#unicornduke

[bomberqueen17]

okay okay chapter update on give a dog a job

So I finally finished writing the final chapter, which means, I get to post the penultimate chapter, and then I'll follow up with the last one mmmm well next time I post something, which, maybe Friday? Maybe next Monday? We shall see how that all works out. But! The work is complete and will be done being posted soon.

Bumped the rating up to Explicit. I really do think this is Mature, but well, I mean, there's-- well, you'll see. Despite the comedy of miscommunication that has been the rest of this story, however, this bit is actually pretty clearly-communicated and all.

Actually as I was doing the final proofread I was thinking specifically about unicornduke and how they'll probably enjoy the good communication and then mostly want to skip the sex LOL

Listen I'm just going where the muse takes me.

Chapter 9, on AO3

Once upon a time, Iorveth would have known exactly what to do, when to press and when to be coy, he’d have had no shame about taking his shirt off or stepping into Vernon’s personal space or deploying direct eye contact or any number of devices, but his face was broken and he’d been in isolation for a year now. He didn’t know how to read people through the filter of their inevitable cringe at his appearance, didn’t have that radiant faith in his own beauty that had once made everything so easy. Playing chicken had carried him far enough the last time, but frantic rutting in the woods was nothing at all like a calculated seduction.

[katy-l-wood]

unicornduke replied to your post “So. I’m getting kicked out. Awesome. My mother’s dogs made a HUGE...”

that sucks so bad. Is there anything we can do?

Nah. I’ve got things pretty much under control. I just needed to vent a little. Thank you, though.

[toodumbtorun]

unicornduke

  I Now Have An Instagram

nice nice nice. you can see ALL of my pictures I post over there. it is so many

lol yeah, I’ve been looking through my friends’ instagrams and have just been like “OH, so THIS is where they’ve been putting them all...”

[jenroses]

unicornduke replied to your post “paleo bread is deeply disappointing. There are so many flavors and...”

anything that isn't partially wheat bread is so very unsatisfying. I've settled for the best gluten free bread I can find but it's not that great. I've found cornbread not from a mix is much tastier but a lot of people can't eat corn.

Franz gluten free 7 grain is not bad, and makes a damn fine grilled cheese. 

This bread was...not that.

I’m literally allergic to wheat, so partially wheat isn’t an option. And my blood sugars are getting ridiculous, so rice anything isn’t an option. I had a sliver of gluten-free almond flour birthday cake the other day and my blood sugar went up 40 points. Keep in mind that prior to last year I never had a single blood sugar over 125, not even an hour after eating a large meal with cake. 

[copperbadge]

Answers About Miniature Horses

sandrayln replied to your post “My parents signed me up for Nextdoor, which is like some kind of...”

Sam, there's a saying among horse people: 'pony' is a four letter word. Much like shit is a four letter word. They may look sweet and angelic, but they are made of demons that were kicked out of Hell for being a bit too extreme. Miniature horses are much like ponies. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

unicornduke replied to your post “My parents signed me up for Nextdoor, which is like some kind of...”

horses are like many other creatures: the smaller they are, the bigger the attitude. Every mini I've ever met has been a hellish little beast. I'm glad you get to learn these things lol

I love how many people have been reblogging with their own strong feelings on miniature horses, especially everyone who’s like “They are monsters, tiny monsters, I wouldn’t go near one if I were a farrier either” :D

Also UnicornDuke I feel like your username uniquely qualifies you to comment on this.

decepticonsensual replied to your post “My parents signed me up for Nextdoor, which is like some kind of...”

I am so here for Miniature Horse Discourse. Miniature DisHorse, if you will.

I SEE WHAT U DID THERE. 

[yolowoho]

unicornduke replied to your post: anon who asked about the arrows here, yet again...

it’s there now!

awesome!

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Hi, would you be able to recommend some good resources on dog interactions and dog to dog body language? I'm trying to figure out why my dog acts the way she does with other dogs and if she's being "rude" in body language. Some dogs seem to like her fine but others snap at her. She's an adult rescue so I don't know if she was raised with another dog to learn manners from them. Thanks!

For first resources, I really like the diagrams in Stanley Coren’s book ‘how to speak dog’. It won’t tell you if she’s being rude, but it’ll teach you how to read the minutiae of both her body language and that of the dogs she’s interacting with. You can get more practice by watching videos of dogs (bonus points if you know the people who own the dogs) to practice your visual acuity (and then double-check that you’re reading it right if you know the owners). 

Lili Chin’s doggy drawings of her Boston terrier Boogie also has beautiful illustrations of what holistic interpretations of body language look like. She doesn’t focus as much on specific ear position or tail placement, but looks at the dog’s body language as a whole to figure out what information it encodes. 

[clintcoulsonficfinders]

Hi there, I'm looking for this fic in which: clint refuses to visit/see phil on hospital for some reason that I can't remember. But soon after, clints gets Injured and is hospitalised and when he wakes up, Phil is by his bedside visiting him. But somehow, Phil and a panic attack. And clint gets worried. I think that Clint had a life changing injury... also I think there's a scene in which Clint goes, "I scared you?" And Phil replies "not this time". Many thanks. I don't tthink it was on archive

When He Woke by Westgate (Harkpad).

If that isn’t it, please send us another ask!

Thanks to unicornduke for the assist.

[jadenlune]

I was tagged by @burgahboy to post my lock screen, most recent selfie, and the last song I listened to. Im really slow at this x.x Im gonna tag @julesmckenzie, @lykro, @persisting-in-existence, @ariosedreamer, @out-of-this-binary, @unicornduke, @putrescency and anyone else who wants to b.c I'm bad at remembering URLs

[bomberqueen17]

more weaving nerdery

so i have like. fallen down a rabbit hole of this goddamned tablet weaving, which is both funny and like, not.

Sometimes a thing catches you, y’know? and you just want to hyperfocus on it and do nothing else. And that’s what’s happened here, which is fine. It’s that it’s complicated enough to be absorbing, but not so much that it’s actually difficult; my tiny, frazzled, distracted, memory-leaking burnt-out little pea brain can actually achieve reasonable results even under the cognitive load of (*gestures broadly*) current events and such. So I’ve now achieved two entire finished completed bands, and have finished them off in like. Reasonably competent ways. I’m going to sew down the beginning end of my first one a little better, because not only does the beginning of the weaving need a bit of reinforcement as one does, but I also fucked up the weft in the first quarter-inch, so if I can just sew that down to stabilize it the whole thing will be much more usable. Also I finished the second one off by braiding the long fringe and I don’t really like how it came out so. Anyway! Experiments.

What am I going to do with these two finished bands? I don’t know. I’m going to make a third one, something with a white weft, because I loaded the shuttle with white and started using it on the white/black/blue second band, and immediately realized that while the bands are warp-faced, the weft is visible in a few tiny spots and having a design with a black border and white weft looks awful. So I need something with a white or off-white border for my next trick, because I’m not unloading that shuttle. (Yeah I wove the whole band with an improvised shuttle made of a bit of a paperboard box folded in half and cut to shape and scotch-taped down, it was not graceful but it was effective.)

I want to try mixing threads. So far I have used only 8/4 carpet warp from Webs, which I own in four colors-- black, gray, blue, and cream-- but I bought some #10 crochet thread yesterday at Jo-Ann’s, and I own a very weird assortment of other threads/strings/yarns that I’d love to incorporate. And the book I’m using, borrowed from @unicornduke​ (A Simplified Guide To Historical Tablet Weaving), has descriptions of a number of extant examples, mostly recovered from graves, and many many of them are made with mixed fibers. (Very often, linen weft and wool warp, so you see the wool and the linen holds it in place but is largely invisible. I specifically want to try that.) One, notably, from the Hallstadt salt mines, is wool warp with horsehair as the weft, and I desperately want to try that, but am coming up blank on anyone I know IRL who has a horse!

I recently texted my older sister to ask if I could get some sawdust from her husband’s saw mill, and they obliged. Her daughter rides horses at a stable and I’m trying to guage how weird it would be to ask if she could collect me some hairs next time she’s grooming one. I need like.... a handful of long mane or tail hairs, just to make the experiment. They don’t need to get spun together, I can use them single-ply, it’s easy enough to weave in ends-- I’d need like. Probably eight to ten inches is the shortest that’d be useful, and I’d need, well, a dozen that length at least to make the experiment.

Anyway. A project for a later date, but something to keep in mind.

But the thing I came here to note down is the use of fishing swivels to manage twist buildup. Part of this is my horrible allergy to watching instructional videos, which I fucking *hate*, but as I’ve tried to research tablet weaving, I’m finding much of it is described so generally. And so as I was reading, the only information I’ve found is fishing swivels for sale, and the description ‘use fishing swivels to manage twist’, with no information besides that.

cut for some photos:

So, what I did, was I warped my inkle loom in the usual way, where you just tie the warp all the way around the warping pegs in a circle? But I tied an end of the warp to each side of a fishing swivel, and called that good. That seems to be how one would use a fishing swivel to manage twist, right?

If you are a person who is good at knowing how physical objects interact you might be snickering at me right now, however. For as I learned, no, that is not all you need to do.

Fishing swivels, like any mechanical thing with moving parts, are easily-fouled by tangling strings. I learned that if the ends of your string are long enough to tie, then they’re long enough to get stuck in the business bits of the swivels. ALSO, the little metal rings at the ends of the swivels are kind of... slippery? Hard to keep your overhand knot tight. You’re going to have an absolute beast of a time with your tension, as the swivels get unevenly fouled by the ends of the yarns, and also some of the knots slip. It was pure hell, and I had to take the band off very early and give up, because of this, when the whole point of the swivels had been to avoid what had happened with the previous band, where I did not reverse direction early enough and so the woven area of the band advanced past the free space left by the twist unwinding as I wove backward, and made it impossible for me to continue far before I ran out of yarn.

[this is sort of in the middle of the process-- i have the red yarn needle through the one loop of all the swivels to hold them together so they don’t keep sliding around, and you can already see how the ends have wrapped around the whole business so much you can’t even see the swivels. This is where I was starting to suspect a problem. and no-- holding one end of the swivels in place with a yarn needle isn’t going to prevent them from working, the point is that there are two ends and each can independently swivel as much as you want in any direction, so I was trapping one end and leaving the other free, and it was actually useful in the beginning for keeping the tension manageable, so later when I stopped doing that it made things bad, but the yarn ends had, in my defense, already made things very bad by then, so.]

So. Here’s my theory on how to use the fishing swivels, which I have not seen explained anywhere.

Tie your warp to the swivel-- I used one swivel per tablet, so four cords per swivel, and of course you have to thread the card on before you can tie off the warp. I tied it as tight as I could. I would say to additionally tie a second knot at a slight distance from the swivel, so that your ending fringe is stable and your weaving’s not coming up against the securing-knot, which is a pain when you’re trying to undo it later. Tie it as tight as you humanly can. Then take the loose ends beyond your securing knot, trim them to be all the same length, wrap them tightly around the area between the securing knot and your second, weaving-starts-here knot, and then fasten them down securely with masking tape or something like that. You must seal them down so that they cannot get fuzzy and get into the swivels. I have seen no discussion of this and yet cannot see how this technique would work without something like this being implemented.

Repeat for all cards, and do this on both sides of the swivel. There can be no loose ends, or they’ll foul the swivel mechanism.

I’ll get photos next time I try it, but I’m going to do, for my third experiment, a pattern with balanced twist, where you alternate the directions the cards turn so that the twist doesn’t build up in the first place, simply because I haven’t tried that so far.

Probably someone showed all this in a Youtube video, but since I can’t fucking stand videos instead of instructions, it’s the same to me as if nobody had ever talked about this. Do feel free to research it, if it’s a thing you’re interested in, and also feel free to tell me if someone seems to have a better method, but understand that if you link me a video I’m very unlikely to watch it. I have the best of intentions but a whole lot of antipathy toward the video format, which is the worst of both worlds-- both slower than reading, and also my memory is such that I will not remember the crucial bit of the instructions after watching it, so I wind up both no smarter than I was and angry from having wasted a whole bunch of time.

Anyway. I digress. I’ve resisted the alternate-direction patterns because I know I 1) can’t count, and 2) can’t reliably tell clockwise from anticlockwise, so I am absolutely going to be wildly confused the entire time I’m weaving, so I suspect the alternating-direction patterns are Not For Me, but they are a very large subset of tablet weaving patterns so I need to at least try them.

Yeah, somehow I reversed the pattern in my fishing swivel experiment band, 3/4 of the way through the band, even though i would swear to you that I turned the cards away from myself the entire time without variation. Just, somehow in the middle of this, without having flipped the tablets or reversed directions, the pattern started going the other way. Which is not how that works, so clearly I reversed the direction, but I swear to you I turned the cards the same way every time, and I don’t understand how this happened. If I got that confused in a pattern that had no reversals, I’m just telling you now I’m going to be hopeless in a pattern that does have reversals. This is dyscalculia; I simply cannot see the difference in rotation directions, the way I can’t figure out which of my hands is the left one, so this is going to be a problem for me. But maybe it’ll work out anyway. I don’t know.

(For a while at work I often had to go through big orders of slide scans and rotate the sideways ones, and the command said “rotate clockwise” or “rotate counterclockwise” without illustrating the direction, and so I would constantly have to tip my head as I imagined the face of a clock, which I might remind you I can’t read so about 75% of the time I would guess wrong. I cannot overstate how thoroughly my brain does not work for this task.)

anyway wish me luck

here’s what that second band looks like for most of its length, though, by the way, which is pretty acceptable:

[toodumbtorun]

Another winter, another opportunity to wear my favorite of all my scarves. Thanks @unicornduke!

[jenroses]

unicornduke replied to your post: Current WIP status

that’s an awesome ton of words. Also I super duper love the Healing Rules series and I was rereading it today. I’m didn’t know you wrote YOI but I’m going to read that now!

Thank you!

[copperbadge]

mr-chatterboxs-column replied to your photo “Seed Savers why you gotta call me out like this?”

Haha, I always forget that Seed Savers does mail order and that people outside Iowa have heard of them :)

unicornduke replied to your photo “Seed Savers why you gotta call me out like this?”

yay seed savers

I love how every time I post about Seed Savers (which I know I’ve done at least twice before) people come out for no other reason than to share their love of Seed Savers.

They’re so great! Your love is well-bestowed! 

[coffeebuddha]

unicornduke replied to your post “mom: what kind of dog did bill have? dad: bill who? you can’t just say...”

lol that's awesome. probably a great pyrenees if it was a big dog

I was probably around five when I met this dog, so all dogs looked pretty big to me. I mostly remember that he wasn’t a fan of my trying to uncurl his tail--not aggressive, just quiet whimpers and gently pulling out of my small childish grasp--and that I drew a picture of him for his owners, then they took me and my sister out into the backyard and helped us coax these tiny little kittens out from under their back porch.

[yolowoho]

unicornduke replied to your post: anon who asked about the arrows here, yet again...

I don’t see it. It looks like there’s a gap below that should have it but there’s nothing there

hmmm, thanks for letting me know! I'll try moving everything further up, but if that doesn't work I might contact the theme maker, I don't want to bother them until I've tried everything I can do

[bomberqueen17]

weaving

so for my birthday, I bought myself a Schacht inkle loom. @unicornduke​ was like hey you could just make that out of a pile of dowels, and I was like .... will I though? I will not. So, since I had birthday money, I bought it. As a bonus, it was scratch-n-dent from Webs (we made a pilgrimage to the Webs warehouse in MA, which was fun) and so it was already assembled. Because assembling it is currently beyond me. When I say I am low on braincells, I genuinely mean that I am very low on brain cells as like an ongoing situation.

I also bought the 25-pack of tablet weaving cards from Schacht. Because why not. Cut, for some photos.

Brought it over Monday night to @unicornduke​‘s house. We sat on the balcony, and I learned about how to warp an inkle loom for card weaving. When it was done, it looked like this:

And so I set to weaving. It got dark and rainy around then, so I moved indoors, and sat at the kitchen counter-- made and ate dinner, then resumed.

Figured after a little while that uh, the pattern doesn’t look like I expected. @unicornduke​ came out to look and discovered I’d reversed two of the cards. I had to unweave back to the beginning to fix the problem. This did involve some space-time shenanigans, but I eventually succeeded.

(See how that pattern is uh sort of... just weird? Looks a bit like a reel of 8mm film actually...)

So then I started weaving again, and firstly, my first few passes looked much cleaner and so the end was much nicer, and secondly, the pattern revealed itself to be quite nice actually.

This picture is when I reached the point where the twist had built up so much I had to reverse the direction of the weaving, so you can see where the pattern turns backwards. Pretty cool!!! Almost makes me want to do a variant of this pattern where you just do that every repeat!

But then the crucial thing about this is that it can be transported. I clipped the cards together with a binder clip and brought it home to buffalo and now I can keep working on it. Complex enough to be absorbing, simple enough that I don’t constantly fuck it up, small enough to be easily-transported: perfect storm of craftable thing.

Chita cautiously approves but would prefer it if I did not weave and only paid attention to her instead.

What am I going to do with this? I don’t know, and I also don’t know that it matters, LOL.