𝚝.

𝚄𝚗𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚎 𝚔𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚝 𝚟𝚊𝚐𝚞𝚎 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚘 𝚖𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚑𝚎𝚛, 𝚢𝚎𝚝.

[wordsandart21]

Moving on…

Moving on in today’s world is like unfollowing someone on social media: a digital detox for the heart. It’s hitting ‘delete’ on memories stored in cloud storage, and ‘unsubscribe’ from the emotional baggage cluttering your inbox. In a swipe-left culture, moving on is the ultimate act of self-care, a declaration of independence in a sea of past connections. It’s reclaiming your timeline, rewriting your status, and embracing the freedom to curate your own story. So here’s to closing tabs, clearing caches, and pressing ‘refresh’ on life’s browser. Because sometimes, the best way to move forward is to let go of what’s holding you back.

- Words and Art (No Backspace #2)

[jessicaherrerawrites]

[fairydares]

Lucy: Guys...Natsu doesn't think about romantic stuff like that. C'mon.

Erza, Juvia, Wendy, Everyone: ...No, I think he might think about romantic stuff. Like we're not trying to invalidate you, but from all the times he grabbed your boobs and snuck into your bed and saved you and stalked you...like I get how you think it could go either way but I think he might definitely probably absolutely think about that stuff, maybe.

Lucy: No way, you guys are crazy 🤣

Natsu: *writing fanfiction about their 33rd future child's hair color*

[underestimated-heroine]

"we all need to stop donating to AO3 until they apologize for censoring in a volunteer slack about I/P. If you donate you're spineless" is a(n approximate) statement I just read on here.

Yeah, look, I'm struggling with this one. I was from the first reading, I was when I went to the person who made that post's blog and saw a bunch of the kind of posts they've been reblogging, and after reading the former volunteer's "receipts"? now I'm really struggling.

To be clear, I'm not struggling with whether I agree with the post's assertion; of course it's ridiculous. What I'm struggling with is trying to figure out how we got uhhh here. "Here" being someone looking the other users of Tumbler-Dot Cob dead in our virtual eyes and calling on them to "boycott" the fanfiction-hosting nonprofit AO3 over what amounts to an interpersonal dispute between a small subset of volunteers in a Slack channel.

I could analyze what happened and the conversation in question, but having read the entire thing, I feel it's just not worth it and would rather extend the grace of discretion in this case. I'll only say that while I find the opinions of some of the people in that slack gross, the now-former volunteer and the above-linked poster also misrepresented the situation, conducted themselves poorly, and also made some gross assertions and denials.

Again, can't believe we're here after the Spotify Wrapped thing was called out and so many people have called on us to check ourselves on the antisemitism (EDITED and added a different link with both that pamphlet and way more resources!) but no, AO3 isn't "run by the Zionists" (yes, OOP heavily implied that in their doc: "But regardless of the personal beliefs of the individuals involved, this is much deeper than the org just being zionist.") Nor is AO3 a productive battlefield to die on in the name of Palestine.

You're looking for places you can actually help (PCRF post, more charities post, Standing Together) and I get that, but come on, now. This ain't it.

[sineala]

Superheroes and ethics

I realized that I wrote this last month on Patreon and forgot to post it here. I got asked to write meta about superhero ethics with regard to Steve and Tony. I ended up writing mostly about how Captain America's Plot Armor interacts with his principles.

I have been asked to talk about ethics and philosophy with respect to Steve and Tony. Unfortunately, the only philosophy-adjacent disciplines that I know well enough to speak about with any confidence are formal semantics and pragmatics, which isn't really all that useful in daily life unless you'd really like to learn about the differences between entailment, presupposition, and implicature, and also the Gricean maxims of conversation, which are great if you want to completely ruin conversations by violating them as many times as you possibly can.

So I'm not a philosopher, sorry.

But! I can talk more informally about Steve and Tony and ethics.

And I know there's been a lot of meta -- and actual books -- written about their differing views. I have a book here, A Philosopher Reads Marvel Comics' Civil War: Exploring the Moral Judgment of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, by Mark White, which I have not read yet but it sounds like this is probably the book you want to read if you want an actual philosophical analysis of this stuff. Judging by the reviews, the author decides to associate Tony with utilitarianism and Steve with deontology. That is probably fun. I am in no way qualified to talk about it. On an informal level, the thing I find fascinating about them is that, when it comes down to it, Steve and Tony are really not all that different.

I have been thinking about this for a while, because the last time I left anonymous asks open on Tumblr, the final ask I got before I decided that this wasn't a good idea was someone who wanted to pick a fight with me by asserting that Steve/Tony was a bad pairing because "they don't think alike, have different morals, different interests, and different emotional issues that the other is not capable of helping out with." This is one of the reasons why I don't have anon asks on anymore. But I thought it was honestly an interesting thing to think about.

So I have been pondering this on and off for a while, and I realized that the thing that really bugged me about it was that their general thesis was that Steve and Tony were bad for each other because they have nothing in common. See, I don't think that's true. I think they have a whole lot in common. But I am also willing to acknowledge that canon likes to put them in situations where they're at odds with each other and it seems fairly easy to come up with circumstances that will cause them to want to beat the stuffing out of each other. But, crucially, this doesn't mean they have nothing in common.

(I also think they actually have a lot of similar interests and are actually very capable of helping each other with their emotional issues, which canon demonstrates multiple times. But that'd be a different essay.)

For me, one of the reasons why Steve/Tony are so compelling as a pairing is because they are so similar. Let's call it, like, 95% similar. They are remarkably like-minded when it comes to their values and how they view the world. It's just that then they can fight, bitterly, over the remaining 5% of differences.

They work well together most of the time and it's just the bits where they almost work together that are so agonizing and provide so much material for fandom. Because it's not like they don't understand where the other one is coming from, what they want, or why they want it. They do. They just don't understand how the other person can come up with a different path to the answer given their shared goal and shared values. Steve doesn't understand how Tony is willing to do something that Steve thinks is wrong, and Tony thinks, I don't know, that Steve's ideals are too naive for the real world. Tony thinks Steve's plans are unrealistic and Steve thinks Tony's plans are unacceptable.

There's also an additional complication, which is that Steve as a character has a lot of plot armor that Tony doesn't. Steve decides what he thinks is moral and what he thinks is immoral, and he simply does not do the immoral thing. And the thing is that the narrative helps Steve out with this. It's fine if he's idealistic! It's even okay if his ideals are naive! He almost never has to go against them. I am saying this as a big fan of Steve. The story really helps him out.

For example, Steve thinks that killing is wrong, so he doesn't kill anyone, generally speaking. (Depending on the retcon you believe in, he may have in fact killed zero people in World War II, which is kind of ridiculous.) But in situations where the best of the options involves killing someone, someone pretty much always ends up dead. It's just that someone else does the dirty work. Steve surrounds himself with a lot of spies and assassins (Bucky, Sharon, Natasha) and those people kill the people who need killing.

In Civil War, Steve believes Registration is wrong, and he never has to change his mind. He probably still believes it's wrong. Instead of going on trial, he dies; he never has to face the consequences of any of his actions. The narrative shields him from that. When he comes back to life, Registration is gone and he gets a pardon from the president. It's all taken care of. He causes a lot of damage, and he doesn't even have to say he's sorry for trying to bash Tony's face in, in public, with witnesses, after having destroyed what looks like several city blocks.

So Steve never compromises his principles, because he has the luxury afforded to him by the plot so that he almost never has to be in a situation where he'd have to decide whether he should compromise his principles, say, for the sake of the greater good. He doesn't have to make that choice, because Marvel's not interested in writing stories where Steve has to make that choice. So it just… doesn't come up. He almost never has to put his ethics to an actual test. If you hand Steve the trolley problem, he'd just say, well, I'd save everyone. That's not an actual option in the trolley problem. But he's pretty much always going to be in a plot where he gets to do the right thing and save everyone.

Tony, though? Tony has to do terrible things for the sake of the greater good all the time. He doesn't get to opt out of the decisions. Even on a personal level, he has to do terrible things to himself. He has to decide probably at least half a dozen times whether he should wear the armor even if wearing the armor is hurting him -- say, when he decides to take on the LMD in the arc where he gets his first artificial heart, or in Armor Wars II, or in that storyline in the middle of Busiek's run after he gets beaten up by the Mandarin. And he always decides to wear the armor no matter what the personal cost is to his body. He ends up in a lot of fights where he has to take pretty bad damage to save the world -- and while Steve would also make that decision, Steve's going to heal up and be fine, like in his recent run where Bucky shoots him in the shoulder. He has a healing factor and he's fine in a couple weeks. Tony breaks his back in order to save civilians and then gets addicted to morphine and ruins his life for a good long while. That kind of stuff, with lasting physical consequences, just doesn't happen to Steve. Let's not talk about Streets of Poison.

It's pretty obvious when you look at their biggest fights (say, Civil War and the incursions) that Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and Steve doesn't. However, Steve doesn't exactly have usable alternate suggestions. The plot armor helps him out there. Steve espouses extremely noble ideas, life and liberty and all that… that are not actually workable plans.

And because of how the narrative treats him, he doesn't really need to have workable plans, either. It's not like he actually uses them. Because he's just going to be fine. (Except in the incursions, but everyone came back to life afterward so it's all fine.)

Steve doesn't like the SHRA. Okay. Fine. He believes it's an unjust law. His plan is apparently to just… keep fighting Tony and anyone else who tries to take him into custody for not registering. What's his endgame? Does he have one? His plan appears to be "be on the run from the government forever." As far as I can remember, he would prefer the situation to go back to the way it was but he does not, to my knowledge, ever propose a way of achieving that. He's not out there saying the law itself should be found unconstitutional or anything.

Similarly, with the incursions, after the Gauntlet breaks, the Illuminati have no solution for an incursion that isn't building bombs and destroying the other Earth in the incursion. Either they act to destroy the other Earth, or through inaction, both Earths are destroyed. Big ol' trolley problem. Steve refuses to play. Steve says he can't countenance that. Excellent moral stance. It's very him. He says, "I believe we'll find a way to stop it." He doesn't have any ideas besides "not the thing Tony is doing," which appears to also be his stance about the SHRA. If they'd let Steve stay in the Illuminati… what would he have done? I suppose the possibility exists that if he managed to flip one of the scientists to his side he'd get them to think up an alternate answer. He could have suggested that everyone evacuate Earth. But he doesn't actually have an idea, personally for what to do. Other than "nobody should die."

(That isn't even what happens, in the end. Of course, by the end, Steve is trying to hunt Tony down and kill him, so you could argue that he's not really behaving much like himself there, and neither is Tony.)

Anyway. When you think about it, what Steve wants and what Tony wants, in both scenarios, is pretty much the same thing. They have the same values and the same goals; it's just that the paths they're willing to take are different. But when it comes down to it, they both actually want the exact same thing. Like they do most of the time. They both want to save the world. Except now they're fighting about how to get what they want. The fights are about the details. At least in 616.

We can contrast 616 Civil War with MCU Civil War. I have actually only watched CACW once, so this is going to be fun and possibly inaccurate. The 616 SHRA and the MCU Accords are, very broadly speaking, about the same general topic: government oversight of superheroes. In the MCU, after the disaster in Lagos, the UN decides that they can't just have the Avengers running around wherever they want, exploding things and getting people killed. Tony agrees with the need for UN oversight. Steve does not; he feels that the Avengers should be able to go wherever they need to go without getting caught up in red tape. Here in the MCU, Steve and Tony not only disagree on what the right thing to do is, they disagree on what the right outcome should be, and the reasons for that. Steve wants things the way they were. Tony would be okay with some amount of oversight. They both have different visions of the way the Avengers would look and operate, because they value different things; Steve wants autonomy and Tony wants accountability. The fight isn't just about the details. The fight is about everything.

This isn't the case in 616 Civil War. No one is fighting for (or against) "I, a superhero, should be able to go wherever I want for superhero reasons." UN oversight is one of those things that all the Avengers, including Steve, have agreed about for years; there are panels of Steve asking to get UN clearance before the Avengers zip off to Russia to save Tony. What happens in 616 is that an inexperienced superhero team gets into a fight they can't control, destroying a school in Stamford, CT, with massive casualties. The SHRA is a US bill saying that all American superhumans (which is probably thousands of people) should register with the government, receive training if they want to be heroes, and provide the government with their real names.

Both Steve and Tony are opposed to this, before Stamford. Then, when Stamford happens, Tony realizes the SHRA is happening no matter what and decides to support it. Even with the SHRA in effect, both Steve and Tony think there should be superhuman oversight; Steve just thinks it should be the teams training people up, the same way as they've always done. They don't even disagree about that; Tony also thinks they should be in charge of oversight, but he means himself (and Steve if Steve would ever join him). The people training superheroes would in fact still be them, both of them, no matter which side wins the war. Neither of them trust the government to handle Registration well. Steve's answer is to object to the very idea of Registration and to stay away from the government, and Tony's answer is to get in there and keep the superhero database in his own head so that Gyrich won't get the list of names and start sending Sentinels after everyone.

So they both massively distrust the government's presumed right and/or ability to safely do this, and want to protect superheroes from government oversight as much as possible. That's basically the same stance. Steve just thinks no one should get anywhere near the government, and Tony thinks if he gets in there he can make it less bad. He can be the guy doing the oversight. People who don't register might get arrested but at least they won't be killed by Sentinels, because he can stop that from happening. Steve isn't willing to imprison his friends at all, probably because he doesn't believe Tony when Tony says the only other option is death (i.e., they can't go back to the way things were -- although of course that's eventually what ends up happening, albeit long after Civil War is over). He probably thinks there's a secret third option, because for him there usually is. But what they basically want is the same thing. Tony's just willing to go a little farther than Steve is to get there.

Sure, Tony's plans aren't perfect. But he does have them. Sometimes they're really lousy, because sometimes there is no good solution. I acknowledge that he does a lot of things in Civil War that are actually pretty rotten. I am saying this as a fan of Tony. He does some bad things. He starts a war with Atlantis. He manipulates Peter Parker into unmasking, which has terrible consequences. He builds a prison. He imprisons a lot of his friends. But none of these things involve the government massacring superhumans. The one really, really bad future he's afraid of doesn't happen. (And we know, thanks to that one What If issue, that that's exactly what would happen if he weren't running Registration.) Other bad things happen, yes. But not that, which is the worst.

Steve doesn't want anything bad to happen. Steve just wants the good solutions, with no moral or ethical compromise on his part. and he usually gets them eventually by narrative fiat. Sometimes he has to die first -- which is, of course, what happens in Civil War -- but, eh, whatever, it's comics. That's not really a major drawback for superheroes. And eventually he gets what he wants, because comics return to the status quo. Everything goes back to the way it was.

It's the same thing with the incursions. Neither Steve nor Tony want their Earth to be destroyed, obviously, but Tony is willing to build bombs to destroy the other Earths in case they can't find any other solution. Steve says he thinks there will be another way. And neither of them want to use the bombs! Tony doesn't want to use them at all! The Illuminati don't actually find themselves in a situation where they have to decide whether to bomb a populated Earth until the Great Society incursion, and Tony refuses to be the one to do it. After Namor does it, Tony is distraught and says he thought they'd find another way -- which is the exact same thing Steve said to him except nobody kicked Tony off the Illuminati for saying it. They both have the same attitude. They want the same outcome. They don't want to use the bombs. It's just that Tony's willing to build them. They're pretty much on the same side here about everything (including the desire to not bomb other planets) except the lengths to which Tony is willing to go to have a backup plan. Just like Civil War.

I suppose I would say that, overall, comparing Steve and Tony's relative ethics seems hard to do in a way that is fair to both of them because Steve is so often given the ability to stick to his beliefs in a way that Tony isn't. "What does Steve do when he actually can't do the right thing" is one of those questions that doesn't seem to get explored all that much, except possibly at the end of Hickman's Avengers run, in which everything was going to hell anyway, and it wasn't like he got to be in Secret Wars to try to fix it. He does also tend to quit being Captain America when he doesn't like the government, although I think in that case that's more that doing the right thing at that time is Not Being Captain America.

(Secret Avengers is also a pretty good look at a Steve who has to do bad things and really, really doesn't like the things he's doing. He doesn't handle compromising his own values all that well. I think that would be a whole other essay.)

But anyway, yeah -- I think 616 Steve and Tony are on the same side when they fight, more than you might think they are given how many panels we have of them dramatically punching each other. Tony believes that the ends justify the means, and essentially, a lot of their fights are because Steve disagrees with Tony's means -- but he is very often 100% on board with Tony's actual motives, which I think is a fact that often gets lost when we start talking about their conflicts, because at that point we… want to talk about their conflicts. But I think they really do agree with each other a lot, which is what makes their conflicts so interesting and painful.

[epitomereally]

Celestial Navigation by @sabrecmc

18 year old Omega!Tony finds himself Bonded to Captain Steve Rogers. He isn't happy about it until he is.

An absolutely gorgeous story of learning to love yourself, even when you feel like you don't fit in & that you grew up wrong. I'm so happy to have gotten to bind this mammoth work for Sabre & as a gift exchange for @mourningmountainsbindery (who bound me this beautiful copy of Astolat's Let the River Run—JUST LOOK AT THAT COVER!).

Also to anyone who has @ed me lately (looking at u, em @powerful-owl & tacky @tackytigerfic particularly) & I've been derelict in responding, here is WHY.

This has been the longest binding project I've undertaken, both in page count and in time. My original message to Sabre was on March 16th—can't decide if I want to use the laughing or crying emoji here—and the colophon says I made the book in April 2023 (which was when I started typesetting, maybe). I had been randomly perusing dying videos on Youtube in bed on a Saturday morning, as one does, and came across a video showing how to spiral tie-dye. I IMMEDIATELY had a design premonition of the full design for this fic as a two-volume set, planted into my brain wholesale by the binding gods. I learned many new techniques throughout the process (edge painting, edge trimming/sanding, tie-dying/dyepainting, embroidery, typesetting meta from tumblr which copy-pastes with the worst goddamn formatting in the world, kill me now). Overall, alternately extremely painful & wonderful, and I'm extremely proud of this set.

Design-wise, I went whole-hog with the scifi stars theme. Endpapers are recolored versions of the star charts from the Apollo 11 mission:

Title page & chapter titles are both rips in the galaxy:

Epigraphs both star-themed:

Some more glamor shots because I'm so proud 💕

8.6 lbs // 3.8 kgs worth of books (~3000 total pages) 🥰

Celestial Navigation is also INCREDIBLY popular, and Sabre has been incredibly generous answering asks on her tumblr + writing additional one-shots in the universe. There is also a veritable volume of fanart. I was so inspired by seeing @robins-egg-bindery copy of ********, with its appendix of fanart & meta, that I promptly copied them.

fanart redacted because lots of the artists are no longer active on tumblr but just know i am ECSTATIC about the amount of art in these books

Lastly, I love how @clovenhoofbindery includes their 'Illustrator mess' with their bind posts, as a behind-the-scenes look into the wild process of designing these books. I don't actually have an Illustrator mess for this book (the chapter titles & title page pretty much came in one take), but I do have a DYING MESS. It took me sososo many tries to figure out how to get the dye to look how I imagined in my head. I ended up 'dye painting' instead of tie-dying in the end, but my inbox is always open to chat hand-dying/tie-dying/dyepainting (or what I did differently between any of these attempts). Numbers are the dying attempt.

Last process shot: I hand-dyed variegated linen thread to match the colors of the bind, which ends up being incredibly difficult to see on the finished bind, but was super fun while I was sewing!

Materials:

Body font: Kepler

Title font: Compaq 1982

Chapter number font: aliens & cows

Endpapers: recolored versions of the star chart used by Michael Collins during the Apollo 11 mission (archived at The Smithsonian)

Bookcloth: dyed using Dharma Trading Procion Fiber-Reactive Dyes

Title page and chapter headers: designed in Photoshop using the Ultimate Space brush pack by jeffrettalyn on DeviantArt

Metallic embroidery thread: Cosmo Nishikiito thread

I would dye for this embroidery thread. It is LIGHT YEARS better than the classic metallic embroidery thread from DMC: much easier to work with & much more sparkly. Literally so eye-catching; it truly doesn't translate to photos.

Paint for edges: Daniel Smith watercolor tubes in Iridescent Sunstone and Prussian Blue

Note: these are GORGEOUS watercolors. The color is so saturated and strong and beautiful BUT I don't think I'd recommend watercolors for edge painting. They went on very differently depending on the grit of the sandpaper I used for the edges + they sometimes bled into the pages + they had to be set with fixative, which then stuck the pages together.

[cleverknittingblogname]

Decided to actually share some (bad) pics of my WIP for once: making the jasmine scarf for my mom:

Nearly done! (She doesn't want long). The stitch isn't particularly hard imo but if you're going to do it, definitely use stitch markers to keep track of what you're doing (especially if your forgetful/distractible like me). It's also just TIME-CONSUMING. A simple, repetitive stitch but it takes a LOT of time.

Thanks to baby tod for modeling. 🙏