mercymaddyo

[mercymaddyo]

Marc 🫶🫂🥲

[mercymaddyo]

i am not a typical marc bolaner but he just looks so kind here i had to show everyone

[mercymaddyo]

Imma lay some information about Marc Bolan on you coz it's just hanging out in my head for free

Marc Bolan is seriously the greatest wizard who's ever lived. Every other rock legend is really easy to explain. Like Jimmy Page is a great guitarist and writes great riffs and stuff and Robert Plant has an amazing and versatile voice so all that checks out and like Bruce Springsteen is a great songwriter and dynamic performer and The E Street Band is just a fucking excellent band so we all get that and Billy Joel is the fucking Piano Man and Queen is four great singer/songwriters who are also great at instruments and ditto The Beatles and The Stones are a bunch of little freaks being weird and most of them are really good at instruments but we mainly like watching them jumping around saying the filthiest shit we've ever heard and that also makes sense. And like David Bowie is some kind of space goblin with a borderline classical voice who can kick ass on like 7 different instruments and ditto Prince.

All of this makes perfect sense.

And then there is Marc Bolan. Who sold more records in the UK than The Beatles. Like he beat The Beatles at their own game. And what exactly did Marc do? Well, he had this really fast vibrato so it always sounded like he was singing his Torah portion. He was 5'5 and always wore muscle shirts under pink satin suits and feathers and had Barbra Streisand's exact hair. He wrote this kind of free associative poetry that is completely open to interpretation and no one actually knows 100% what any single song is about. Like, some of his biggest hits, people are like, that song is about a car. And then other people are like, you're fucking ignorant, that song is about a PHONE. And these people are still arguing. And he's been dead since 1977.

And the rest of his songs are about weird fucking cockney dudes who just confused the shit out of everyone in the East End where everyone knew their names, but not like their actual names, but like the random shit people called them instead of their names because people didn't know who the fuck they were even though they'd been living there since the dawn of time.

And then there were other songs about how Marc Bolan wanted to have sex with you. But these songs were also ALWAYS about cars. And then there were songs where he'd just sing shit like "we're the leopards" over and over and over again and he'd call it "The Leopards Featuring Gardenia and the Mighty Slug" and I cannot stress this enough, there was no Gardenia or Mighty Slug featured on the album, it was just his wife.

And a major part of Marc's wizardry is that he is consistently name-checked in lists of the greatest guitarists of all time. If you go back to his first, I don't know, 7 albums or whatever before like Electric Warrior came out, he was BAD at guitar. So bad that Eric fucking Clapton took pity on him and just straight up showed him how to guitar right. And I'm gonna tangent off to say one thing about this man's personality: he was hella difficult. But like, even after he learned how to guitar real hard, he still wrote songs that had like 3 goddamn chords in them. I'm going through the rolodex in my brain, but he pretty much never wrote a song in a minor key. Life's an Elevator, that one's in a minor key. And then maybe nothing else ever again? He was rocking as hard as is humanly possible with as little as is humanly possible.

Back to the whole Marc was difficult thing: Marc kept pissing everyone in the world off and couldn't keep a band together. Did it matter? NO! His drummers kept mysteriously dying so the answer to who is the drummer in his band, at any point, was A) who is a drummer who is alive? And B) who is a drummer who can tolerate Marc Bolan's personality? And like half of them were named Mickey.

David Bowie tells a good story about meeting Marc Bolan. They were good friends, even though Marc was a giant pain in his ass. I'll let him tell the story because it's just better.

Marc was OBSESSED with Syd Barrett. Fair enough, aren't we all? He used to hang around Pink Floyd's manager's office constantly because of that. If you don't already know, Pink Floyd's manager at the time brought on this very nice woman named June Child to basically look after Syd and then they became lovers, but she was literally an employee of the company. Marc was SO OBSESSED with Syd, he MARRIED JUNE CHILD. He did that.

I've talked a lot here about how he was obsessed with cars, right? Well, he became very rich very fast and bought a fuck ton of old cars. Could he drive? FUCK NO! He was terrified he was going to die in a car crash, that was his greatest fear in life, so he never learned how to drive. And so guess how he died? IN A MOTHERFUCKING CAR CRASH. At 29 years old. Just after quitting cocaine and champagne and starting to get his life back together.

He named his son Rolan Bolan. His songwriting did not get worse on drugs, it just got more lyrically insane, but it was not a far trip. He influenced punks everywhere and is one of the most underrated proto punk artists (example B) and also made a ton of disco at the same goddamn time. So much disco.

He started out doing Lord of the Rings inspired folk and released a boatload of albums like this. He wrote giant fuck off fantasy novels as a teenager called shit like The Krakenmist and Pictures Of Purple People and I think maybe one called The Children of Rarn or maybe that was his poetry collection but he has like 3 different songs called The Children of Rarn anyway. Rarn was the fantasy world he had invented.

Then he went electric and made all of these hard rock/disco/proto punk/boogie albums that we've already covered. And then he died. And he did aaaaaalll of this shit and so much more I couldn't possibly cover or even have knowledge of in a mere 29 years.

So in summary and in summation: a billion albums, an infinite amount of unproduced demos that they keep putting out in compilations to this day, folk, pop, rock, punk, glam, disco, blues, bop, novels, poetry collections, an ironic death, feathers, big hair, AND THE MAN WAS DYSLEXIC AS FUUUUUCK.

I don't know how to describe this man, but Marc Bolan is my hero.

[mercymaddyo]

me: „i h4te men!!! 😡🚫💥🖕“

also me when these mfs: 🧎‍♀️💍💒💖🤭✨🌸

[mercymaddyo]

Tyrannosaurus Rex performing Salamanda Palaganda on French television, 1969. One of the last performances with Steve Peregrin Took before Marc Bolan went electric and brought in Mickey Finn as a replacement on the bongos.

[mercymaddyo]

Guys 😭 ahhhhhhhhhhh

They finally got the recognition that they deserve!!!!

[mercymaddyo]

in every universe it’s marc bolan and mickey finn <33

[mercymaddyo]

Marc! 🫢

[mercymaddyo]

Marc Bolan t-shirts in a 1973 Kays catalog

[mercymaddyo]

Marc Bolan performing "Cosmic Dancer" in 1972

[mercymaddyo]

marc in his room with his record collection + playing the guitar!

[mercymaddyo]

*The Balck brothers speaking French*

James: *Literally melts on the spot and finds it extremely hot*

Remus: Shut the fuck up, I don't speak croissant.

[mercymaddyo]

sirius and/or regulus telling a story: "when i was little..."

remus and james: *braces for the absolute worse*

[mercymaddyo]

OHMIGOSH I love your art style! It’s just framed so perfectly and coloured so well and ahskahdkahjs

I was wondering if you could share some of your steps when you draw? Like sketches, thumbnails, colour blocks, etc.?

Ayoo, thank youu, and of course!

(sorry if these are a bit all over the place. My psd files were a MESS, but here's some of what I could scrounge up)

Thumbnails (complete with my atrocious chicken scratch)...

Colour keys...

Sketches/Line at different stages...

Honestly, my drawing process is all over the place. Always skipping, and going back and forth between steps

But my general pipeline is:

Tiny thumbnails > Make my favorite thumbnail bigger > Draw over top with a better sense of proportion and volume > Colour key based off of sketch or thumbnail > Clean up the line > Colour it > Make more adjustments and add any effects> Do the final crop > Export it 7 million times > Bon appetit ✨

[mercymaddyo]

I'm sorry Jegulus just works a little too well thematically in the way it fits into canon and in astrology parallels to convince me it didn't canonically happen

[mercymaddyo]

[mercymaddyo]

How I download fics and give them covers before sending them to my Kindle.

Hi all, I've been considering making a post about this for a while and now seems as good a time as any. I'm not an expert, and there is more than one way you can do this; I'm just going to show you my process using "Call It What You Want To" by @separatist-apologist as an example. [This will only work on computers FYI.]

Part One — Getting Started

Download Calibre (it's free.) Calibre for PC. Calibre for Mac. They also have it for Linux but idk if that's still relevant.

Follow the program's setup instructions, and then those for wirelessly connecting Calibre with your Kindle account. Alternatively, you can connect your Kindle/e-reader to your computer with a cable and transfer files manually or download the file to your hard drive and share it another way. I highly recommend taking a few extra minutes to set up the wireless sharing as I think it's far more convenient.

Create a folder in which to store fanfiction downloads so that you can be an organized human.

Part Two — The Fanfiction

Find the fic you want to download on ao3 and click it so that you're on the fic's first page.

Above the box of metadata (ratings, warning, tags, etc.) on the far right click the "download" option. When prompted to select a file type, choose "MOBI."

Note: Though ao3 has an "EPUB" option I've noticed a bug that removes the chapter navigation from the fic when downloading the EPUB directly from ao3. If you enjoy the "x minutes left in this chapter/book" feature on your e-reader, you will want to download "MOBI" and we will be converting it later in Calibre.

Save the file to the folder you created.

Launch Calibre if it isn't already running.

In Calibre, click "add books" on the toolbar at the top of the screen.

Navigate to the folder you saved the fic in, select the fic, then click "open." Calibre will import the MOBI file to your library.

Now as you can see, "Call It What You Want To" already has a cover when we imported it to the library. That is because the cover image is embedded in the fic on the archive. Some fics will already have covers embedded such as this one.

Calibre is not a genius. If there are multiple images in the fic it will usually take the first one and default it to the cover. In the next section, I will go over how to add/change the cover of a fic in Calibre and how I like to create them.

Note: Even if the fic doesn't have embedded images, covers may have been made by readers and linked to the fic either in the notes or related works sections so it's worth checking if a cover already exists. If a fic is popular enough, a Google search of the fic's title + "cover" or "cover art" will show you if there have been covers already created for it.

Part Three — Making The Cover (I use Canva)

On the Canva homepage click "create a design" then select the "custom size" option. Canva does have a book cover template but I've found that it's awkwardly tall compared to the default size for Kindle books so I make my own.

I set the dimensions of the design to be 1024 pixels wide, and 1600 pixels tall, then click "create new design."

This is where you can get creative, make whatever you want. These basic steps are shown in a gif at the bottom of the section:

One: Choose a background image (you'll want to make sure it's a high enough quality that it won't be pixelated.) I used an image I had already uploaded into Canva, but you can use whatever you would like.

Two: On the sidebar, select "elements" and then "rectangle."

Three: Make sure the rectangle covers the whole design, then change the color. I like using the colors from the photo that Canva suggests and then making them a darker shade. Once you have the color that you want, reduce the transparency of the rectangle to anywhere between 40-50%. (This step ensures that the text we put on top of the image is easily legible, play around with it a bit.)

Four: On the sidebar, select "text" and then "add a text box." Then type in the author's username and change the font, the color, and the size until you like it. Repeat the same steps for the fic's title. I like to center the title on the page and put the author toward the bottom but that's just my preference.

Once your cover looks the way you want it to, click "share" at the top right and follow the steps to download the file as a PNG. I usually just save the image to my desktop so I can grab it easily once I'm in Calibre.

Part Four — Adding the Cover in Calibre

In your Calibre library, hover over the fic and right-click. Then hover over "edit metadata" and click "edit metadata individually."

On the "edit metadata" screen, find the section that says "change cover" and click "browse."

When the file upload dialog box appears, navigate to the PNG you just saved from Canva, select it, and click "open." This will add your cover to the fic. You can use these same steps to add any cover image that you've saved to your computer.

Make sure to click "ok" at the bottom of the screen to save your new cover and navigate back to the library page.

Part Five — Converting to EPUB

In your Calibre library, select the fic and then click "convert books" on the toolbar. At the top right of the converting screen, set the "output format" to "EPUB."

Now, the following steps are unnecessary little things I do to make my reading experience more seamless.

Click "Look & Feel" on the left sidebar. Under the "fonts" tab, I embed the "Georgia" font family. I do this because I prefer reading in Georgia which is not a default option on my PaperWhite*. I have my Calibre conversion settings in place to do this automatically. You can embed any font that you have on your computer.

*It might just be me, but when opening a downloaded fic (following the methods in this post) for the first time on my Kindle the font is always weird. The trick to fix it is to go and change the font from whatever is selected (Baskerville in my case) to "publisher's font" and then I've found that switching it back to "Baskerville" on the font selection screen activates the embedded Georgia... even though it will say that it's Baskerville? Idk why this is, I just wanted to let you know how I fix it.

Calibre defaults to a justified text alignment unless you change the default settings. This appears as "original" in the alignment options. The random too-large spaces between words of a justified alignment give me the ick so to make everything left aligned, I stay on the "look & feel" page but move to the "text" tab where I can change the alignment.

Staying on "look & feel," move to the "layout" tab. To ensure even paragraph spacing regardless of how it appeared on the archive, I select both the "remove spaces between paragraphs" and "insert blank line between paragraphs" options.

On this page, you can also change the indent size of the first line of every paragraph (highlighted pink,) and the size of the blank lines Calibre will insert between paragraphs upon conversion (highlighted green.) I set the indent to 0.0 and leave the line size 0.5 which is the default.

The last thing I do is go to "EPUB output" on the left sidebar and check the box labeled "insert inline table of contents." This just means that Calibre will add a table of contents to the beginning of the EPUB. (By default it puts the TOC at the end which I don't like.)

When everything is set as you'd like it, click "ok" on the bottom right and Calibre will convert the MOBI file you downloaded from ao3 to an EPUB containing the settings we just changed. Both file types will appear in your library when you click on the fic and scroll within the right-side window. I usually delete the MOBI format after I have the EPUB because I don't need it any longer.

And you've done it! Now all you have to do is either right-click and share it to your Kindle, or you can "save to disk" and download the EPUB file to transfer to your e-reader by a method of your choosing.

I hope someone finds this marginally helpful. In truth, I was just bored so I made this post but in light of the recent DDoS attacks against ao3, I think everyone should look into downloading their favorites so that you're never left out in the cold again.

Happy fanfic downloading <3