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ITS TIME

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A few free sewing patterns that are on my ko-fi! Each has a video tutorial~

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same

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This year's Extra Life stream is a go! Come celebrate my birthday and help raise money for my local children's hospital.

November 2-3, 2024

Saturday - TTRPG Day

1:00 PM: Kobols Ate My Baby

Sunday - Game Day

12:00 PM - 3:00 PM: Challenge Stardew

3:30 PM - 5:00 PM: Lethal Company

5:00 PM - End: Gartic Phone

All times are in PST $5 donation incentives will be live during Stardew

Watch at: twitch.tv/glazedeemon

⬇️ Extra Life info below the cut! ⬇️

Here’s a little information on Extra Life and why we are fundraising again for them this year.

What does Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals do?

Every day, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals treat:

235 kids for diabetes

295 babies in neonatal intensive care units

2,128 kids for cancer

2,329 kids for surgeries

16,200 kids with trauma

Each year, 10 million kids enter member hospitals of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals for care. The money raised goes directly to the hospital to:

Fund critical treatments and pediatric medical equipment

Make sure the hospitals can provide charitable care to those in need

Help cover specialized services not covered by insurance

(cit: 2023 Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, extra-life.org)

🍩 Donate Here 🍩

@valiantsystem @rinaberd @ragingsystem

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Mystery Skulls Animated - Ghost (Oct 26th, 2014)

Ten years ago on this day...

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Big baby off to their new home~ See you later alligator 🥲

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🎃Halloween Pokemon Clothes made by Versiris👻

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Not my meme but figured I'd share for those about to ride out the storm

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Alright, my babies, as it is now officially October, it is not only Halloween month, but it is the start of the annual FIBER ARTS FRENZY, A time when we fiber artists have to officially acknowledge the holidays have just hitched a ride on the Spaceball 1 and is coming at us at Ludicrous Speed. (If you don't get the reference your parents did not raise you right, and you have my sympathies.)

And, when I say holidays, I mean ALL of them. Why so many cultures and religions were so inconsiderate as to bunch them all up at the same time of year so we fiber artists have to scramble, wail, and curse the heavens, I'll never know.

At least we have each other.

So, to my fellow fiber artists I say: Y'ALL START YOUR ENGINES.

To the people in fiber artists lives during this frantic time: You best have comfort, understanding, support, and a sturdy sense of survival ready, because your loved one is about to try to Make All The Things.

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Thank you, Google, for putting AI results at the top of your every search, so you have the chance to blatantly lie to me whenever you feel like it. Really great feature, y'all. I mean it.

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So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17 years in a hot attic!)  

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kazuaki horitomo’s tattooed cats.

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A new viewpoint on antlers reveals the evolutionary history of deer (Cervidae, Mammalia)

fullview recommended!

something i've wanted to do for a while now. i've scoured the internet for something like this and can't find anything that compares all the different types of antlers together. except one recent study on their evolution, which is also very interesting on its own! i simplified it to provide a visual reference, while still trying to be scientifically accurate. some things differ between this and trophy scoring terminology like where the beam is and whatnot, so if something looks weird that's why.

small additional note, this study and others provide a lot of evidence that eld's deer should be in their own genus as it doesn't appear similar enough to barasingha and schomburgk's deer. however this doesn't seem to be adapted anywhere yet, so they're still in Rucervus for this guide.

🔴 KO-FI

⚫ COMMISSION INFO

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Does tumblr know about the animation union yaoi yet

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“i am a monument to all your sins” is such a fucking raw line for a villain it’s amazing that it came from halo, a modernish video game, and not some classical text or mythos

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Go ahead Red Mage, save the party.