#it was like an antique even then

[winter-seance]

[dailyloopdeloop]

DAY 94: antiquing

[marzipanandminutiae]

me: I've made many garments for myself! cutting and fitting and stitching singlehandedly!

a potential employer: can you finish these seams by machine?

me: I have never sewed anything ever in mine entire Life

[wigglebox]

Suptober - Day 3 || Inspired [x]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Are those little dolls made to look like 3zun as animals in the most recent comic? I need to know how/when Nie Mingjue got those. Are they gifts from Lan Xichen or Nie Huaisang? Did Jin Guangyao sew them himself and stuff them full of evil talismans in case the song didn't work? So many possibilities.

The 3zun dolls were a self-indulgent reference to this (previously abandoned) doodle! As for who made them in universe? I'll leave it up for interpretation B*)

[nooomagnus]

the smut-writing struggle is 20% repeated pronouns, 30% choreography, and 50% needing more words to describe a human body but then you try to look up synonyms and this happens:

“she let her kisses grow openmouthed across the gloopy planes of her abdomen”

“the quagginess of her breasts”

"her neck was terribly boggy"

(supple. supple get in the car we are LEAVING)

[leroibobo]

a carved mother-of-pearl quran box and matching quran depicting al-aqsa mosque from bethlehem, palestine, dating to the 1960s.

mother-of-pearl carving is a traditional craft in bethlehem; said to have been brought over by franciscan monks from italy in the 15th century. the tradition is still going strong today.

[sirenemale]

Okay I'm desperately trying to find examples of horror film artbooks, or ANY concept art for older low budget horror films. I'm not finding much at all, which does track bc of the nature of these productions but they still would have had production art, that art has to be somewhere. SO if anyone has book recs or blog posts or anything pleaseeee drop them. Rn the best I have is the mars attacks artbook, the return of the living dead art book and some really shoddy production art for house of 1000 corpses I got off a prop site. Long shot too but any kind of concept work for John Water's films would go crazy as well, so far I've only got tangential stuff like the scrapped designs for the Pork stageplay with Divine and the paper doll book that Van smith illustrated (costume designer and stylist for his films and for Divine).

[autisticaradiamegido]

day 177

i used to collect music boxes

i should get back into that

[pearl-kite]

So I came to the realization today that I am not going to get anymore work on this trunk done this year. I still need to finish stripping the paper inside and redoing that, but it's just. Not happening until spring. With that realization, I decided it's time to finally bring it back inside, put all the junk on my floor that used to be in it back in it, and guys

It looks good.

This is going to be a summary post of the project, so let's go back and remember what I started with. Back in, like, 2015 or something, I bought this dome-top steamer trunk at a missionary shop for $65

Yeah. Rough. But underneath that paint it was sturdy, and the only thing missing was the lock and the right-side hasp. While I lived overseas this sat in my parents' house, and when I got back I kept meaning to do something while storing all of my yarn and cat food in it. When I finally got my own space (almost a year ago now!) with my own garage, I finally decided: it was time.

Heads up, this is a long post under the cut.

Did a lot of research online, grew to hate how generative AI has even permeated niche topics like how to refinish a vintage steamer trunk, WHY is there generative AI for that, PLEASE stop, went to Lowe's and bought some supplies (I used Citristrip for the paint stripping, it worked VERY easily), and started stripping that hideous brown* away.

Almost instantly I could tell how good it could be. The tin looked amazing, and for most of the stripping process I wondered why on earth someone would cover it with any color. It took multiple layers of stripping, and I got better at it over time.

I did also start to see some oxidation issues with the tin that made the purpose behind the paint job a little more understandable.

One side was particularly bad, but I will never forgive the decision to paint the entire thing one single color.

At first, the flat metal seemed okay, but the longer I worked on stripping, the longer it was exposed to air, the rustier it started to get. I had already planned on coating it, and I ended up getting some Rust-Oleum Rust Reformer spray paint. Instead of removing the rust, it bonds to the oxide and stops the process from continuing. It also happens to leave it a nice matte black that didn't need additional painting. I taped everything off, then sprayed.

Then it was time for the tin. I looked for ideas, and the best one I found was Rub'n'Buff. It's not so much a paint as a pigmented wax, with the idea that you can buff it to a higher shine. As I was stripping paint, I found a spot under one of the slats that the painter missed, and the original tin had been painted a gold color, so I used that to decide on color. I decided on Grecian gold, though I used the antique gold as a kind of base to make sure the Grecian stretched far enough.

I originally started applying it with some craft foam brushes, but they didn't really want to work for me, so I ended up buying a pack of makeup sponges, the little disposable wedge ones, and the finer texture worked much better. I had to trim them down pretty frequently, because the wax would build up and stop applying as nicely, but there were more than enough in the pack to finish the job.

The coverage is amazing for this stuff. This side was the worst of them, and one layer of the stuff was almost perfect. The Grecian gold was almost a bit runnier, though, and ended up needing a second layer to cover some patches that were almost too thin, thus the other underneath.

This tin is so pretty though. I still kind of regret that it needed it; the places that weren't oxidized were so bright in a way that the Rub'n'Buff had no hope of emulating. There are some places you can still buy the embossed tin for rehabing trunks like this, but I haven't found one with a pattern quite like this, and this one is so much nicer than the ones I've seen. I'm very glad that it was all intact except for where the lock goes.

After the tin came the slats. I knew from sites like Brettun's Village that I wanted to use tung oil, so I had bought what I thought was tung oil. Turns out Minwax gets to call their tung oil finish that even though there's. No... tung oil. in it. ? So uh, if you want actual tung oil, do NOT listen to Minwax, they're lying, I don't understand why it's allowed. It still looks nice enough, but quite annoying.

Speaking of Brettun's Village, they not only do their own restorations AND provide a guide, they have a very extensive supply of recently furbished and original parts. They happened to have a nearly identical hasp to the one that was missing (so nearly identical I only noticed after my dad pointed it out) and an old lock also similar to my original, made in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

The next step was to tackle the inside. Instead of just adding more paper on top (like the last people did, so now there are two layers, one of which hides some original stickers ;3;), I decided to try to scrape that out, and I've found some structural issues that the metal and slats outside have held together and kept hidden.

The top split in the wood is an actual crack on the front that needs fixing. The middle split is just the gap between the planks. The bottom is also a crack, but not as extensive as the top one.

So the final steps, when I get the motivation again come spring, is to finish getting as much of the paper off as I can. Then my dad is going to help me use some bondo to hold the cracks, and I'll find a removable wallpaper I like. Then I can sort out what I'm going to do with the lock. That top split runs right through where the lock should go - you can see some of the wood filler we already put in from where the original was ripped out - so we can't try to put anything there or it'll crack worse.

But I brought it in today!

It looks so good, I glance over and get to feel so satisfied; I did that.

*I don't like to call any color hideous, because a lot of the time it really depends on the context, and it's an okay brown. But for THIS? It was probably the worst brown they could have picked. Mixed with the orange of the paint stripper it looked like I was scraping diarrhea.

[rukafais]

Reading pulp fantasy and understanding how it shaped the fantasy genre is extremely fascinating because its like "oh, that's why every Strong Female Character heroine of the 80s-90s fantasy boom was Like That, huh"

[creekbed-burial]

[shalom-iamcominghome]

My first chanukiah! This was in my shul's small judaica for sale collection, and I think it's vintage. I was told many of the objects have been in the display cabinets since the 1960s, and since I can find no evidence of this chanukiah online, I'm inclined to believe it. If so, this is older than my dad is!

[brittlebutch]

the evolution of the operator symbol over the course of the series is so endlessly fascinating to me, because like. Alex came up with the symbol and only ever really used it on his hypergraphia papers, which we don't really see him do much (if at all) after season one

but Brian,, Brian uses that symbol constantly. It's basically a signature by the end of the series - he leaves it on Tim's medical records, and on the back of Alex's photo of Amy, and on the note he left for Jay about Benedict Hall - he even uses it in his final video to unveil his name - it's self-referential, but he doesn't ever really seem to use it to denote The Operator the way Alex did?

Like, to me it really does seem like he basically appropriated it. "This is the symbol you created for the thing that was hunting you, but now I'm the thing that's hunting you" - like, hh fuck dude, Looking At You

[hood-ex]

Dick: "I'm not going to pretend to be the best motorcyclist in this race."

Also Dick: wins against aliens, androids, and gods in the greatest and deadliest motorcycle race in the cosmos.

[gingermintpepper]

Hi!! I don't know if you remember me, but I'm the person you explained the Castalia thing to a few days ago. I've been following you for a while now, but I just managed to go through your blog well and proper, and I'm here to express both my gratitude for the amount of info and links you've shared (I did NOT know about the hepatoscopy and haruspicy, and I'm about to go down a lengthy rabbit hole) and my horror at once again being given a new hyperfixation (I didn't imagine wanting to read about liver-divination help).

Also, also, are you the author of Exeunt Phoebus Apollo on AO3 because that was the fic that sent me on this greek mythology spree, and it's so good I got obsessed with Apollo, and he's everywhere around me now. Thank you for writing it!

AAAAAA THIS IS SO SWEET?? THANK YOU!! I do remember you and hey man, I'm always happy to help <33

I'm so glad to recruit someone else to my hepatoscopy group because it is a long and storied tradition with many many different types of study and schools of thought dating all the way back to the Sumerians! It's an extremely underrated bit of study when it comes to sketching portraits of divination and prophecy when it comes to adaptations of imaginings of greek myth works - similar to bird augury (which was such a widespread skill that most people had some level of understanding of the basics of what the omens of common birds meant the way people now can look at the clouds over head and know if it'll rain and when approximately that rain'll happen).

It's a great and common misunderstanding that things like prophecy and magic were these fantastic elements that had no tangible features to their practices and while there's nothing wrong with interpreting things as more fantastical for the sake of coolness or aesthetic, I personally think these elements are interesting enough to be worth looking into and portraying!

Also yes, I did write Exeunt 😳I'm very very honoured that you enjoyed my work so much and I'm even more grateful that it could let you see the Apollo in everything 💖 Thank you for reading it!!