#those machines and the materials it makes and requires can be used in ways that dont cause so much harm

[handweavers]

i'm a weaver my time is spent sitting at looms and spinning wheels and sewing machines and dye pots, and my ability to make any money at all comes from the fact that my work can't be truly reproduced by machine and speaks to my own and others' desire to reconnect with acts of making and living that are slower and emphasize the physicality of our lives, that we are present in our bodies in a physical world and we are sensorial creatures who relate to each other and the world through tactile means. it serves as a reminder that there is a lot we can do away from screens, that there is joy and meaning to be found in creating something with your hands, and that through this we can find channels to address and learn to live with grief and loss without running from the fact that we are living animals with meatbodies and a finite amount of time.

i think it would be very easy for me to fall into a trap where all modern technology is bad and we need to escape it at all costs and to take a luddite approach to technology - literally a luddite approach, because the phrase "luddite" comes from workers in england during the industrial revolution who destroyed machinery in cotton and wool mills to protest the introduction of that machinery as cost saving measures by the capitalists. but the problem in that situation wasn't inherently the machinery that processed cotton and wool more efficiently, it was that the people who owned the factories used that technology as an excuse to pay fewer workers and maximize profit while creating more unsafe working conditions for the workers that remained. in a situation where the workers owned the factory and the machinery, the introduction of this machinery wouldn't have necessarily been harmful but rather potentially helpful to the workers, for whom more free time wouldn't be a death sentence and proper precautions in the use of the machinery to protect human life could be prioritized

i don't want to make the mistake of confusing technology or some other boogeyman as my enemy. the enemy is capitalism, and i choose to prioritize class consciousness over my private existential worries about new technological developments. all the tech we use is made by humans, just like this economic system we live in. we have the capacity to dismantle economic systems and build new ones, just as we have the capacity to use the tech we make in ways that benefit rather than harm us and the world we live in. my gut tendency is to be distrustful of new tech but i have to remind myself that it isn't helpful and it obfuscates what's actually going on.

[followthebluebell]

would love a list of low energy enrichment activities to try with cats. im always looking for more ways to be involved with my cat but she is 3 and very high energy and after a long day i often dont have the spoons to chase her around with a toy while she finds new exciting hiding spots to look at it from. this makes me sad :( i dont want her to be understimulated

Food-based enrichment:

Feeder toys are a favorite! But these carry the drawback of requiring cleaning afterwards, so calculate that into your spoons. Some of them are machine washable, so that may be an option if you've got a dishwasher.

Snuffle mats - another favorite, these also require the occasional clean but don't need to be cleaned every time you use them. You can make your own pretty easily. Or, hell, just grab a very cheap bath mat from a dollar store. Your cat won't know the difference.

Scatter feeding - literally just. Throw a handful of treats or kibble on the floor or down the stairs. Literally, that's it. Calculate clean-up into your spoons because cats aren't reliable vacuums. But it keeps them busy for a few minutes.

Toy based enrichment:

Get a cardboard box. Crinkle up some brown wrapping paper or whatever cheap paper you've got on hand and put it in the box. Congrats, you've now combined your cats two favorite things in the world: boxes and paper. For extra fun, add catnip (or silvervine or whatever your cat's drug of choice is), toys, or treats.

Ripple Rug: this is actually a specific product. It's literally a square of carpet or rug with velcro on the bottom that attaches to ANOTHER square of carpet or rug. It's fairly stiff. The idea is that cats can dive into it and make their own little tunnels. My cats LOVE it. You can probably recreate it quite cheaply using cheap rugs or carpet, tbh.

Cat crinkle mats: again, this is something fairly easily made at home. You get some cheap crinkly plastic and sew it into two old washclothes or something similar. Congrats. You now have a little mat your cats can sit on, bat around, and crinkle. You can also just buy them in multiple sizes. Many have catnip in them too.

Paper bags: cats just love paper bags. Be sure you remove the handles to make sure no one gets their head stuck. Most cats entertain themselves pretty well with bags.

Cat springs: those little plastic springs are a favorite, and so are those cheap rabbit-fur covered mouse toys.

Cat race track toys: another favorite.

Cardboard cat scratchers: the cardboard ones require MORE cleaning because they leave little bits of cardboard all over the place, but it is kind of nice that you can just throw them out when your cat is done. Any scratcher is good, though. I've listed cardboard for ease of clean-up and because it's a very popular material for cats.

Cat tunnels: like bags and boxes, cats just love tunnels.

I'm not a big fan of laser pointers or robotic toys. I haven't seen many cases of light chasing disorders in cats compared to dogs, but it's an issue enough that I don't readily recommend them. I also don't really recommend robotic toys because a lot of them make noises that cats don't like. If your cat enjoys these things, congrats; I just don't find them universally popular enough to really recommend. But I had to mention them, because if I didn't, my notes would be full of 'but what about Product X!!".

I've tried to keep this list to low cost toys and activities. There are other things you can do, like installing wall shelves or getting a big cat tree, but these things are more likely to be expensive, either in terms of money, time, or energy. I wanted to focus on low cost activities that I felt were more accessible to disabled folks.

[beespaceprogram]

Sticker Cutter Research

I was looking into getting a sticker cutting machine, and I decided to start by looking into cricut which is a well known brand. I had a look at what models they had than their feature etc, but what I was most concerned about was their software. Printer companies like to lock you into a defacto subscription to support hardware you don't really own, and as I was to discover, cricut are operating in a similar way.

The cricut software is online-only*. To cut your own designs you need to use their software to upload your art to their server. There's no way to cut a new design without a logged-in cricut account and an internet connection. At one point in 2021 they flirted with limiting free accounts to 20 uploads/month but backed down after huge community backlash, as far as I can tell.

The incident spawned several community efforts to write open-source firmware for cricut hardware. Some efforts were successful for specific models/serial numbers, but require cracking open the case and hooking in to the debug contacts to flash the chip; not exactly widely accessible. Another project sought to create a python cricut server you can run locally, and then divert the app's calls to the server to your local one.

I restarted my search, this time beginning with looking for extant open-source software for driving cutters, and found this project, which looks a little awkward to use, but functional. They list a bunch of cutter hardwares and whether they're compatible or not. Of those, I recognised the sihouette brand name from other artists talking about them.

I downloaded the silhouette software to try like I did w the cricut software, and immediately it was notable that it didn't try to connect to the internet at all. It's a bit clunky, in that way printer and scanner software tends to be, but I honestly greatly preferred using it to cricut's sluggish electron app⁺. Their software has a few paid tiers above the free one, adding stuff like sgv import/export/and reading cut settings from a barcode on the input material. They're one-off payments, and seem reasonable to me.

This is not so much a review, as sharing some of the research I've done. I haven't yet used either a cricut or a silhouette, and I haven't researched other brands either. But I wanted to talk about this research because to me, cricut's aggressively online nature is a red flag. Software that must connect to a server to run is software that runs only at the whim of the server owner (and only as long as it's profitable to keep the server up). And if that software is the only thing that will make your several hundred dollars worth of plastic and (cheap, according to a teardown I read) servos run, then you have no guarantee you'll be able to run it in the future.

Do you use a desktop cnc cutter? What has your experience been like with the hardware and software? Do you have any experience from home printers with good print quality and user-refillable ink cartridges?

* Cricut's app tried to connect to more than 14 different addresses, including facebook, youtube, google analytics, datadoghq.com, and launchdarkly.com. Launch Darkly are a service provider that help software companies do a whole bunch of things I'm coming to despise, for example, they offer infrastructure for serving different features to different demographics and comparing results to control groups. You know how at various times you've gotten wildly different numbers of ads than your friends on instagram? They were using techniques like this to work out how many ads they could show without affecting their pickup/engagement rates. Scummy stuff.

⁺ Electron apps are web-pages pretending to be applications. They use heaps of ram, tend to have very poor performance, and encourage frustrating UI design that doesn't follow OS conventions. Discord's app is a notable example of an Electron app

[adventuringblind]

Mend Me

Lando Norris X Reader

Genre: Magical Realism via Superpowers (kind of), A mix of fluff and angst

Summary: After a long history of being running and hiding, she finds someone who isn't afraid of her. Enough to risk it all for him. Feat Oscar and Carlos being a chaotic duo for once.

Warnings: A tad dehumanizing (if you really squint), mentions of hospitals, mentions of blood/wounds/weapons/bruises, reader literally bring someone back to life,

Notes: This is incredibly experimental. I like these kinds of AU's that incorporate racing still. It's fun to see different concepts come to life in a normal world! I'm currently working on a few A/B/O fics and a few other experimental things :)

Side Note: and another request! I had so much fun writing these two and this story in general! I'm hoping to write more like this, or for these two specifically, in the future!

Masterlist // Request Form // My Website // buy me a Ko-Fi

This is not the life she envisioned for herself. The running, hiding, forging papers to try and keep herself safe.

Stupid unnatural abilities that she never asked for. A danger rating that started at three and moved up steadily as these abilities expanded. Classified within a unique group that tends to be more isolated due to their nature.

A healer is what her new papers say, a danger rating of five. Her armband required across the globe remains the same color. Unassuming and weak, which is how she needs to be perceived.

Powers, abilities, magic, auras, whatever you want to call them, manifest in different ways. Some are element based, some a material, some deal with things like the mind and soul. Smaller groups include shapeshifters, psychics and mediums, shadow work, and her own group.

Those who deal in life and death are not to be messed with. The healers and the reapers. Which, you would think wouldn't be dangerous. She was lucky enough to not be sentenced to a life in captivity. The reapers can decide who dies when, if they are strong enough. Usually prompted by the healers if they person is out of reach. It's a peaceful passing. Yet that doesn't stop people from fearing that kind of power and control.

No, she's a healer. Lower levels are kept as doctors and nurses. Knitting wounds together, feeling the pain of others, being able to x-ray a body without a machine, are all useful.

Raising people from the dead? yeah, that tends to freak people out.

Her wound transference started small. A scraped knee on a friend became her own, but without a mere itch. Soon it progressed into deep lacerations which bled less on her and healed faster. Then it was bigger injuries like broken bones and concussions.

Training was required for anyone with abilities. In order to see where they fall in rating, where they can be utilized, and make sure they have control over the chaos.

She spent ample time in the local hospital with the other healers. The paramedics had rushed inside. The body nearing death. They flatlined, mangled in different ways, yet she still managed at the age of sixteen to bring them back.

The amount of pain she was in was nearly unbearable. She'd almost killed herself in the process.

Her rating shot up to seven after that and she was whisked away to a facility for people like her. They moved her up to nine after another year. She'd managed to bring back someone who'd been dead at least a day.

She's a necromancer.

Whatever she is, they all knew they couldn't stay in that place. Inevitably escaping with their combined powers. She'd never run so fast. She was provided new classification papers and sent off to a different country.

Which is how she found herself here. Traveling and healing despite the prior adversity. She likes this job, specifically because she's strong enough to manage drivers and personnel in the paddock who hurt themselves with their own abilities, but not enough to look conspicuous. Which is a fine line she's toeing, but she makes it work.

She has regulars. Max Verstappen frequently asks her to come around. Metal tends to slice him when he's not grounded and specifically more agitated. Lando has a tendency to hit himself in the head with things when he's excited and the telekinesis decides he needs something right that second. Carlos shapeshifts into a bear, which comes with its own set of problems (she didn't know she'd have to be a vet, also). Then there is Alex, who always seems to be summoning feral street animals.

The year she started; she was nineteen. Lando and Carlos were teammates then. The Brit a in his sophomore year of the sport. The number of bruises on both drivers was ridiculous due to Lando randomly pushing and pulling random objects was ridiculous. Carlos even joked he might have been doing it on purpose at the time.

It was 2021, and the encouragement of Daniel, that got him to ask her out. An invitation she accepted. It was nice, but there was that lingering fear in the back of her mind that he would figure her out and turn her in.

A night out in 2022 is what changed everything for her. The ability to trust and a longing for connection driving her to spend the night with him.

Now, her suppressor band is strong enough that she's only supposed to wear it for twenty-four hours maximum. She'd put it on when she woke up the morning prior and hadn't taken it off sense. Lando had asked if she wanted to take it off, let their energies meld together. A privilege only people like them have. But she'd declined and he hadn't pushed.

She slept in. The best sleep she'd had in a while, mind you. Yet the pain firing through every nerve of her body had her crying. She hadn't cried in pain in so long. This was entirely new to her, and if she's honest with herself, terrifying to experience.

~~~~~

Lando stirs beside her. His hands cup her face and eyes scan her body as he attempts to understand what's wrong. She's unresponsive and he panics. Enough to call Carlos and ask if it's something to do with her classification of power. She could've overdone it, or it's the residue of a different injury she took on herself. Whatever the case, he needs help.

"Lando, mate, she's a five right?"

"Yeah? why?"

"Suppressor bands for five and up tend to be stronger than four and below."

Lando pauses for a second. "Aren't you a seven?"

"And I take mine off in intervals." Carlos' explanation makes sense. Enough for Lando to calm himself and locate the chain on her wrist. "Just take it off and see if it helps. It might not be immediate though so give it about ten minutes and then call me back."

"Thank you, Carlos."

"Not sure what we'd do without her. Maybe kill ourselves? So, you better keep her alive, mate!"

Lando ends the call. Her body seizing in his arms in a scary kind of way that makes him want to vomit.

The chain doesn't come off easily. The second he manages to unclasp it; she becomes deadweight in his arms. But he doesn't get the kind of relief he is hoping for from it.

The aura she has around her is strong and intense. The kind he's never felt before. It's not nauseating like when Carlos or Max is high on emotion, this is serene. Like he's never felt better in his entire life. Which is strange, considering how strong it is...

He calls Carlos back. This cannot be normal for a five. The fact he has it off, but she's sweating and gripping his hand like she's in turmoil makes him wonder.

"Did it work?"

"Uh - possibly?"

There is a brief pause. "What does that even mean?"

"Okay, so, energy of a five healer, is it supposed to be this intense? Cause I feel like I'm on cloud nine and she's still in pain." He wishes he could reverse it, just get her to settle and not look like she might die until he can help her.

"I'm coming over."

It takes Carlos too long to get to his room. His anxiety is getting worse by the second. She's finally exhausted herself enough to fall asleep, but her energy is still permeating the room in a way he can't describe.

Carlos nearly falls over when he steps inside the door. "You like this?!"

"I feel fantastic!"

"Well good, we know you have a soulbond now. We'll talk more about that later. I'm going to pass out if she doesn't have a suppressor on."

Lando whines, but he knows Carlos won't last like this. He just hopes something reset and bought them time to figure it out. He puts the chain back on her wrist and Carlos immediately looks better.

"Verdict?"

"She's not a five, that's for sure." He inspects the chain and her arm band. Carlos' own brown band is still around his bicep. The shapeshifter colors. Lando's is yellow for the energy category, Max's is red for the secondary elements, and Alex's is brown with a green stripe in the middle for the animal handlers. Her band is white with a black ring in the middle, the reapers are the opposite. The number attached to her band is a five. It's the same as a legal document.

Lando snatches the band off of where it lays next to his own. Sure enough, when he flips is around, A different number is crudely patched over enough that nobody could make it out unless staring for an obscene amount of time.

Lando hands the flipped band to Carlos. "She's a fucking ten."

Carlos hums and examines the elastic in his hands. He then fishes a suppressor ring out of his pocket and switches hers for the one he brought. The energy is still there, but the Spainard doesn't look like he's going to be sick anymore. Lando claims this as a win.

On the other hand, he can't fathom why she didn't trust him enough to tell him. "I don't understand-" The crack in his voice is embarrassing.

Carlos gets him to sit down next to him on the edge of the bed. He places Lando's hand on her shin and they watch the tension she was holding in her body disappear.

"Have you ever seen how the treat anyone six and above?"

"No... you never talk about it."

Carlos sighs. It's a pained one; eyes distant as he recalls memories. "Fives toe the line of being stronger than the people deem safe. These universal numbers used to classify us aren't just for the amount of energy we exert, it's what we can do as well. I shapeshift into a bear, which can be destructive, but I can also do it with fewer breaks and for longer stints."

"What does that have to do with any of this?" Frustration now evident.

"Relax, I'm getting there." Carlos gives him a pointed look and quiets himself. "Six and above tend to have more restrictions. They want to make sure we can't cause any chaos or start wars or something. Reapers are immediately labeled as tens. Healers start small but increase depending. I met a good few back in school that ended up being taken away for some unknown reason."

"So, she's a ten, meaning she can do what?"

"I'm not sure... but she is definitely at risk if anyone were to find out."

Carlos stays with him. Explains to him what is probably happening due to the extreme suppression of this kind of energy. He explains this soulbond thing. How their energies mesh well together which is what was giving him that euphoric feeling earlier. It's not rare, Lando is only a three himself, but for her it is because of the intensity.

It's around midnight when she wakes up, panting and drenched in sweat. Whatever these higher energies are, the seem to communicate for them. Carlos gets next to her and switches the suppressors again. He's giving her the familiarity in a stressful situation with no words.

"Fuck - Lan, I'm so sorry!" Her voice is hoarse and cracked. He wants to tell her that he's fine, that he understands, but words aren't there. Not when she looks this sick.

He opts for the physical contact route instead. The gentle kind, so he doesn't scare her. This hug feels different than any he's had before, but he assumes it's because his aura is actively seeking hers. "We have a soulbond. Our energies mesh together quite nicely."

"So, you know now? You're not going to turn me in?"

"Absolutely not! Carlos has been giving me a crash course and everything. I'm sorry that you are treated so horribly..."

She grips onto his shirt and sobs harder than she has in her entire life. It's broken, and Lando can't help but wonder when the last time somebody cared for her and her abilities alike is. "I'm not leaving you, okay? I might be a three, but I'll do my best to keep you safe." And he means it. He has every intention of keeping her out of the clutches of those who would see her locked away.

~~~~~

Lando convinces her to quite working under the FIA and let him take care of her instead. She still attends to the drivers since she can, because she wants to.

It's never a surpise when she receives a phone call from across the paddock asking for her assistance. It's more fun this way, not having the constant pressure of people watching her for any semblance of too much power.

Carlos keeps a close eye on her when she looks on the verge of overexerting her power or suppressing for too long. He had her and Lando set alarms for when to take it off and put it on again.

2023 comes around, and both her and Lando are more relaxed this year. Car wide, the Brit would rather die, but otherwise, he's fine.

Oscar is a rating six water manipulater. Carlos makes sure he knows where to find him if he ever needs anything. The FIA tends to get on the case of higher ratings.

It's because of that rating that Oscar manages to figure out she's not what she says she is. Lando gets wildly defensive when the Aussie brings it up. She just laughs when he threatens to throw his teammates dinner into his face.

They all get along nicely. Lando manages to not send random objects at Oscar despite various threats, and she still finds herself in every garage.

Then Vegas happens, and everything changes.

The crash replays on the screen, but she can't hear it over the sound of her heart. Their soulbond had only gotten stronger, she can feel his pain and discomfort now because of it.

As an established healer, Jon lets her tail him to where Lando is. The medical team only lets her go so far.

But it's worse than anyone is letting on. She can feel his heart slowing, the internal bleeding more than they originally thought.

He's still alive when the race ends, but he won't be for much longer. They won't let her inside. Oscar and Carlos can barely get past the front desk to where her and Jon are sitting outside the door. Doctors are still working away at a problem they haven't found yet.

"They won't let you in?" Carlos gives a look of utter confusion. "Wouldn't it be helpful to them?"

"Yes, but I'm too emotional to be in an operating room as a five."

Oscar's face lights up. "How far does your energy reach?"

"Decently, why?"

"If me and Carlos take our suppressors off, then we can blame the energy on that."

The three of them take off their suppressor in unison with Jon watching the end of the hall in case someone comes around the corner.

The wall makes it hard to navigate. But she knows Lando's aura like it's her own. She's mapped his entire body, healed him more times than she cares to remember.

The flatline of the moniter rings through her ears.

She finds his heart. Where he's bleeding out, where his ribs are cracked and splitting him open.

And she fixes it.

Lando sits up on the table, heat beating erratically, but he's alive. The doctors don't know what to do with themselves.

They open the door. The only one there is Jon, teary-eyed, but not from sadness despire what he says.

~~~~~

Lando is high on painkillers. Though he wishes his human healer were here to make it better. He just wants to meld with her, thank her without words.

Jon had filled him in on the details. It's not safe for her at the moment, but his teammate has her, and Carlos is on his way back to Lando after helping get her settled.

The Spainard drives him back. Even stopping for food on the way since none of them have eaten and Carlos has this perpetual need to store food for the winter. Lando always gets him honey as a joke.

"When you see her, don't panic. There's blood we have yet to clean up from the incisions they made. But it's mostly just pain and exhaustion."

Lando nods and opens the door. The sight is odd, more so than scary. She's on the bed, pale, and covered in different fluids. Her mouth is open, and Oscar is dripping tiny water droplets inside. Her supressor bracelet has been ditched, but her ring is on so the other two can be around her.

Her eyes drift towards him the closer he gets. "Lan!" She tries to sit up but fails after two seconds and yelps in pain.

"If you'd just take the water and stay put, then you might not be in as much pain." Oscar scolds her, but she just rolls her eyes.

Lando crawls onto the bed next to her. His hand drifts over where he heart is, and he places her hand over his. "I'm alive because of you. I can't - I just - I don't understand why they didn't let you in. You're not dangerous. You saved me."

"Lan, it's okay... I'm happy being considered dangerous as long as I have you around."

"Ay! What are me and Oscar then?!"

"Rivals, according to the media." Oscar muses and drops another bead of water into her mouth.

"That was planned and executed well, okay, we make great rivals." Carlos nearly jams some kind of pastry into Oscar's face, but he opens his mouth just in time. "What am I going to do with you three?"

Lando doesn't have the energy to ponder the question. Him and his lover end up falling asleep at some point. Both of them are still in pain and in desperate need of rest.

He wakes up to a call the next morning from Jon. His trainer is adamant about speaking to all four of them.

Yeah, they all get lectured about how he had to go get tested and was humiliated by the hospital staff when they laughed at Jon's own ability. "Aparently, making people sneeze isn't an ability. But I'm happy you're okay, Lando. I would've missed you, buddy."

"I second that!"

"And a third."

Everyone looks at her expectantly. Some kind of response swirls around in her head. Maybe witty or sarcastic with the way she's smiling to herself.

"If you died, Lan, I would've never forgiven myself." Her energy taps on his. It envelopes them, warm and comforting. Their bond still growing stronger as their souls dance together around them.

"Gross, you two should get a room."

"This is our room!"

"Your point?"

Carlos and Oscar can't stop their laughing fit. Delerious from the long night they had previously and little sleep then managed to get. Still, Lando goes back to being in his own world.

He's wrapped up in her, and she's wrapped up in him. Exactly as it was intended to be.

"Reckon you could make an undead army?"

"Osc - I swear to god-!"

[fuwabloom]

The Sewing/Home Economics Club!

Hazu is the president and only active member of the club, whereas the majority are all ghost members. Ghost members are those who joined a club in name only and there to fill in numbers. They'll typically join club activities every once in a while to secure their spot. Ayano joins the club during the Drama Club's play productions begin.

The club was disbanded years before and was only recently revived, leaving Hazu as the de-facto president since the previous one wanted to focus on entrance exams. Because of this, Toga Tabara was able to join, but as a ghost member.

Below is Galatea Acts spoilers/dynamics:

Ayano joins the sewing club due to being to the rule that students must join a club or face disciplinary action. She was invited to join the Drama Club alongside Kenchou after he auditioned for a role in their murder mystery dinner theater production, but she declined. Since he insists they go home together after club activities, Ayano is forced to find a way to kill time and remembers the rule of joining a club. Not wanting a lot of noise or attention, she walks around to find one that fit the requirements.

Despite the Gaming/Subculture Club insisting she's a member, she isn't officially on the list, and then finds the Sewing/Home Economics Club... kinda. The room is quiet aside from the sole sewing machine at work, and she encounters Hazu Kashibuchi. After a messy first introduction, he allows her to stay here so long as she doesn't bother him. She agrees and sits in the club room for the next few days before asking to join.

Kenchou eventually finds out about her joining and tells her that she should hurry and get other members or else it'll disbanded. So Ayano, having befriended Ousa Nakashima and Raimu Fumetsu prior to this, invites the two to join as they have yet to join a club. When Hanako Yamada transfers in, Ousa gets her to sign up as well. Seeing his classmate, Raimu, coming from the sewing club room, Toga Tabara, checks the club and is immediately recruited as a ghost member.

(best to worst) Skill / Interest level:

Hazu is incredibly skilled with sewing. He's made more than half the dolls and designed apparel, some can be seen hanging on the wall. Unfortunately, he's horrible with speaking so during club president meetings, not only is he the youngest, he's also the most soft spoken, so the budget isn't as fairly divided towards the sewing club.

Ayano is automatically the vice president. She knows how to sew and mend, but isn't motivated in starting any new projects. She prefers doing the inventory check and looking over others' works. However, if you provide her a pattern or blueprint, she can easily replicate it.

Raimu learned how to do embroidery and tailoring when she was young due to her strict family upbringing. It was meant to be early bridal training. She has her own sewing machine and feels more comfortable using it so she brought it to the club. She's the muscle of the club so she and Ayano do a lot of the shopping.

Ousa is fairly new to the idea of sewing, but enjoyed it so much that she started practicing at home. She likes making accessories more than clothes. Her favorite things to make are key chains and bracelets, making a new matching pair for Raimu.

Toga doesn't have much interest but he can do the basics. Due to his status as a ghost member, he doesn't know where all of the materials are and opts to help organize or clean rather than partake in club activities. He's pushed to be more involved by the others, especially Hanako.

Hanako has little to no interest, but her competitive nature pushes her to learn how to improve. She refuses to be seen as the worst, yet her impatience is her downfall so she gets frustrated too easily. Her ideas get too big for her current skill level so there's a box dedicated to her attempts.

[lorynna]

I Saw you reblogged the post on chromosomes determining sex and added a note about a "non-functioning chromosome" still being there but not being active, and I'd like to recommend the book Material Girls by Kathleen Stock. She takes a deeper dive into sex characteristics and proposes (imo) a better way to classify sex that is what she calls The Cluster Account. Taking all the characters of a definition and recognizing that while errors sometimes occur, they don't necessarily disqualify something from being a part of the category it belongs to.

I find most answers in what makes a female a female to focus too much on one thing about females like having a uterus, xx chromosomes, larger gametes, having a period. And people always want to pull a gotcha with intersex conditions or bringing up women that do not fix every single condition. But since when does something have to fit EVERY single detail of a definition to still be a part of that group?

If you define tiger as "large feline with orange fur and black stripes" is a white tiger not a tiger? Is a tiger without fur not a tiger? Of course not, they're still tigers because they fit the cluster model and check of most of the conditions to be considered part of their category, just with an error. Infertile women, women without periods, women with intersex conditions are still women. And under Stock's cluster account, lions are still not tigers and men are still not women, because they don't fit most (actually fit very few) characteristics of the category and already belong to another category which they do fit very well.

I'd love to see more radfems using this account because I think the discussion on "define woman" to "okay then, define female" is mostly being met with TRAs trying to make a hyper specific rule list all females have to fit every check on and if they don't, they go "see? If not every female fits the perfect definition, that must mean a non-intersex fully male person can be a female too!" And radfems are trying to argue that the female does fit the definition instead of targeting the absurd claim that a category becomes open and all inclusive if anything even slightly challenges it's definition.

Thank you for your kind message and also your recommendation regarding the book. 🌻

This is a very good take you just shared, very interesting to read and I 100% agree.

The never ending discussion between radfems and TRAs about what a woman is, is indeed exhausting and repetitive.

The blog I reposted, was about chromosomes, especially chromosomal abnormalities and why intersex conditions still don't make you less of a female or male.

From my personal experience I have seen TRAs use the "All you do is reducing women down to their body parts! all women are to you are baby making machines!" (and similar arguments) pretty much all the time and also constantly arguing about "but what if a woman has a hysterectomy? is she not a woman anymore since having a uterus is a requirement according to you?"

At the same time radfems constantly preach that hysterectomies, mastectomies etc. don't change your sex, but that those body parts are what healthy women according to the norm are born with or develop during puberty.

I see those arguments you wish would be brought up more being made all the time by radfems (my personal experience) and because I can't believe that TRAs just cannot understand those patient and eloquently worded explanations by several radfems I more so believe that they don't WANT to admit it or gaslight themselves.

How many times have I seen TRAs being like "don't go look at this post, this TERF is actually making some points!"

I think another classical, but very easy to follow example I could add to yours with the tigers/lions would be: Humans are born with 5 fingers on each hand. Very rarely a human is born with 6 fingers. Are fingers now on a spectrum? Is this person suddenly not a human anymore?"

Of course the discourse with chromosomes is more difficult than this example but even intersex conditions don't technically "challenge" that sex is binary.

[shituationist]

assuaging my anxieties about machine learning over the last week, I learn that despite there being about ten years of doom-saying about the full automation of radiomics, there's actually a shortage of radiologists now (and, also, the machine learning algorithms that are supposed to be able to detect cancers better than human doctors are very often giving overconfident predictions). truck driving was supposed to be completely automated by now, but my grampa is still truckin' and will probably get to retire as a trucker. companies like GM are now throwing decreasing amounts of money at autonomous vehicle research after throwing billions at cars that can just barely ferry people around san francisco (and sometimes still fails), the most mapped and trained upon set of roads in the world. (imagine the cost to train these things for a city with dilapidated infrastructure, where the lines in the road have faded away, like, say, Shreveport, LA).

we now have transformer-based models that are able to provide contextually relevant responses, but the responses are often wrong, and often in subtle ways that require expertise to needle out. the possibility of giving a wrong response is always there - it's a stochastic next-word prediction algorithm based on statistical inferences gleaned from the training data, with no innate understanding of the symbols its producing. image generators are questionably legal (at least the way they were trained and how that effects the output of essentially copyrighted material). graphic designers, rather than being replaced by them, are already using them as a tool, and I've already seen local designers do this (which I find cheap and ugly - one taco place hired a local designer to make a graphic for them - the tacos looked like taco bell's, not the actual restaurant's, and you could see artefacts from the generation process everywhere). for the most part, what they produce is visually ugly and requires extensive touchups - if the model even gives you an output you can edit. the role of the designer as designer is still there - they are still the arbiter of good taste, and the value of a graphic designer is still based on whether or not they have a well developed aesthetic taste themself.

for the most part, everything is in tech demo phase, and this is after getting trained on nearly the sum total of available human produced data, which is already a problem for generalized performance. while a lot of these systems perform well on older, flawed, benchmarks, newer benchmarks show that these systems (including GPT-4 with plugins) consistently fail to compete with humans equipped with everyday knowledge.

there is also a huge problem with the benchmarks typically used to measure progress in machine learning that impact their real world use (and tell us we should probably be more cautious because the human use of these tools is bound to be reckless given the hype they've received). back to radiomics, some machine learning models barely generalize at all, and only perform slightly better than chance at identifying pneumonia in pediatric cases when it's exposed to external datasets (external to the hospital where the data it was trained on came from). other issues, like data leakage, make popular benchmarks often an overoptimistic measure of success.

very few researchers in machine learning are recognizing these limits. that probably has to do with the academic and commercial incentives towards publishing overconfident results. many papers are not even in principle reproducible, because the code, training data, etc., is simply not provided. "publish or perish", the bias journals have towards positive results, and the desire of tech companies to get continued funding while "AI" is the hot buzzword, all combined this year for the perfect storm of techno-hype.

which is not to say that machine learning is useless. their use as glorified statistical methods has been a boon for scientists, when those scientists understand what's going on under the hood. in a medical context, tempered use of machine learning has definitely saved lives already. some programmers swear that copilot has made them marginally more productive, by autocompleting sometimes tedious boilerplate code (although, hey, we've had code generators doing this for several decades). it's probably marginally faster to ask a service "how do I reverse a string" than to look through the docs (although, if you had read the docs to begin with would you even need to take the risk of the service getting it wrong?) people have a lot of fun with the image generators, because one-off memes don't require high quality aesthetics to get a chuckle before the user scrolls away (only psychopaths like me look at these images for artefacts). doctors will continue to use statistical tools in the wider machine learning tool set to augment their provision of care, if these were designed and implemented carefully, with a mind to their limitations.

anyway, i hope posting this will assuage my anxieties for another quarter at least.

[ineffable-obsession]

90s Crowley Cosplay

So! I'm working on a S1 shoulder-length hair Crowley cosplay costume for Ineffable Con 5, and I've really been getting into the details of the costume. Let's look at this guy:

I'm getting lost in the weeds a bit, but! He has at least two different snake belts used in the same damn costume! And a different one in s3!

The top (s1:e1, antichrist delivery) has a golden sheen to the head and prominent raised oversized scales.

The middle one (s1:e1, park) has a satin black finish and paired holes over the entire length (presumably, we never see the back but they wrap around).

The S2 belt also has a golden sheen on the snakehead buckle, high gloss finish but more more subtle scales, visible rivets attaching the head to the belt, and top stitching along the edges.

Reproducing the belt

The easy part: you can just order exactly that snake head buckle off Etsy, the very same one used in the show. Available here for $20 (resin) / $90 (aluminum cast).

It has little black jewels for eyes you can glue on once it's painted (1/4" diameter).

At this point, I'm not entirely convinced that the first belt is real snakeskin; it might be embossed leather or PVC. Python scales look like rounded diamonds up close; cobras are more like ovals, vipers have the sharp diamond shape with the raised center (like the vein of a leaf).

If you go looking for viper skins, basically nothing comes up, but! Rattlesnakes are in the viper family and you can find both Western and Eastern diamondback hides quite easily. And they have the leaf pattern to the scales.

But if you compare the snakeskin in the costume belt and the real hide (bottom left) or a real belt (bottom right), Crowley's belt is overly regular in its pattern and doesn't have spacing between the scales the way real hides do. Crowley's belt is ~9 scales tall (top to bottom), the rattlesnake is ~15 scales, meaning the show's belt has scales 1.66x the size of a natural hide. Real snakes have much, much smaller scales. The more I look at real rattlesnake hides, the faker those scales look to me.

I'm fairly certain the S2 belt is real snake skin -- the smaller scale size and the flatter scale matches python belts nicely.

Embossed leather can give you nice deep grooves between the scales, and an even pattern, matching the belt in the park.

I cannot find a viper print embossed leather anywhere on the Internet. Faux snake vinyl / PVC fabric, however, has huge scales -- the same ~9 "scales" per inch, and there's likely one somewhere with that leaf-texture.

Conclusions

I can't say for certain, but I think the first belt seems really likely to be PVC wrapped in order to get that texture.

The middle one was likely made of embossed strap leather, the more durable material supports all those extra holes without being weakened, and the single layer doesn't require top stitching. The scales are an extremely regular pattern, and still fairly oversized. Plus you can get those very deep grooves between the "scales" when they're stamped into the leather.

The final belt looks like actual snakeskin wrapped leather -- you wouldn't use rivets like that on PVC, it's not strong enough, but riveting leather is just fine. Plus, it has a line of machine stitching near the top and bottom, which makes sense if you're joining two very different materials together (thin skin and hide). The scales are the smallest and flattest of the bunch, which matches actual snakeskin. And, the budget of S2 was a bit higher, so maybe they had more money to blow on a $300 snakeskin belt?

My suggestion for a belt?

This is currently $12 and not overly terrible, it's got an ok pebbley grain to the scales, at 1.3" wide it's pretty close to the buckle size.

If you have access to some dye that will work on pleather, you could try dying this one, $13. It's not particularly embossed though, so the snakeskin pattern might just disappear on you.

If you have money to spend, a 1.5" wide, men's python skin belt will run you about $56, this one is quite close to that s2 look.

Happy crafting and dress up!

[hirocimacruiser]

M20b

TUNED IMPREZA

The highlight of the WRC (World Rally Championship) is the special stages called SS. Enthusiastic European galleries crowd around the SS, trying to get as close as possible to the super-high-speed rally cars, and stand for hours until the cars appear. On the other hand, top rallyists such as D. Auriol, who boasts four Corsi wins, trace slippery blind corners with millimeter precision. Modern rally machines are truly ultra-high-speed cornering machines that can be used 24 hours a day, in all weather conditions, and in all seasons. Tommykaira set out to tune his long-awaited boxer engine with the aim of creating a ``Tarmac SS specification,'' which was targeted at paved SS in this WRC. The base car is the Impreza, which won a shocking runner-up place in the 1993 1000 Lakes Rally. When Tommy Kaira tunes the full-time 4WD turbo, even a sports sedan becomes this close to a machine. M20b...SS Tarmac Special.

Maximum output is 265ps, left only to drivers with rationality and technique. Maximum torque 33.5kg-m.

Cornering characteristics with excellent stability and controllability. With both of these features, the M20b gives the driver the luxury of looking at the console on high-speed straights that are about to flat-out. Even if you were traveling at speeds above 240 km/h, you could read the triple meter readings, check the harness, and ask the navigator about the depth of the next corner. It's not just because it's 4WD, but you can definitely say that it was born from Tommykaira's suspension tune. The overall suspension settings, including tires and wheels, were worked out by engineer Kikuo Sara, and even the compound composition of the tires was studied on a test course exclusively for Dunlop. Also, since the M20b claims to be a ``Tarmac SS specification,'' it goes without saying that its cornering characteristics were thoroughly checked. Unlike pure rally machines, the M20b pursues safety as its stage is on ordinary roads, and has achieved the most fan-like handling possible. The difficult posture changes due to 4WD are seasoned with high power of 265ps and suspension tune. By simply operating the steering wheel quickly and accelerating while being aware of the front load, it was possible to turn in at once while maintaining a high speed. Furthermore, the Tommy Kaira-tuned boxer, which has increased both torque and output, shows sharp start-up acceleration while listening to the wild music of yesteryear. Tommy Kaira is known for its speed that closely follows the accelerator opening, even when starting up a hill or accelerating to overtake when selecting a high gear. The intense acceleration G that makes your head go white exceeds the catalog specs.

WRC driver's workplace.

Here is the scenery that makes you feel that way.

The interior tuning of the M20b was intentionally focused only on the driver's cockpit. Since this car is a machine that pursues driver's satisfaction, we decided that any decorations other than those related to driving would not suit this car.

First, the steering wheel jumps into the driver's field of vision. Here, we have adopted a new item that uses a lot of silver and carbon in addition to the Italvolante product that has been used on conventional Tommy Kaira cars. It provides smooth steering work inspired by WRC's works drivers. The shift switch does not require any unnecessary processing on the main body itself, and the shift boot is changed to a short stroke type. The top is machined from aluminum, allowing stress-free and quick shifting in any direction. The console is the first to use an original box made of three-dimensional molded layers of carbon. The central console section, which has three transparent meters that are essential for hard driving, is completed with hard materials that give it a WRC feel. The meter panel located directly in front has also been changed to a Tommykaira original. The panel projected on Tommykaira red has the Tommykaira logo. The speedometer is ticked up to 260km/h.

Large two-stage bridge evolution type rear wing. It approaches its rivals with the power of its front air intake.

In the past, WRC was dominated by Group B category machines. Larger than base vehicle

Extremely modified aero parts and thick tires were the official features of the WRC machines at the time. The M20b is equipped with large evolution-type aero parts on the front and rear that convey the image of such a high-performance machine. The two-stage bridge type rear wing, suitable for the extreme "Tarmac SS specification", is made of solid glass fiber and exhibits a high rectification effect at high speeds. While ensuring rearward visibility, it generates downforce at high speeds and greatly helps improve stability. The presence of the two-stage evolution type rear wing is so great that just by showing off its strong rear form, it can erase the fighting spirit of rivals.

The air intake part, which maximizes the cooling effect, has been changed to an original design spoiler with large openings above and below the bumper line. Tommy Kaira's aggressive face is finished in the style of a WRC machine with a pair of fog lights.

[Tommykaira M20b]

Price ¥3,780,000 (Type-RA base)

¥3,980,000 (WRX base)

¥2,855,000 (Basic model Type-RA base)

●Body & Transmission/Monocoque 4-door sedan 5-speed manual ●Brake/〈Front/Rear〉 Ventilated disc + anti-fade sports pads

●Engine / 1,994cc horizontally opposed 4-cylinder DOHC TURBO with intercooler ●Maximum output: 265ps/6,500rpm

●Maximum torque: 33.5kg-m/5,300rpm Drive system 4WD

●Suspension / Reinforced suspension

●Tires/〈Front/Rear〉 215/45ZR17 DUNLOP Performer 8000)

●Wheels/〈Front/Rear〉 7.0JJ×17 OFFSET+52mm ●Total length: 4,340mm Overall width: 1,690mm Overall height: 1,405mm/

●Vehicle weight 1, 200kg

Other equipment, options, and body color are based on genuine Subaru. The price is the price of the vehicle delivered to the Kyoto store, registration fees and consumption tax are not included.

・Price, specifications, data, etc. are subject to change without notice.・The photos shown are of the model for photography purposes and may differ from the actual product in details.

[rametarin]

Seeing a lot of propaganda lately.

It's convenient that the astro turf environmentalists that schmoozed their way into business and regulation of it set up these oil companies and others with environmentalist paths and ways to get people to get involved in said environmentalism. That was effectively the compromise that would enable industry and progressive life to co-exist.

And now they're treating industrial environmentalism as if it was a scam concocted entirely by greedy polluting business heads. When people taught, trained and given careers in environmental science working with said companies weren't trained to do that shit.

It's just like the "OH MY GOD EVERYBODY PLASTIC STRAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWS!" fiasco, where the entire point of it was to have a goose stepping push for "change" imposed from the top down, get everybody into a hysteria about how straws were actually hurting the planet, and then come to find out.. No. 40-90% of the plastic in the environment, micro or other, is fishing nets. It was always fishing nets. And pollution from the developing world, or China. They knew that going into it and instead chose to do this campaign specifically to "have a convuhsayshun" by scaring the bejesus out of everybody and then pushing for low hanging fruit to drag you through the process of legislation thought to "change the world."

Those paper straws weren't even plastic free, as reusable as plastic straws, or very good.

So now the agritprops are spreading that anti-industry shit by acting like carbon footprints and home recycling was all a scam by the businesses to deflect from THEIR regulation or emissions, instead of what they really were: Deliberate demands by the environmentalists, whom regulate and oversee themselves as self-appointed experts and regulators of pollution, to micro manage everyday peoples trash and emissions. And make people ask, "Why aren't businesses getting poked with a stick?"

Because they wanted you to go, "GLAD YOU ASKED! Sign this paper that lets us suck great big sums of money out of businesses unless they reach these virtually unobtainable purity goals that are virtually required to function."

The only thing I'm glad about is that carbon sequestration and other forms of particulate management have improved as technologies to where machines capable of sequestering industrial emissions and doing something about storage and repatriation of the waste materials into other industrial applications, are much cheaper now. Eventually, these alarmists and blood suckers will run out of pollutants to use to justify a middle man to antagonize businesses about.

Because really, that's it. Once industries can manage and sequester 99.999% of their emissions until they're environmentally benign, and so are their products, there won't BE anything to tax or penalize for their pollution.

As is, if the UK itself cut its contribution to pollution each year by 100%, it'd put an end to a total of 2% of the global emissions of anything. The big drivers and movers of pollution driven climate change aren't western, they're East Asian, South Asian and African.

This revisionist propaganda where it was just business itself that made life suck for individuals when it "should've been raking business through the coals all along" is just that. It wouldn't have been possible to meet emissions standards of 0 in the west and be able to have any kind of industry.

But then the Inverted-Reds knew that. Which is why so many were gone off the deep end in environmentalism, talking about "getting back to primitive roots" and other nonsensical hippie shit. We're not going to forget that movement, yall.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Op-Ed from the New York Times:

To keep the lights on, many utility companies are proposing to build dozens of new power plants that burn natural gas. North Carolina-based Duke Energy alone wants to add 8.9 gigawatts of new gas-fired capacity — more than the entire country added in 2023. Using their own projections of soaring energy demands as justification, these companies are also pushing back on the climate targets set by their states and the Biden administration.

If state regulators sign off on these plans, they will be gambling with our country’s future. We need to electrify everything from cars to appliances to slow climate change, but we won’t be able to reach our climate goals if we power all of those machines with dirty energy.

There is a better way. But to get there, legislators will need to overhaul the incentives driving utilities to double down on natural gas, so that they can turn a profit without cooking the planet.

Companies like Duke, Dominion Energy and Georgia Power argue that they need more gas-fired plants to reliably provide power during times of peak demand — for instance, on a hot summer weekday afternoon when home cooling systems and data servers are all humming at maximum output, and the grid strains to keep up. But those peaks tend to materialize only for a few dozen hours per year, and there are ways to deal with them that don’t require a massive amount of new methane-burning infrastructure.

The real reason the utilities want to build these plants is quite simple: The more stuff they build, the more money they make. Regulators let utilities charge their customers enough money to cover what they spend on assets like combustion turbines and wires, plus a generous rate of return (up to 10 percent) for their investors. This longstanding arrangement incentivizes power providers to build expensive things whether society needs them or not, in lieu of lower-cost, cleaner options, and to invoke their duty to keep the lights on as a post hoc rationalization.

Fortunately, utilities have plenty of ways to meet this new need.

They include “virtual power plants” — when technologies such as home batteries, rooftop solar systems, smart water heaters and thermostats are linked together and managed via software to provide the same services as a conventional power plant. Utilities in Vermont, Colorado and Massachusetts are already using them, to quickly respond to rising demand at a much lower cost than operating natural gas combustion turbines. According to one estimate, virtual power plants could lower U.S. utilities’ costs by as much as $35 billion over the next decade.

Utilities could also accelerate efforts to replace outdated transmission lines with newer ones that can carry double the electric current and to bring more battery storage online. They can compensate customers for using less energy during times when demand is high and invest far more in energy efficiency, helping customers to adopt devices that use less electricity.

All of these solutions would save customers money and reduce carbon emissions. They could, according to a Department of Energy analysis, meet the entire projected growth in U.S. peak electricity demand over the next decade.

[sumikatt]

frankly, i think your point about "some people train their own AI art models" is inherently flawed because rhe vast majority of people are not training their own model. they are paying for a service which was trained on art that was taken from the internet and used without permission in order for a machine to try snd recreate something similar bit by bit. i havent gotten a commission from someone who isnt a friend of mine in well over a year because people are just choosing to generate art with AI. i dont think AI art isnt "real" art because yeah, i agree with you, the whole idea of real art or not is complex. however, it is an undeniable reality that AI is trained on the work of artists all over the world who do not even get asked for permission before a tech company makes money off of their hard work.

I agree it’s a small, small portion of people making their own models that ensure that all art involved is used with consent. Many people buy a subscription or credits to generate what they want. Most people probably use free credits on Discord to make a meme or anime girls. Many people use it many different ways, yes.

I’m sorry you’ve lost a client over it. I know commissions are hard. Freelancers without dedicated clients would be the ones to suffer most from the popularity of AI art. I can’t say I’ve felt the impact myself, since it’s also very popular to be anti-AI.

Actively searching through job boards, I also feel like it has barely affected those listings. Maybe one of like 300 art jobs in the USA/Sweden asked for AI experience (Prompt Artist), and it was an AI startup. The “normal” art jobs like UI/UX, Environments, Materials, Concept, Technical, Animator, etc all still asking for 3 years experience for entry level lmao. Saw an intern position that required an “industry-standard” portfolio. So still a pain as it was before advanced AI gen.

Many paid AI art services have takedown options for their training sets and can block names from being prompted. If you were a popular enough artist to be in a training set, you can remove it and block the majority of AI art users from copying you—like you said, a majority of people use these services instead of self-hosting.

(Sending DMCA takedown requests are actually pretty easy. I had to send one to an old teacher who reposted my art and a bunch of classmates’ art on her ArtStation. that was funny lol)

I’m not sure how I felt when I went to search up my art on haveibeentrained. Because I’m a nerd, I’d preemptively blocked scrapers on my portfolio, so nothing was there when I looked. Searched up my legal name, my old Twitter (which had some popular pieces), my old DeviantArt usernames. Nothing there, either. I was probably pruned from the set for being low-quality. Kinda funny, I thought I’d be good enough to include at least once. Maybe next time.

.safetensors / .ckpt files (which are the models Stable Diffusion runs) have no image data in them, by the way. It is all math and numbers in there. There is no way of telling what was included in the training set, unless the dev(s) that made the model release it publicly. The models themselves are usually around 3–6 GB, though there’s larger ones and mini ones.

Like my own silly brain, there’s no way of tracking down the exact art pieces the software was referencing off of when it generates something. Am I making money off of another artist’s hard work when I remember how to draw heads from a Proko video? Am I ripping off photographers when I recall their pictures when drawing my characters? I’m not a tech company, but I still make money off of the things I copy and filter through my mind and hand.

I’m rambling at this point, sorry. Of course, the core issue is capitalism. How different would people see this medium if money were not an issue? How futuristic, how exciting it is to visualize something from words alone. It’s that art machine I’d always wanted as a kid, where I think of something and it pops out on the page finished.

I think it is worth to uplift those who use the medium as ethically as they can, as @are-we-art-yet is doing—having a do-not-use artist list, avoiding corporations, don’t try to undercut traditional artists. Like with any medium, there’s a variety of artists. Some are nice and do their best to have a good impact, some don’t care at all about the ethics of their art.

I’m still pretty firmly a “traditional” artist. I won’t stop drawing or give up because of AI. I play with AI on my own hardware and power for fun and for getting ideas (is that stealing?). It’s mostly replaced scrolling through Pinterest for me, but I still save people’s art and photos that I like in my computer, so I can look at em later, maybe get inspired. And steal like an artist, I guess.

[neilwroteathing]

I don't know what to title this, but here you'll read of my Murder Drones OC

It's time! I wanted to make a post about my Murder Drones OC since me and a couple of frens have been roleplaying with them lately, so to give more to this blog and add characters that maybe people enjoy and ask, I present to you in a lengthy post:

Boone Doser

Lots of thank u's, pat pats and sm more to my lovely friend over on instagram @d3athup0n for gifting me this for my birthday, as a bust reference of the big man himself. In this post you'll get to know more about him and maybe a note here or there about the process of developing him.

------------------------------------------------------

Unit BD2, otherwise known by his co-workers as 'Boone Doser' is an Industrial type of Worker Drone within the world of Murder Drones.

Industrial Drones (IDs) are different from Worker Drones (WDs) for the way that they're heavily altered by a company and given specific programming to work as an automated heavy machine and perform more arduous tasks individually. Drones like these were a safe way for humans to have machinery identical to those such as Bobcats, Forklifts, TLBs and like Boone Doser's name implies, Bulldozers.

Yes I'm proud of that pun name

Boone was designed to function in the way of serving in heavy facilities that would require digging, moving rubble or in his case, aid in digging operations.

One of the few models of his generation, Boone was the 2nd model of the Bulldozer line, which was only 5 models total made before the next generation of Industrial Drones was developed. Boone is part of the 3rd generation of IDs and was sent to work in the mining facility located in Copper 9.

Equipped with a heavy duty casing, flexible joints with more rigid segments on his extremities and almost armor-like plating, Boone is built to be heavy and put up high torque. The blades on his back can be removed and attached to his arms, then to be used for pushing and digging by splitting in two parts and connecting once together on his arms.

Another feature not visible is that he does not possess the typical legs a WD would, but instead have his entire feet and part of the ankle be replaced by two sturdy wheels with high grip to traverse smoothly over rocky terrain and step across mud piles without getting stuck.

With all this torque and power, he is a hard machine to break apart without special equipment, blades themselves able to withstand plenty of damage (like a shield).

He wears work approved clothing, such as a safety mining vest, safety goggles and a hardhat (with his name scribbled on the left side)

ALSO HIS HAIR IS MADE OF WIRES AND AH I LOVE HOW IT LOOKS.

------------------------------------------------------

Lots of blah blah about his design and origin, and yes I invented a whole new brand of Drones just for this, bite me.

Now to the fun part!

His lore!

Grengcore was the name of the company owner of the mining facility where Boone worked, which was a company entirely set within Copper 9.

Boone was created in 3040 and sent to one of the mining resource plant, in which he'd work with humans and drones until Copper 9's explosion, which caused the death of the humans and leaving all drones to continue work on their own (which was hard, since none was taught how to send a spaceship with the mined material anywhere)

Either way, he'd develop relationships with almost all workers and mostly positive ones too, him being quite upstanding and serviceable as can be, optimistic, even eventually, developing a link for one of the workers within, being a girl that he'd work alongside with daily, even together during breaks.

This link would continue to flourish into a code full of love, where he and this worker would decide to create their own starter neural network, AKA a child of their own, a compromise solidified after a wedding within the facility, where two rings of quartz were worn to seal the promise and become husband and wife.

After the big day, Boone would be given his name by the workers, who all called him B-2, and his name would be scribbled onto his helmet as a fun gift from his wife.

Time passed, and while working during break hours, a sudden cave-in happened, that crushed the entrance in due to something causing too much movement nearby. The workers instructed Boone to

'Just continue digging'

He'd continue as instructed, expecting the others to soon dig out the entrance as he discovered the cave in to be far more risky to clean out from inside with the chance of a complete breakdown of the tunnel being dug if attempted from the inside.

He'd just keep digging.

The assurance calls from the intercom ceased, and his order remained unchanged

The visits from his wife through the speaker on the single camera mounted in the room prior to the tunnel stopped coming

He wouldn't hear the gibberish of his child with the sweet voice of his wife

His code began to deteriorate with one order starting to freeze onto his programming

1095 days went by as he continued to work non-stop

He had no idea what happened as the days went by

He had no knowledge of where anyone was

He had no other things he knew besides to dig

to replace damaged blades

eat from a huge boxed supply of batteries

run out of wires to light up the tunnel

run out of working explosives

his body wearing away

and finally, becoming a hollow husk of what once was a worker with pride, with friends, with a loving partner and a child he wanted to provide proper parenting to.

If only he knew the carnage that had gone down back in his home, but alas, all he knew now was few things:

Just keep digging, to throw ore to the left, dirt and stone to the right, replace damaged equipment.

Boone Doser became the sole survivor of the mining facility, but not without severe impact to his own self. Only one thing would be able to maybe help him return to reality, and it came in the form of a faulty Disassembly Drone, who took pity on his miserable state, and offered him to escape.

------------------------------------------------------

Okay that was way more than I expected to write-

BUT YEAH THAT'S BOONE DOSER

If you managed to reach this part like... I'm proud of u, and if you want, you can ask Boone questions, see if his poor CPU can answer them.

[fancyshooting]

Yoji Shinkawa's comments on character design from METAL GEAR SOLID 2: MAKING OF

[All machine translated. Original text here.]

Start with a brush, finish with a pencil. PS2 requires the finest detail

Upon receiving an order from Kojima, Shinkawa began designing the characters and main mechanisms. The process begins with rough sketches with a brush until he is satisfied with the final product, and when he has a clear image, he begins to clean up with a pencil. The artist switches from one medium to another in order to accommodate the detailed modeling on PS2. This process was the same for characters who had appeared in previous works, such as Solid Snake, as well as those who were making their first appearance in MGS2, such as Raiden. How did these fascinating characters come to be? We will follow the story with abundant materials such as rough drawings and colored pictures, as well as Shinkawa's comments.

Solid Snake

Two years after Shadow Moses: how the legendary mercenary has grown

Solid Snake became a legendary mercenary after his exploits on Shadow Moses Island (the previous work). He appeared in the Tanker section after two years, and in the Plant section after four years...

"In the previous work, he was a member of the military's special forces, so he was using the latest equipment. But this time, he belongs to an organisation that doesn't have much money. So the director asked me to create an image of rags and tatters. For the tanker section, he just put on the sneaking suit he wore last time and a harness. For the plant section, he took SEAL 10's clothes, so he wore that outfit. He is older now, so he has a bit of fat on his body. Snake, who was created through genetic manipulation, ages faster than he actually does, so I wanted him to look older than Otacon."

Raiden

What is Raiden's default setting, the "self" who has lost his individuality?

As the game says, the name "Raiden" comes from the name of a fighter plane. Although the character is designed to be unassuming so that players can empathise with him, it seems that many ideas were incorporated into the game when it was first developed.

"I had been working on this character since the planning stage of the project, so I had been drawing him from the very beginning when the idea of "MGS2" first came up. There were no specific orders regarding his appearance, so I was allowed to draw him however I wanted. Raiden was a more perverted man in the initial setting. He licked bird poop and moved in strange ways... But I thought he was too weird to be a player character (laughs). I even made a motion that made him move like a spider. When the director saw it, he said, "That's not right" (laughs). When I thought about playing the game with it, I found it difficult to use, so it became more and more orthodox. There has been a lot of talk about Raiden, but I thought it was a good idea to create a bishōnen character in order to change the existing image of him."

Solidus Snake

Former US president with a Japanese sword in each hand.

George Sears, aka Solidus, is the 43rd President and Raiden's adoptive parent. His power suit-clad figure is impressive, but the idea was created by Shinkawa.

"A former president in a power suit with a Japanese sword in each hand. It's amazing, isn't it (laughs)? I had always liked the idea of a powered suit, so I had been working on it for a while. Right before I went to the first Nasu training camp, I had the idea to put a power suit on Solidus. The facial model was the same as Snake's. I just changed the hairstyle and added an eye patch. I changed his hair style and added an eye patch, but his appearance has changed a lot..."

Olga Gurlukovich

The modeling changes between the Tanker section and the Plant section.

Olga Gurkukovich played the role of Snake's antagonist in the Tanker section and supported Raiden behind the scenes in the Plant section.

"Olga's modelling was changed between the Tanker section and the Plant section. In the Plant section, she has given birth to a child, so I drew her with an image that emphasises her strength. The ninja figure is naturally slender compared to the ninja in the previous work. The ninja in the previous work was not a suit but a cyborg made of a reinforced skeleton. In contrast, this time Olga is wearing a power suit on top of her body. Also, Olga's armpits (laughs). The director wanted to show her armpit hair in the scene where she holds up her hands, so he asked me to include it. I didn't think it would be such a hit."

Revolver Ocelot

The director's comment, "That arm is Liquid's arm," was the deciding factor.

Ocelot has become even more of a key figure in the story than before. Was his right arm originally supposed to be "grown" differently?

"I was wondering what to do with the arm that was cut off in the last film. At first, I drew a cyborg-like arm that could perform mechanical actions. But one day the director said, 'That arm is Liquid's arm' (laughs). Well, it was better that way because it was more interesting. So I added an arm slightly thicker than the left arm. The rest is just as I imagined. I thought about letting the hairline recede a little more, but I decided against it and rather rejuvenated it. I think he absorbed the power of Liquid and it revitalised him."

Otacon

The growth of an otaku scientist who has followed a path with Snake

Otacon's shocking past is revealed in the second half of the story.

"Otacon wore a white-ish hoodie in the last work, so I put him in white again. He wears a suit, but we continued with the white image. As you can see in the latter part of the game, Otacon has grown from a timid young man. I hope I have conveyed that feeling. Originally, I ordered 'Otacon' to be a fat computer geek. But from that time on, I knew it would be difficult to draw a fat guy. That's why I made him look like a nerd, like a weak engineer. People say that the director is a model, but that's not true (laughs)."

Rosemary

An "ordinary woman" who tormented Shinkawa to the end

What happens when the wrong person enters the battlefield? Rose, who appeared in a support role for Raiden at Kojima's request...

"I drew dozens of pictures, but I couldn't decide on a character at all until the very end. The director asked me to draw a normal woman, but normal is the most difficult part. Raiden has a feminine image, so I had to think about what I should do for Raiden's girlfriend. I also had a hard time deciding on the color of her hair, but since Raiden was already decided to be white, I decided to go with black to add contrast..."

Emma Emmerich

EE is an authentic bishōjo character in the Shinkawa style

Among the characters appearing for the first time in this work, she is the second most beautiful character after Raiden. She is said to have a certain model for her distinctive hairstyle...

"I feel that EE is a direct adaptation of the beautiful girl characters I used to draw in the past. The hair is based on a character in a gag comic I used to draw. She is called 'Ahochiu,' and she had a lot of curly hair (laughs). You remember Meryl in the last work? I really wanted to have a younger woman. I saw 'Leon' at the time, and Natalie Portman as Matilda was so good. Matsuhana-san, who was watching the movie with me, was moved to tears (laughs). However, we were not so sure about such a young girl holding a Desert Eagle, so we ended up rejecting the idea. This time, we made it a reality with EE. The director's idea of lacquered chopsticks is included in the work... The director came to me out of the blue with a newspaper clipping and said, 'This is it!' It was hard for me to model the curly hair and lacquered chopsticks, though.

Fortune

The "Goddess of Fortune" is pursuing the beauty of Black women

According to Kojima, the name "Fortune" comes from "fortune cookies" (sweets with a fortune-telling note inside). Shinkawa embodied this "goddess of fortune..."

"I want to include Black women in this project for personal reasons (laughs). When I go abroad for interviews, I find that Black women are beautiful and cool. In the previous film, there were Black men but no women, so I asked for them to appear in this film. I thought it would be cuter if she showed some skin, so I made her wear a swimsuit (laughs). The swimsuit she is wearing is based on the one used by the SEALs, so I tried to make it a little sexy without losing the army-like image."

Vamp

The "Gyarando" [happy trail] was so realistic that it ended up being a phantom

The late Kaneto Shiozawa was supposed to voice this vamp. The character is a rather racy "bisexual" character...

"I drew Vamp in the image of a ballerina. Later, I got a video of Joaquin Cortez, a dancer, for reference and watched it. I was surprised. It was the director's idea that every time he kills someone, he hurts himself. My idea was to make Vamp have chest hair. It was rejected because it was too graphic. I modelled it at first. I modelled the chest hair and "Gyarando". But with the rendering capabilities of the PS2, it was too realistic and made me feel uncomfortable, so I decided to leave the chest hair alone. It's something you don't understand until you try to texture it."

Fatman

A difficult character whose modeling was turned in last

As you know, Fat Man is the name of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It is said that there were plans to name other members of Dead Cell after atomic bombs as well as Fatman. As the name implies, Fatman is a fat character, but Shinkawa struggled a lot until Fatman was completed.

"It was difficult to draw something round in a cool way. That's why it was so difficult to draw Fatman. I think he was the last character to be modeled. I asked them to make a rough model and wait for me to work on the details. I got a good hint from the bomb squad in New York. There, I actually tried on a bomb blast suit... The suit was too bland, so I added a pouch to hold the bombs."

Others

Temporary "old man" characters who appear and disappear quickly

There are many [silver; refined] characters in "MGS2", without borrowing Shinkawa's words of "only old men." Marine Corps Commander Scott, who was the father of Fortune, prosthetic-legged Peter, Nastasha Romanenko's ex-husband, Ames, and a number of other men who turned up and then died...

"Peter was really a sniper observer. Scott? I feel sorry for him because he dies as soon as he appears. I thought it would be okay if he was Black like her, since he is Fortune's father. Ames is the same, only he appears in the movie - but everyone dies. I know this from the initial drawing stage, so I feel a bit empty, thinking, 'Oh, he's going to die, too...' The director doesn't seem to mind, though, and says, 'Oh, they'll just keep on dying!' (wry smile)."

Subtle and tasteful design of enemy armaments. Arsenal's theme is "huge"

Although the mecha and armaments are popular with enthusiasts, the team has tried to keep the flavor as "light" as possible.

"I didn't necessarily make the enemy's equipment as it is, but I tried not to change it too much. For example, I made the boots of the SEALs look a little more futuristic... If there is something outrageous in the midst of something realistic, it looks even more outrageous. I was careful to show that gap. The arsenal, like Fatman, has a round shape, so it was difficult to create. We wondered what we could do to make it look huge. In the end, we decided that it would be better not to add anything. We decided that it would be better to have nothing on it at all, just a little turtle shell pattern... It would be weird to have all sorts of things on it when you're moving around in the sea."

Rejected

"MGS2" secret characters that cannot be seen in the game

Chinaman is a mysterious boss character who was supposed to be a member of Dead Cell. He is not purely Chinese (Vietnamese), but he is called "Chinaman" because he grew up in Chinatown. He is a Kung-Fu master who can manipulate his body weight freely by focusing his chi, and is a SEAL-ish swimmer. This suggests that the boss fight with Vamp was originally an idea for Chinaman.

Oldboy is another Dead Cell member, and as his name suggests, he is an old soldier of over 100 years old. He was the man who taught Big Boss and other mercenaries from around the world combat techniques, and he would change his equipment depending on the player's equipment.

Doc was conceived as the Master Miller of the previous work. He is the doctor who developed the Arsenal Gear AI and can tell us about the Arsenal and the Plant, but his true identity is that of an artificial personality created by the Patriots. Max, also an artificial personality, was deliberately intended to have the same voice as Mei Ling.

Metal Gear Ray

Shinkawa's version of Godzilla? The "underlying theme" behind RAY

This time Metal Gear is amphibious. It is a well-known story that it was inspired by a submarine, but there was another hidden theme in Shinkawa's mind.

"There was a Hollywood version of Godzilla, wasn't there? I was really looking forward to that, but when I saw Godzilla appear, I thought, 'That's not what it looks like!' (laughs). This time, I put it to RAY. I said, 'This is the real Godzilla.' For the previous work, I used plastic plates and putty to create a three-dimensional model, but this time I used Sculpey. If you make a three-dimensional model, you have to make sure that the details are consistent. I decided to clean up the rough drawing with a pencil after I made it three-dimensional.

[alchemist-of-thebes]

KH OC Week Day 2

Little late in the day, but better late than never? Anyway, on to Day 2! Day 2: New World ◾What would it be like if your OC visited a world they'd never seen before? As I did for Day 1, today I'll have short bit about both Velcia (KHx-Era) and her eventual descendant, Velcia ("Modern" KH Era).

KHx-Era Velcia:

For the KHx-Era Velcia, the experience of truly visiting a new world is rather more muddied. Daybreak Town is not her true homeworld, and although she does not remember much aside from fleeting memories of her true home she is never able to to really shake the fact that she isn’t quite in the right place. Further complicating her perspective is the fact that, as a Wielder of Daybreak Town, she has visited many of The Master of Master’s Projected Worlds created by the Book of Prophecies. While she still finds each new world to be incredible in its own right, it isn’t until she finally ends up in the true world of Olympus that she learns how much more satisfying the real thing can be. And so, in the end, her reaction to visiting an entirely new world really changes depending on where she is in her life. Prior to the Keyblade War, any new world would be met with the same drive and determination to learn and document everything she can. She is driven to see things, draw them, to learn more or less how it is and how it works, before bustling off to take one more little nibble off the plate of infinity that is the unknown.

After the Keyblade War, after the horrors and dust have settled and she’s begun to adjust to life in her new world, however, little Velcia’s frenetic nature would come to focus into something more personal and passionate. Though she’s unlikely to ever become a people-person, her relationships with the people she sees and the world around her would grow to have a much slower pace and a deeper appreciation. If she were to visit a new world at this point, her countless stacks of pages covering a large range of topics would be replaced with more neat and organized subjects of considerably greater depth, and her focus would be to learn and find the heart of what makes each place uniquely special.

KHII-Era Velcia:

The first new world Velcia gets to visit and really truly explore is Eos. Coming from Olympus, a world with nearly no technology, she finds herself constantly impressed and amazed by the marvelous machines and society that they have built. Despite this, she finds herself more engrossed in learning as much as she can about the properties of magic on this world and devotes much of her time to learning the fundamental construction of several Lucian Spells - even on other worlds, her thirst for knowledge and love of learning are hard to set aside. The first several New Worlds she visits are during her travels with Hinata. Velcia grew up hearing quite a bit about the “World Order” (Or at least, an approximation thereof), but her understanding of this is put into a bit of a conflict by the requirements of their mission. Velcia does her best to respect each world, though ultimately tries to defer to the decisions made by DiZ or Hinata in most cases.

Having very highly attuned magic senses, Velcia comes to find that the way she remembers each world best is by the unique sorts of magic each world is imbued with - much like some may remember a location, food, or event by the smell, sounds, or flavors. The base magical elements of each world are similar, but the way these elements are used by the locals is seldom the same from one world to the next; and learning about these is generally her favorite part.

Being a potion-maker by trade, she also finds herself very interested in each world’s local plant life and other sorts of materials that are naturally saturated with magic properties, or those that can be imbued easily with it. It takes some time for the notion to come to her, but she does eventually start trying to collect especially interesting or unique plants or seeds from worlds when she finds she has the time or opportunity. Someone, someday, is going to need to have a discussion with Velcia to teach what an ‘invasive species’ is. Also, I have this picture from a few years back of this Velcia wearing the outfit she got when she traveled to Eos for the first time. This picture was commissioned for me as a present, and was created by an artist called Benvey.

That's it for me for Day 2! Thanks again for stopping by, and thanks to everyone else participating in KH OC Week - it's been so fun to see everyone's stuff and be a part of it after all this time. :D

[cosplaytutorial]

Ulala from space channel 5, her classic white crop top and skirt outfit? I’m new to sewing and idk how I should do it

Hello there!

This is a very timely ask because I've been off and on considering remaking my own Ulala cosplay (RIP to the one that I wore so much the fabric disintegrated) and might finally do it.

My first piece of advice is: this costume is somewhat advanced just because of the materials involved, but if you don't mind using different materials, it's not TOO bad.

I'll start with the shapes and types of patterns you should look for, because thankfully the shapes of this are easy. The top should have princess seams, likely armhole princess seams. This will get you that tightly fitted look over the bust, and you can take in the side seams and the princess seams just under the bust for a tighter underbust fit. The collar is probably a quarter or half circle -- mess with shapes on paper scale mockups until you get one that looks right.

The skirt looks like a half circle to me, but again, play around with paper patterns to get the right shape. Use a circle skirt calculator to get the measurements you need for the skirt and for your collar. (Be sure to use the waist measurement where the skirt sits, not your true waist!) These are used by taking a string or measuring tape and drawing a circle using the radius it tells you -- the waist radius is the inside of the donut and the full radius is the full length.

I'd recommend getting a pattern for gloves that have finger gussets, and basting the gussets in by hand before machine sewing. Since you're doing the white version, you can probably purchase boots rather than making bootcovers, and use a paint like Angelus leather paint for the platform.

The 5 logo can be painted on with fabric paint or ironed on with HTV. If you don't have an HTV cutter, you can do it by hand or find a friend with a die cutting machine (Cricut, etc.) to do it. If you choose to stencil, I'd recommend the freezer paper method.

Fabric is the hard part.

The way the costume is drawn makes it look like shiny PVC vinyl type fabric. This fabric is what makes it a bit advanced -- vinyl type fabrics (I'm including shiny, smooth stretch pleathers here that have the same look even if they're PU or a material other than vinyl) require some different techniques -- but switching the fabric to something less perfect for the look but easier to sew would greatly help. A shiny spandex would work if you added structure to the skirt, but you may find it difficult to sew.

I'd go with a slightly shiny but still structured woven material for a beginner sewist. A bottomweight cotton sateen would work quite well. If you don't mind something a bit more slippery but that is shinier, I'd go with a peu de soie (a type of heavy satin).

If you choose PVC, I'd personally go with something more structured than a thin stretch one, but not TOO thick because of the gloves. Order swatches when ordering online. The official costumes from the promo events when the game came out seem to be made of a similar material. (Look at those for reference!) If you go with PVC, you need to use a teflon foot or a walking foot for your sewing machine, otherwise the fabric will stick, and you need to be VERY careful about sewing and pinning because needle and pin holes will not close back up like with most fabric. I'd invest in some cheap sewing clips.

Regardless, the skirt and collar will need some added structure -- I'm looking at using fusible foam (like Pellon Flex Foam) for mine, as I just did a cosplay with fusible foam in the skirt and the shape was great. Just make sure you test it ahead of time to be sure it plays nicely with your chosen fabric.

I hope that helps! Good luck :]

—Fabrickind / Q&A Staff / Twitter