#all you non thimble people are insane

[terrorbirb]

I lost my thimble :000000000000

[the-consortium]

Excuse Me? Mr. Saqqura? I have a question. Do you feed Tnzettchian daemons your summon that are more bird like soul birdseed?

The light in Saqqara's part of the old Eldar palace seems even slower and lazier than in the other towers and halls. He has made himself at home in a spire a little way off, towering high above the arboretum. A thin, bone-bleached pinnacle, it sways gently in the non-wind of the old world like a blade of stone grass. Far on the horizon, one of the frequent dust storms clenches its fist and slowly strives up the edge of the sky. Over the ground-level landing bays, the heavy plasteel gates grind shut.

With sparing movements, the Word Bearer arranges a tea set. Pours some mint syrup into two small cups that would not be large even in human hands, but are no more than a thimble for an Astartes.

He pushes aside a couple of pages with notes that are obviously not written by him, but are concept drawings for an improved Narthecium that Arrian is working on with Tzimiskes.

The leaves he puts into the cups give off a spicy, slightly disconcerting smell. Whatever the plants are, this is no ordinary tea. He pours the mixture from a pot decorated with intricate silver ornaments that are very disturbing at second glance. Turns over a small hourglass and then sits down again cross-legged.

He makes a welcoming gesture with his hand and then pats a particularly large bottle that is standing on a little bench next to him.

"Splinters of Tzeentch live very well here with the Consortium. In, well, nature, if you want to put it that way … in the wild? … they feed on confusion, convoluted plots and madness, of course. But here on Urum, dozens of the galaxy's greatest medical geniuses have come together and are constantly busy trying to be better than their brothers and cousins. They team up, fall out, try to set traps for each other, write treatises so complex that most people go insane trying to read them. The Chief Apothecary is very insistent that his students regularly publish their work, even if it's next to impossible to get any medical journals in the Eye. He calls it an old Terran academic tradition. So I'm more concerned with making sure my slivers of Tzeentch don't get too fat than getting them food. So, to get back to the question - no, I don't need bird food. Feeding them is not a problem at all. There are other difficulties, though. I just had to stop Herik the other day from taking one of the more bird-like demons and doing gods knows what with it. Emperor's Children are weird sometimes and Herik's obsession with birds is disturbing."

The last of the sand has run through the hourglass and Saqqara reaches for the two small mugs. "Tea?"

[badassindistress]

Floofy Shirt Sew-along - Step 0: Getting Started

I’m thinking we’ll start properly in August to give people the time to find fabric. For now we’ll do some measurements so we know how much fabric we need and get the preliminaries out of the way.

What you are definitely going to need:

Fabric

Thread

Needles

Fabric scissors

Pins

A measuring tape

3 buttons for the cuffs and the neck (or one button and cufflinks)

A ruler or stick you can use to draw the 1cm seam allowances

 What will make this project a lot easier:

Tailor’s chalk or other method to mark lines on your fabric

An iron and ironing board  - I would say this is a necessity but not everyone has one and you can make a shirt without, it will just be harder and won’t look as good.

A thimble - in the long run it will make you sew quicker and be better for your hands

A sewing machine (I am intending to handsew this because not everyone has a sewing machine, but if you do have access to one and want to be done quickly, do the long seams on a sewing machine and glory in the speed of modern technology)

A cutting mat, quilting ruler and rotary cutter – This thing is all squares and triangles and quilters have got squares and triangles figured out

If you’re used to inches, keep a converter handy because my brain is used to centimeters

How much fabric do I need?

If you’re going full period accuracy, you’re going to need about 240cm of fabric (if it’s 150cm wide), this is supposed to make a shirt long enough to use as underwear. If period accuracy is not your game (or thrift takes precedence, which is very period indeed), measure  the full length (back and front) from a tshirt and get something about 20 cms longer so it can properly be tucked into your waistband. For me, 160x150 will probably do the trick (for reference, I’m 1.72m)

Necessary measurements:

Desired full length of the shirt, 240cm if you want to go full floof

Neck circumference = measuring tape goes around the neck

Wrist width = measuring tape goes around the wrist

You don’t need to adapt the other pieces of this pattern to your own sizes, it’s basically one size is gloriously large on all (if your build is very large to begin with, you might want to add about 10cm more width to get the desired blousy effect, but if you’re slight you don’t need to make it smaller.

For the type of fabric I’d recommend cotton or linen for the historic feeling, but go with whatever brings you joy and isn’t stretchy. It needs to be light enough you can gather it up without it getting bulky and not terribly prone to fraying so you won’t go insane while sewing. Silk isn’t particularly historically accurate, but it would be amazing, so. Go with what is available and sparks joy. (Thin sheets or table cloths can definitely be used for this). Same with colours. I’m going for black, and white is perfect if you want to go swim in a pond á la Darcy, but there’s no rules that says it can’t be pink and flower infested.

tl:dr – procure 160-240x150cm of non-stretchy fabric of a lightness and colour that you would like to wear. Wash it, iron it and congratulate yourself on being super productive.

[dangermousie]

Sooooo, it looks they did the foot washing scene from the novel. Unfortunately minus geography-changing sex and slit throats and suicide attempts but it’s cdrama not Game of Thrones so...

Heh.

Because I am pretty annoyed at the last ten or so eps of Ever Night 2, I was thinking - why don’t dramas play to their strengths? Like - do they not realize what they are?

In this case, romance.

No, dramas don’t need to fixate on romance to be good or even to appeal to me. My favorite cdrama of all time is the Story of Minglan, and the romance doesn’t get going in any meaningful sense until 30+ eps in. I love Nirvana in Fire and romance in there can fit into a thimble. But that is because there are other things to interest me (or anyone else) - family relations, interesting politics, revenge, etc. 

There is nothing wrong dedicating minor time to romance if the drama is about something else but in something like EN2, there isn’t much else magnetic stuff there. The romance in the first twenty or so eps was amazing and hit all my kinks and if the previews for later on are correct, is going to hit all my kinks later on again. But much as I enjoy it, there isn’t much else there this season despite their attempts to have the apocalypse and continent-changing war and mysticism and whatever. Most of the actors involved in those arcs aren’t very interesting and the script doesn’t really do much to make them interesting to cover the lack of acting amazingness. (Frankly, some of the actors are just fine but the script doesn’t do them favors anyway.) I have to care about these people and to find them interesting to watch their battles and schemes but I don’t. It’s like they took the one part of s1 that I always skimmed - the west shrine stuff - and expanded it to cover the bulk of eps from ep 20 on.

I can assure you, nobody (or very few people) are watching the second season for anything but Ning Que x Sang Sang. So just focus on romance, which you do really well! (And which you had so much of that anyone not liking romance probably bailed by now.)

Yet they don’t. It makes me think of General and I, the lifeblood of which was epic, sexy as hell romance between the leads and they spent the bulk of their running time on it, only to engineer an insane twenty-ep separation which basically killed the momentum dead. I ffed through those eps like nobody’s business and I am pretty sure I was not alone.

Same thing here.

Yes, I realize they are separated in the novel.

However:

1. Apparently they are not following the novel closely this season anyway, not like last. So modify it further to make the separation shorter or less absolute or w/e.

2. Shorten the fucking war! Honestly, I love period war dramas. I love period war politics. Three Kingdoms 2010 is on my fave cdrama list and it’s 100 eps of that with very few brief forays into romance. BUT!!! They do not have the budget or the choreography for amazing war scenes. They just don’t. Frankly, even if they did, because so many battles are such high power wuxia, it would become a little repetitive anyway - waves of force and bolts of dirt are only that exciting. Nor can they make their politics interesting or cast actors who can carry off those discussions (Chen Jianbin as Cao Cao in TK2010 made me watch him strategize and destroy like it was crack.) Basically, none of those battles need to be as much or as long. That way we can get to the good shippy stuff sooner. PS I didn’t love NQ in the Wilderness without Sang Sang arc in s1 but it was miles more entertaining than this, no idea what happened.

3. Giving characters room to breathe would both make them more interesting and relatable and allow us shippiness. That doesn’t even have to do with romance per se. Where are Mrs Zeng, Chao Bro’s widow wife,  lady general blah blah blah. When you remove all attachments and relationships, the characters that are left become less interesting. Hell, I’d settle for Long Qing x Flower Fanatic at this rate! It’s not just romance obviously - I wanted to see Sang Sang’s mom’s reaction to her seeming death. I wanted to see Yan Prince’s reaction to his father’s assassination. I wanted something! And that brings me to NQ x SS because even if they are not together, they could show him missing her or thinking about her distraught if they let him have a quiet moment to be a person instead of Mr. Plot. (There is no moderation btw - he spent four eps wandering around Middle Earth Tang yelling out her name and collapsing, and now he’s spent 8 eps being plot plot plot with small breaks and both the former and the latter went on for too long and should have been mixed somehow.) Hell, maybe do like the book and allow them to hear each other’s thoughts and do it at this junction.

4. I’d probably be more OK with this if this was a 60 ep season like the first 1 and I knew that after a few more rough eps we’d get eps and eps of NQ trying to win over Sang Sang-as-Haoran and then traveling and fighting whatever else together, but this season is 43 eps and there is no way. Best case scenario, we get the ending where they reunite and are happy (because there is zero chance this baby gets third season so they better not do an open ending) which is fine, but dammit, 43 eps isn’t much, why did they have to waste god knows how many on boring non-shippy stuff. 

5. Anyway, whatever, bring back my damn ship!