#it'd be nice to have cheaper options

[wereh0gz]

Wdym the switch 2 got announced

[soup-mother]

actually a topic I'd genuinely LOVE to see people discuss is how countries like thailand exist to so many people as cheap medical destinations (cheap to tourists not to locals). like idk it's a very touchy subject especially for trans ppl but the way "oh I'll just go to thailand to get bottom surgery" exists in so many people's minds and it's like.... that's a benefit of imperialism again isn't it? but because we're a marginalised community within our own rich countries it's "less important" or "more necessary".

like i made a post about a similar thing ages ago and a lot of the comments were sorta acting like trans medical tourism is somehow "less" privileged medical tourism than cis ppl? like how do you think it feels being trans in one of those countries? that exist to us as "cheaper options"? do you think it's "cheap" for people there? do you know what wages are like? especially for trans ppl?

idk it's just holy fuck, being trans doesn't make us immune to benefiting from imperialism and being able to leverage valuable currencies even if it feels like we "deserve" it more. idk i don't think i have like a grand thesis to make here and if you interpret this as "trans people getting bottom surgery is imperialist" i think you should go take a 50m dive into an empty pool, but like...yknow. It'd be nice to be able to talk about? not everyone lives in rich privileged countries and like it or not those of us that do still often carry incredibly touristy imperialist ideas of the countries we rely on for surgeries.

[reversemoon255]

BoonBoom Killer Robo

I wanna say this may be the last release from BoonBoomger? But they also designed a Killer version of BoonBoom Classic that definitely feels like it's supposed to be a toy. Even though we've hit the final arc of the show, it'd be cool if we got one or two new Killer Versions and they released Killer Classic along with those as a set. I think it's possible since they revealed the Japanese government was developing more BBKRs. I'm not expecting a Killer Leo or anything (though that would be cool), but maybe Dozer and Safari for more weapon options. Maybe a new head. Who know.

This is essentially the same as standard BoonBoom Robo. There are a few sculpted differences, like the tires and head on Trailer, Off-Road's drill, Wagon's fingers. The Police remold (which did not come with this set; it was a movie ticket preorder bonus) has quite a few remolded parts, like Itacha on the lightbar, an entire new front cab, and a new spike trap that accommodates the sticker.

The front of Trailer is also a new piece, clipping on so you can also attach it to BoonBoom Robo. That paint is also well utilized, really being used to bring out the differences between the two. However...

While the paint is well utilized, this is another instance of a premium piece having less paint. Moreover, it's basically all orange, so there're also less colors. There're also strange color instances because of the plastic, like the split colors on the face or the arms that do distract.

There's also the BoonBoom Danger. It's a nice remold, but it only has, like, two car sounds. It's mostly just plays sound clips from the villains if you keep pressing the button. They come in the same order every time, and there are a lot of them, but if there was a version that was $10 cheaper and didn't come with this, I would have taken it.

Overall, a fun remold, but definitely not essential.

[whoslaurapalmer]

so this week's overall mission is Getting Bills In My Name, and my cousin's wife and my aunt and i went to comcast on friday to ask about getting my mom's plan in my name or starting a new account (first of all we have tv+internet through comcast, and verizon for cell phones -- the only reason i can figure for this is because we've been a comcast customer since before we had cell phones, but then we had the landline since before we had the internet, idk it was the late 90s, okay.), and the woman at comcast said that my mom's plan isn't actually something they offer anymore and is a great deal, so i could be grandfathered in to it, which wasn't what i was expecting bc i'd priced cheaper plans online (including with the phone) but i was like. okay. this woman is an employee and of course, knows comcast better than i do. and they don't even offer this specific plan anymore but i could still get it! so my brother and i go back this morning to comcast with the account switching paperwork but i also came With Questions. bc i have a limited income and i would like it to cost less than it current does, bc that's a lot!! and when i did price plans online!! the options were cheaper!! and better suited to me as one person!! but the woman at comcast said that there really was no cheaper plan and also that phones were not bundled and a separate cost? and i was like. 1) i am not a comcast employee. there are things i do not know. 2) however, it says something different online, but i don't want to argue with this woman, bc she's nice but also kind of intimidating and doesn't sound like she's actually willing to work with me on the best price and what's right for me, despite me leading with 'i'm on a limited income.' 4) there may be things i have to make concessions on going forward, in the name of finances, which i hate, and she said i could take out cable, but i really do like cable. it's a whole thing. i shouldn't have to compromise. i don't know. 5) these are decisions i have to make myself now!! no one can make them for me!! which is nice but also incredibly stressful!! i don't want to make the wrong decision, but i also want to stand firm if i think there might be a better option, and i also don't want people to just tell me what to do!! 6) i should have asked more specific questions, probably. but i was very thrown in the moment, despite preparing. i am working so hard, okay. 7) MAYBE SHE SHOULD'VE ASKED HER OWN QUESTIONS, THOUGH, SEEING MY CONCERN!!

also overwhelmingly it'd be easier to make decisions if THE GOVERNMENT WOULD PROCESS MY APPLICATION AND GIVE ME MY DECEMBER MONEY

so i told her i'd have to think about it. i might just call comcast right out instead and see what they tell me. in any event, my brother and i had a great time looking at all the display phones and poking them while we were waiting!! we got to see the touchscreen flip phones!!!

my brother: whoa. me: i think they're so neat, but they're so expensive. but, the flipping...... my brother: don't they test them for like, one thousand flips or something? me: yeah, but like, i just KNOW i'd fidget with it. i KNOW i would. my brother: ......yeah, you would. me: and so i'm convinced i'd break it somehow. but it is neat. my brother: it is.

[froggiewrites]

Honestly, I think one of my favorite outfits Sanji has is the Gentlecook tshirt. I have two theories for it. Either he saw it and was like “Hell yeah that is soooo me” OR it was a gift from one of the strawhats. Idk which one it would be tho. I wanna cosplay Sanji and that outfit is such a nice cheaper option plus it would make a nice shirt to sleep in. :)

Oh my god that's also my favorite Sanji outfit!! I love the idea of him seeing it and going "omg...its made for me..." but I could also absolutely see it being a gift from Nami in an attempt to get him to wear something other than 3 piece suits and Hawaiian shirts. I don't think Luffy would give gifts that normal and I think Zoro would rather die than admit he liked Sanji enough that he thought of him when he saw it. Usopp is also an option but I don't think Mr. Shirtless-With-Overalls would pick a normal shirt either.

And yeah that seems like it'd be a really good option! Not too expensive and can still fit in a regular wardrobe 😊

[rametarin]

If I owned an electric vehicle company..

What I'd prioritize is the niche of a reliable shitbox. Deliberately.

That fucking monster vehicle would not be pretty, by design. It'd be made to survive absolute torture, abuse and neglect but still keep tickin'. Like a Toyota Hillux, but pure electric.

Hack it? Motherfucker you can't even interface with it. It'd be ANALOG electronic, outside a few independent electronic components with digital readers that don't connect to a grand computer; you gotta interface with them shits and the data is one way only. And them shits would be insulated to be hardened against EMP, because it's my company and I said so, fuck you. This vehicle is dumber than an insect and I want it that way. No brain in its head, no one with a penchant for mind controlling machines that think to make it betray you or snitch.

And this machine would be designed to sit there just surviving like a family golem. It's an electric vehicle. Compared to an ICE, it has few parts, and what you can't fix with home equipment, you'd just have to buy to replace parts. But it'd be designed so you could fix the shit that isn't directly related to the motor. Or not have shit that can break to begin with.

Naturally, the electronic portions would be hardened against EMP. One way, or another.

Ideally, it'd be a future where they learn how to make proper, functioning electric motors out of garden variety substances like iron ore and alloys, without the necessity of rare earths either for the motor or the batteries. So, every piece that makes the thing move would be sourced from the home country. Why? Because I feel it's important to be able to make things even if a butthurt neighbor on the world stage cuts off your access to their supply of resources. And while it may not be as cheap as otherwise, having a sustainable and accessible supply that won't quit no matter the world economy is important.

The body would be designed to be replacable and abuseable. Maybe some sort of shell that stops UV, but also, carbon fiber beneath; something that'd survive being submerged in floodwaters and the sea for decades and just need a replacement motor and batteries to be okay again. I'd want the thing incapable of corroding in the rain, or even the sea. Because sometimes, shit happens. Your car floods. It'd be nice to be able to rescue it and know you still have a car, if you want. But also, it's a spartan minimalist monster, so you can also just buy a new one for reasonably cheap.

It's electric, not ICE, so ventilation isn't as big an issue with a good heat sink; that means sealing it against moisture and flooding would be possible. That'd mean it could be in its own internal atmosphere and be hunky dory without exposure to things like rain and being flooded. So, surviving sinking in fresh or salt water would really be no issue.

And... battery technology being what it is, it's impossible to say what it'd be capable of. But ideally, I want solid state batteries that have nigh infinite recharge without dendrites or breakdown. But, that may never happen.

I'll settle for batteries that aren't rare earth but still have capacity and range in the ballpark of rare earth batteries. Ones that should be cheaper and easier to cycle in and out because they'd be made of common materials. But, really, I have no control over physics and chemistry, and realistically, the batteries wouldn't be my field. So.. Kinda limited in options for those.

[quillheel]

@playedbetter // harry & jean!

Jean was beginning to remember how much he hated office parties. There were only two options in Precinct 41.

One. less of an party, more of a drink until most couldn't stand, which of course would loop back around until it became one again. Rarely, if ever, prompted from celebration, but rather out of shared misery. No one endured the kind of shit they saw on the regular without getting a little fucked up, and with a budget as small as theirs, alcohol was cheaper than medication. Murders, assaults, drugs. All of it bled them out until the evening when they were relinquished from the dutiful, and allowed to be the wounded. A thousand years ago, Jean was half certain that Harry by sheer force of presence spearheaded it; both in creating misery, and alleviating his own. Some of the time, most of the time, Jean would get dragged under with him. Eternally the sinking ship. Eternally anchored to the bottom. ( Eternally stupid enough to have anchored himself there... )

Two. What they were enduring now. He felt like a fucking toddler. Always the same things; families, financials, work ━ always the soft parts of work, the squishy parts, the parts you can bring home to your wife and tell her how your day went without flinching, without bruises, whenever you had the heart to bother cutting the fat at all. It never changed, with alcohol rarely strong enough to provoke anything interesting, and food only lasting long enough to distract you. The people he knew the terrible reality of, melted down for the sake of politeness, worse than interesting misery, worse than volume and vivaciousness and venom, because fuck ━ it was boring. nerve was better than nothing, but all he got was smooth questions of 'how are you' 'i hope you're doing well' 'how is work'

Jean would take burning himself at the stake if the writhing gave him something to do.

Maybe that's why he comes outside in the first place. Harry's silhouette a familiar one through the glass and against the darkening sky as evening falls into a more honest night. Maybe that's why he chooses him for company, despite that thousand years of dragging, or perhaps because of it. ━ was he refuge, familiar and perhaps disjointed but more sincere than apathy, or was he the stake he was burning at? Skin peeling, heat endless, something to destroy himself on. like a favor returned in a thousand little moments he'd never truly remember, he's sure, he's come to terms with.

Maybe he hasn't. The bitterness has already set, like a poison inside of him. But it's better than disinterest, better than malaise.

For a moment, as he steps out into the cooler air and the door squealing on its hinges for a half second before being lost entirely in the sound, he mistakes the pen for a cigarette. He realizes his mistake a second later, but that bitterness twists in him like a spasming organ, like if it had been that Jean had been right ━ nothing was different, nothing changed, it was just the same shit. Too old to grow out of it. Too old to go back.

But it wasn't, he reminds himself as he stations a little ways away from Harry ━ a few feet between them, maybe, a small but healthy distance that felt broader by sheer virtue of who Jean was at all, always seeming more fickle and more terrible than he was, so much bite that his teeth were all you'd see some days, nothing else. ━ it wasn't, as he folds a terrible bite waiting to snap away, he hasn't done anything wrong, Vicquemare. He's innocent. He's innocent. ( a burned part of him asks for how long. He doesn't have an answer. He doesn't know if he wants one. )

Strong arms brace him forward on the railing, leaning over, wearing a nice white dress-shirt he'd gone through the effort to iron that hugged his shoulders, his chest, along the muscle in his sides, down the folded up sleeves ; and perhaps he does study the traffic, studies how easy it'd be to throw Harry's balance over, for just a moment ━ before it's over, and he doesn't twitch.

" Why are you asking me? You could be a fucking scholar about it, 'the intricacies of the Revacholian jamboree and getting dead drunk', if you wanted to be. " he mumbles, snipping. his voice is rough, and irritated, and low. It always sounds like that. Like he's had a stick up his ass for 10 years now, and will for another 10. ━ but not a trap waiting to spring. Not yet. Jean was opportunistic, but he...

he tried not to be cruel. he relents.

" No, just the shitty ones, " he sighs, roughly scrubbing a hand across his face as though trying to work away 20 years of exhaustion. " McLaine got them playing fucking musical chairs, whatever it's called. It's like a kindergarten in there. "

Jean considers, briefly, the idea of taking the opportunity in the open air to smoke, but he remembers the bite marks riddling the pen, and decides against it. he might be bitter, and sarcastic, and at times venomous, but he wasn't about to torture Harry. He didn't have it in him, be it the heart or the nerve. He winds up tapping his fingers along the metal railing, glancing over at Harry, almost expectantly, depending on how you looked at it.

" That why you're out here instead of in there? I thought that'd be your scene. " he inquires, commenting without seeking to rip him apart so much as idle boredom prompting curiosity, perhaps even common ground. If nothing else, Harry was usually interesting to talk to.

[illmoraineakoi]

Hollow Knight Plush Stuff

So, I decided I'm going to give this a shot, at least until I hit some sort of big snag that makes the end result not worth the effort.

Read More because this post got loooong

As per my last post trying to resist doing this, I've begun by trying to figure out some basic measurements for Hollow. The objective is to be as sprite accurate as possible, which I don't really foresee as being an issue, given the simple design.

And doing the measurements has really put into perspective on how utterly insane this venture might be.

The plan is that the plush will be 7 1/2 feet tall, from feet (if you could call those points 'feet') to the dip between their horns. I've determined this to be a really good body pillow/huggable buddy scale. In addition, if I ever develop a pattern for Ghost with this scale, they'll be 20 inches tall (without horns) and that's also a really nice huggable size.

Hugability is very important to me, you see.

Anyway, Measurements.

You want to know the measurements I've come up with?

Shin - 29 1/4 in Knee Ball - 2 5/8 in Thigh - 23 1/4 in Torso - 25 1/2 in Bicept - 18 1/2 in Forearm - 16 1/4 in Neck - ~8 - 9 in Head - - 14 in Horns - 41 in

If those numbers don't mean anything to you, get a yard stick, and look them up.

These are only the basic length measurements, I still have to work on width/thickness, and the more in detail stuff. Like the hands, which I just....chose to ignore for now lmao.

But now I want to throw some ideas around for how I want this thing to be put together, and some issues I foresee.

Stuffing Options-

there are benefits to Hollow being so thin, but I don't think their limbs stuffing will be one of them. Stuffing their limbs with normal fluff might not hold up longterm. Stuffing, unless densely packed, will move around and shift, and long narrow things are the worst at this. The amount of dragon tails I've made that have empty crease spaced because of this (and because i never learned my lesson) is at least a dozen by now. If I want to really make this, I don't want this to happen, and I especially don't want to have to try to open it back up to fix it a year or two down the line.

So, normal fluff for limbs is out. That leaves me with two options: foam or batting.

Both would negate the empty spaces issue, and both has their pros and cons. But ultimately, I think it comes down to how much I want the limbs to hold their form. Batting would be easier to work with, and cheaper, but it'd likely cause the final limbs to be floppier than using foam would. Foam would make them stiffer (perhaps even too stiff, depending on the type of foam available to me) and keep the actual shape of the limbs better. Pretty much just gotta figure out how cuddleable I want to go, I think.

For the torso, shifting fluff won't be such an issue, as there's more space to move side to side, which in turn means there's less chances for empty pockets to form. Main issue I foresee would be the waist, which will likely be the area it would bend the most. I think for the torso, I need to think about how much I want it to be able to support itself, which would be nice.

But now we get to the two major things that I KNOW will be a mess of problems on problems and be a bitch to deal with: the head and the neck.

Necks are the bane of my existence, and I know why most plushes don't have them: that moving stuffing empty space causing the necks to loose support and flop about. The bigger/heavier the head, the worse it'll be.

And Hollow's head is fucking MASSIVE.

The entire thing is 55 inches long, most of which is horn.

If I want the neck to have any sort of support, I will have to use dense foam, and even then I might have to put some sort of plastic tubing/metal armature within it. I would prefer to not have to do that, but It'll all come down to how heavy the head will be.

Which means that the head will have to be as light as possible. normal fluff is out, stuffing it to as firm as I tend to like my plushes will make it too heavy. I sort of want to try foam, at least for the horns. I feel like foam would be really nice to keep the shape of the horns, which is an important thing to me.

the more and more I type, the more I think that this plush will be mostly foam-stuffed. Which is actually kind of neat, I've never worked with foam as a stuffing material that much before. Mostly as a core to hold shapes. We'll see, this is mostly just spitballing ideas.

Fabric-

I want to see if I have enough fabric already, which will go a big way into factoring if I actually do this. But I also want to use minky for this, and I don't think I have any black minky left.

Minky is my go-to fabric for my plushes, because it's my favorite and because it's very soft. the specific type of minky I use, Shannon Cuddle 3, also has a short pile (fur) compared to other minkys, while being no less soft. Minky is also somewhat stretchy due to being a knit-like fabric, which makes rounded parts nice and smooth. I love working with Minky, and the idea of having a big minky-fluffy Hollow is one that I cannot pass up, that would be sooooo nice.

But I'm not sure if I'd want their head to be minky as well. I feel like having it be a different fabric, a different texture, would be really nice, both tactically and visually. Probably still a knit, so it's still soft, but one without a pile. Or I could just do what I sometimes do and just....use minky inside out lmao. bit of a waste of minky for such large parts, i usually only do that for smaller parts. I think I might actually have a white fabric that might work really well, though with how large the head will be, I'm not sure I'll have enough. Which will suck, because I haven't been able to find this fabric ever since RIP ME

I might check out the Amish fabric shop I sometimes shop at, I can't remember for the life of me if it sells minky. It'll be a good place to look for potential mask fabrics regardless.

As a side note: a cursed part of my brain briefly though about how the plush might look like if I used velvet for the body. It'd probably look really cool, but I'm someone who doesn't like the feel of velvet. it's like...prickly, to me, not soft at all. So while it might LOOK really nice, it's definitely not worth doing. I want to be able to cuddle this plush.

[Also side note: my favorite fabric site has apparently shut down WTF WHY THAT SITE WAS SO FUCKING GOOD?! IT HAD ALL THE MINKY COLORS NOOOO]

Eyes-

Eyes are always a part I pay extra attention to in plushes, because I feel like they can make or break a plush's face.

I've done some googling, and it seems like everyone who's made HK plushes of Vessels just do black circles. Which makes sense, that's literally the easiest thing you can do to make their eyes.

That's probably what I'll ed up doing as well (or, well, eggy ovals instead of circles) but I still wonder what it might look like if I tried to make a sort of indent or carve out for eyes, so they're more like eye holes. I think that'd be a really cool idea, and could potentially look really neat, really look like head shell has some depth from the 'underlying' blackness. The issue would be doing it with fabric, which could prove difficult.

If I do use foam for the head, that would make it a bit more possible. The foam would hold the shape of the eye socket.

Perhaps gluing black fabric directly onto the foam 'skull', then layering a doubled layer of fabric over top (or even fabric over thin foam over the skull?) would work? That calls into question how to keep the fabric over top secured in it's proper place. even if fit snugly over the foam, it would still be able to move a little bit...This would require some testing, to see if it's even an idea that may work.

Another idea would be to carve out the eye sockets, line that socket with white fabric, then shove a piece of black-covered foam into it, gluing it in place. That seems like it'd be easier, and might look better. I'll test it.

Side note: it'd also be interesting to see if I can make the mask cracks indented too, but those are probably too thin to even try.

Pure Vessel vs Hollow Knight-

Gonna be real, I dunno which one I want to make. Pure Vessel would be easier, despite taking a little more material. I also wouldn't have to deal with the crack.

But at the same time, THK would be more challenging, and I kind of want that challenge.

If I do THK, I kind of want to add some infection 'scars' to their torso, make it less symmetrical than the other side. I've never really tried to do something like that.

I also kinda don't want to have to make two hands lamo

This thing will be so big that I'll only be able to make one. And also only have the space to keep one.

Ending Thoughts-

When I first had the idea for this, I was sure that once I really thought things through, really put thought into all the things I'd have to do to actually make it, that I'd become so daunted that I'd trash it. And for all intents and purposes, this idea is utterly INSANE. I should not be thinking of doing this. It's a huge amount of effort, and time, and money, for something that will ultimately be completely useless. For an oversized plush. that serves no purpose besides being cuddled.

But rather than daunting, I think this could be fun. that I might enjoy the challenge, and enjoy expanding my sewing skills, learning new things. Broken down, it doesn't really seem so bad.

Would it be a waste of time? Potentially. Would I be better off working on other, more productive things? Probably. Would it be a waste of money? Absolutely.

Am I still going to do it?

Yes. Yes I am.

Tomorrow I'll tackle doing some pattern sketches. For the rest of tonight, I'll do some research into fabrics and foams and other potential materials. Maybe some more measurements. Should really do the hand.

Man, this is gonna be one hell of a wild ride.

[unforth]

Okay, so, during the holiday season (during which I celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, and my birthday... in 2022 all within the same 8 days... ) my mom gave me a "I don't know what you want so over the next year just tell me some things you want and I'll pay for them" gift, and I've already cashed that in twice - once for something I'll scream about excessively whenever it finally gets here (I have. no idea when that'll be. I just checked Amiami and it says "processing shipping," whatever the fuck that means.) The other time was to put in an order from @shandian-go's in-stock sale (which appears to be closed again?). The "must have" item that got me to make that purchase was 2ha Vol. 3 Chinese, which I wanted no matter what (and which I've already posted a little about the extras, but I'll gather them all some time and take pics, it came with SO MUCH STUFF ASFADFADG).

But if I'm already getting stuff, might as well get more, right? So I went through the rest and ordered a few things. The expensive parts were actually not for me - a book a friend wanted, and a birthday gift I'll also send to that same friend. But I treated myself to some lucky bags, because like... there's always a lot of merch that I like but don't love enough to pay the premium on "I MUST HAVE THAT SPECIFIC THING." I figured if I got a random assortment, odds were high I'd be entirely happy with everything in that random assortment, and it'd be cheaper than picking out specific individual items.

That order arrived nice and quick, since it was all things that were already with Mel in Canada, and yeah I was right, I'm happy with my lucky bags. I got three - one for TGCF, one for 2ha, and one for "all priest excelt TYK/SHL" (mine ended up containing two Guardian things, a SPL thing, and a Mo Du thing, which is about perfect since the fourth fandom option was Lie Huo Jiao Chou, which I'm least familiar with of the four).

Since they arrived (several weeks ago) I've been, uh. Savoring? Because I'm super busy and don't have time to really enjoy but just. poking at the box for a few minutes every few days has really helped keep my mood up.

Today I stole a few minutes to really start going through things, though. So, here's my TGCF lucky bag! A cute Hualian key chain of Hua Cheng comforting Xie Lian, a pretty pin, an adorable Xie Lian wedding chibi standee, and that gorgeous soldier Hua Cheng/God Please Crown Prince Xie Lian art.

As expected, I am utterly satisfied with this purchase. I'm gonna add the key chain to my keys today (where it'll join the Hualian chibi key chains I bought from ShanGo last year), and I really need to finish the quilt I've been working on specifically as a place to hang pins so I can hang the pin.

Whenever I next feel like I can ask mom for a little money, it'll be this - https://koonbooks.com/products/global-examination-chinese-comic?_pos=2&_sid=a2e0144e2&_ss=r. Which has been on my list for months and was what I wanted next no matter what, but has definitely gained a lot more urgency since I started reading the book, lmao. Now I want it like air. Probably over the summer...

(I also just today got a shipping due notice from ShanGo? I have. no idea what it's for, oops. I thought my only outstanding order was the Yanshen plushies but my memory is shot idek. God, this makes it sound like I buy So Much Stuff I swear I don't. With what money would I???)

[i-cast-teatus-deletus]

Clothing - Hoodies (Part 1)

The most obvious #1 thing that you need after surgery is some zip-up hoodies. I saw a lot of people on a lot of forums recommend "a huge size, like a 3XL"

Unfortunately, I wear a 3XL hoodie under normal circumstances, and the guys wear a 2X, so I needed to really look around and see what options existed that were substantially larger.

I will probably discuss putting these clothes on myself AT LENGTH over the course of this blog, even though I am not (currently, at least) slated for surgery. This is because:

I am taller (and wider) than both guys in question, so if it fits me, it will fit them and probably be the 'right' amount of oversized. I intend to post measurements for everyone when I get to it so you have a better idea, but keep in mind I intend to post measurements of clothing that fits the way we want them to fit after surgery, NOT body measurements, because that is the set of measurements I am using to buy clothes.

I will be the person who keeps these clothing items after surgery is done for the most part (though the guys are not afraid of wearing a super oversized shirt for funsies)

The very first thing I noticed is that Amazon is backordered on a LOT of 5X/6X men's clothing, especially their Essentials line. Not just a little backordered either, but using the same terminology they use for items that have been openly discontinued. I suspect it's supply chain issues combined with figuring nobody is buying them anyway, but I have to admit I'd buy Amazon Essentials 5X or 6X hoodies for some insane price like $26 and be very, very happy with it.

But it wouldn't have made for a very interesting blog post, either.

Fruit of the Loom, a perennial cheap favorite, only goes up to 4X, and Hanes stops at 3X for zippered hoodies. Dickies stops at 3X, and Carhartt, definitely nobody's cheap option, stops at a 4X.

In mid-weight hoodies, it pretty much left me with Champion, though not every style comes in larger sizes. I bought a Thermal Lined Hoodie in Heather Grey because it was dramatically cheaper than the other colors (though I paid 39.99 and it's going for a good bit cheaper than that now), but they also have a Heavyweight Hoodie without the thermal lining that's less expensive that I might buy in Olive so we have a second hoodie. There's other options, too.

Amazon sucks, but they're the only place I found carrying some of these sizes and styles (not even on Champion's own website), and they're carrying them for about 60% of the price of anywhere else. If you absolutely cannot do it, King Size catalog has a single Champion style in the right sizes for a lot more.

After all of that, how is it?

I have two big issues, both of which I'd say are solidly my fault

first, I was (somehow) unaware that a "thermal lined" hoodie would have a plastic-y lining in the sleeves to protect your arms from water and wind. Very useful as an outer layer (and I wish it was an options more places) but it'd SO loud and crinkly. So this hoodie is probably fantastic for running errands in the spring and fall, but it's less great when you're laid up after surgery.

second, my hoodie arrived with a zipper that's busted. The tab of the zipper is metal, but the teeth are plastic, so I have some missing teeth and some badly bent teeth, and now the zipper pull is bent as well from trying to get it unstuck. We'll have to replace the zipper to get much use out of it. If I had caught it sooner, i might have been about to return it, but the return window closed about a month ago.

Past the zipper, I have no issues with the quality of it, and it seem like a nice, fairly heavy hoodie otherwise. So once I replace the zipper, I'll be quite pleased with it, even if it's not ideal for recovering from surgery.

[cepheusgalaxy]

now, let's think more ab logistics and praticality so i can figure out what trainee's uniforms look like lmao:

Most works describe the trainee uniform as a fit of white shirt and black shorts. It is agreed that it includes a tight collar as well, which is commonly, for whump purposes, a shock collar

with that info, we can raise a few questions for clarification: do they wear shoes? are the shorts loose or tight? what about for the shirt? and is its collar more open or tighter? is the wru logo visible somewhere? in the shirt? in the shorts? in the collar?

Shorts: I think that if they are tight like polyester gym shorts it's better coz the whumpees do a lot of exercise right? I mean, doing exercises in tactel shorts is also fine but according to my quick google search polyester is pretty much cheaper than tactel or cotton 🤔 so i suppose WRU would want to maximice gains so it makes sense to choose the cheaper option. I don't know much about fabrics though ;) I will try a few doodles with a logo on it and a few different variations on cut and details and shit but that should be it.

Shirt: Since it's white, it would have to be something that doesn't stain easily ig. I tried googling what fabrics are easiest to clean blood of BUT i also realizes that bleaching them would work just as well. Now that i think about it that's probably why they're white lol. That aside, I think the shirts need to: A. Identify the trainees (which is easy coz theyre also wearing colors lol); B. Be easy to measure so generic sizes must work since they're prob doing these en masse. So probably something with loose sleeves and a wide collar? And also making a wide collar makes the Drawn (TM) part less cluttered and clearer. So probably that. Now, about a logo... I quit trying to make one myself, since there are a few people in the community who already did 🙏, so we only have to choose about the placement. That can be arranged with a few iterations.

Collar: We know it's a shock collar. We know it's tight. I assume it's black, bc it'd look good with the white + black fit they already have going on, and I think it'd be pretty nice if it was fucking Big. Like very thick. I googled a few references and I now have an idea of how they look like but I wanted a little logo on it AS WELL but i think ive figured out where to put it

Shoes: Hmmmm, I doubt it. Socks, maybe? I'll see. If yes, perhaps gray or dark ones. Whites would stain too much.

[funandexploring]

Tw: suicide mention - vent post

I wanna quit my job so bad but I can't! It's stress inducing, but it pays me enough to keep my housing. If I quit my job for a different one, I run the risk of no longer having housing. None of the other jobs in my area pay as much, remote or otherwise. There's actual bile in my mouth whenever I have to clock in but I'm held hostage until a better opportunity comes along

Even if i took the risk of switching jobs for lower pay in the hopes the job would also be less stressful, I'd also have to have an added expense of driving to the other jobs. I'm working from home right now and haven't had a car since an idiot ran their red light and tailboned me 😑 I'd have to take a pay cut AND THEN ALSO add an additional expense of a car payment, insurance payment, and gas payment that I didn't have before. The stress will still be there, just for a different reason!

I could get a roommate but I haven't found anyone who's willing. All my friends are either in a 1 bed with their partner, a 2 bed with their kids, and/or have leases that don't end until months after mine and I'd have to finish my lease (and stay in this job anyway) and THEN couch hop for a few months AND THEN hopefully join up with them on a new lease for a larger apartment if the offer still stands and they haven't found partners and changed their minds on me like has happened before

I could wait for the glorified revolution but if it doesn't both start and END by October 2024 so there can be better job opportunities to choose from with unions that have already forced companies to fair pay for employees and better Healthcare for all attached to it then I'll still be in this mess in a way I'll have to fix on my own...except for the options listed above that already have issues

Honestly I miss being able to say I'm gonna fucking jump when shit like this really hits me. I can't leave a shit job cause no one in charge in any industry cares about paying their employees a living wage and they keep experimenting with how few people can run the place without losing revenue so even if the job pays for housing, you still wanna jump ship anyway from stress

I've been different levels of depressed for long enough that I can notice when it gets worse and I'm honestly so close to quitting and risking homelessness and a potential eviction on my report instead of staying at my current job cause I just straight up can't do this anymore but I know the homelessness would be worse and I CANNOT go back home. My mother literally yelled about never being able to get rid of me TWICE!! I don't care how nice she's been since - moving back isn't necessarily the "better, cheaper, surrounded by love" option other people have. I'm not going back. But I also can't afford to keep going. And I also can't afford to shift direction. And I have absolutely no money for school and no clue what it'd be for anyway

I'm so tired. I may have an actual breakdown the next time someone asks me "how I'm doing." I'm just...so done with this place

[jjsanguine]

I wanted to buy a pin loom so I could make jumpers without exploding the ligaments in my hands or having to cut a bunch of the yarn as is necessary with something like a tapestry loom. I want to make my own clothes because I just cannot find what I'm looking for and also because I need another hobby apart from watching TV. My brain is not what it used to be and I need something to do on days where I can't follow plots.

Wooden pin looms cost big big money for their size and plastic ones are cheaper, but I've never been a plastic girly you know? Teenage me would rather have died than use acrylic (bleugh) or cast anything out of resin. 3D printers are on thin ice.

So I'm going to use my ⅓ of a degree to nail panel pins at home myself. I haven't done any wood working in several years, which is why it took me a while to decide upon just making the loom myself.

Wood was my thing all throughout school so 19yo me would have found how I just haven't made anything even as basic as a pin loom unfathomable. I mean I didn't do much woodworking in 2nd year because my school sucked but at the time I figured I'd be doing some kind of job or apprenticeship.

I'm making 3 looms of various sizes because it costs about the same as 1 singular 10×10cm loom, or 4×4 inch because much to my chagrin metric has not reached the crafting world. I get an imperial unit jumpscare every time I want to make something.

I'm using sapele wood (reddish colour) and iroko wood (pale yellow) because three looms will be able to stack and I thought it'd be cute to have the middle loom be a different colour.

Ideally I would have used padauk wood because I used it for my last big project and it's this beautiful red-orange colour that also smelled really nice, but produced sawdust that was low-key poison. So I appreciated the vaguely food like smell from inside a dust mask. probably why I was and am not daunted by the idea of having to wear a face mask to avoid respiratory disease for the rest of my life.

I only need like 500g of wood so my selection of wood species that are common enough for me to be able to buy such a small amount was limited. I was lucky to get iroko wood though. I needed to buy some for woodcarving research.

I'm undecided as to whether I should get brass or stainless steel panel pins. Brass would probably look really nice with this warm toned wood but stainless steel doesn't cost a bajillion pounds. This is the problem with buying ones own materials instead of just using whatever's in the school supply cupboard. Now I'm thinking of options and possibilities.

[demigirlboss2girlrotboogaloo]

This is going to only a) widen the gap of respectability/compensation/opportunities between “traditional” actors and voice actors (particularly video game voice actors) who are already shat on by the industry and have far worse working conditions

You are fundamentally missing the point of why anyone wants to use AI VAs in the first place. It's not because it's cheaper, because with this deal it *isn't*, and even without it that value proposition was shaky at best. It's because videogames are an interactive medium and being able to generate voice lines in realtime opens up tons and tons of new opportunities for dynamic dialogue, which is awesome.

b) completely fuck over new people coming into the industry. If it’s cheaper with AI, then guess who doesn’t get opportunities and the whole place stagnates.

Once again, it is not cheaper with AI. It has never been cheaper with AI, cheaper was never the point, this was never a value proposition, it was functionality and gimmick, which fucking sells. And again, USING AI REQUIRES THE PERMISSION OF THE ACTORS BEFOREHAND AND IS LIMITED IN SCOPE. They are *still* going to have to hire new voice actors, have them come into the studio, do lines, negotiate contracts, pay out compensation proportional to usage, and repeat the entire process when the contracts run out.

Also, the environment argument is fucking stupid and you should be embarrassed to bring it up because it shows how little you know about how scalable computing works. Those supercomputers were not built for AI. They were built for biomedical research and dynamics simulations and security algorithms, they were placed as part of far larger cloud computing and storage infrastructure, the AI part is fucking incidental, but even ignoring all of that, you can literally just train AIs on a gaming laptop nowadays. You'd know that if you actually had any idea what you're talking about. And no, I'm not being very nice about this, I understand that. But my New Year's Resolution was to stop engaging in half-assed discourse with misinformed kneejerkers in good faith, so here I fucking am.

And just, one last thing. There is never going to be a blanket ban. A blanket ban was never an option, and it never will be, not any more than every CEO's immediate resignation and the reorganization of all major studios into worker's cooperatives is an option. Attempting such a hardline stance would've resulted in exactly one thing, an extremely drawn out legal stalemate during which studios would use the ambiguous status of AI safeties to entrench themselves and set precedents which would then be near impossible for any court to ethically overturn, meaning it'd have to go to legislature, meaning at best the most anyone would get would be an utterly toothless bill with so many exceptions and hangers-on that it'd just be another win for the corporations.

So yeah, your arguments are stupid, your goals are unrealistic, and you have no idea how any of what you're railing against actually works.

(Source, a person who's going to do actually productive things instead of firebombing a Walmart)

Remember that whole strike thing? What the fuck was that for again?

There’s no going back once you open that gate. This is fucking depressing.

[popculturebuffet]

Marcy's Journal: A Guide to Amphibia Full Review: The Gay Novel Masterpiece of Our Times

Hello all you happy frogs, newts, and toads! We're going back to Amphibia, because what's more fitting than visting some old friends over the holidays?

Well okay but this is a close second. As you can tell by the title i'm taking a look at the recently released Marcy's Journal: A Guide To Amphibia: A Rope of Sand. Marcy's Journal continues disney's on and off track record of making real life versions of books seen in their series, as seen with the stellar Journal 3 for Gravity Falls and Big Book Of Spells for Star Vs, both of which i'd be up for looking at some day and proudly own. These book use diary entries to help expand the canon, while also accurately representing the parts of the books we saw on screen. Their a grand slam multidemographically too: My niece who loves Gravity Falls has often borrowed my copy of Journal 3 simply because she loves pouring through it that much. And who wouldn't? To a nerd like me it's the best of both worlds as it's both a real piece of the show's universe.. but also has a practicality buying a prop version of said thing just doesn't have. It also helps a lot that both Journal 3 and Marcy's Journal came out AFTER their series ended, giving us one last taste of the show on the way out. It's why i'm disappointed Ducktales never got one as while the Art of Book is truly excellent, I reviewed that last month, it doesn't really expand the world or anything we didn't see. It'd be nice to get characters perspectives on things, especially since Webby and Huey BOTH had diary or diary like objects respectively.

Still we were lucky enough to get this wonderful book, as was I. See I intended to wait after the holidays when I had more money and while I got some on my 31st birthday last Friday, I didn't expect to find it when I took a jaunt to Barnes and Noble. I hoped maybe but given my attempts to find The Art of Ducktales in ANY store before giving up and using amazon as usual were entirely fruitless, I didn't have high hopes. It doesn't help mine doesn't update books often.. so it was a pleasant surprise to find a copy and I quickly snapped it up and poured through it a bit, instantly charmed by it. The book was worth the money too as it's a wonderful, well thought out bit of canon that helps expand on things, deepen marcy and anne's characters, and fills in some of the gaps we as a fandom were most vocal about. Seriously it's clear Matt Braly and co when writing this listened to us about what we missed and wove it into the story. Most questions our characters could answer they do in some way shape or form.

So as a result this review is going to have MASSIVE SPOILERS for the book as it would in any of my episode reviews. So come with me under the cut if you've either read it or can't afford it and thus want those juicy deets, as I explore one of the greatest, gayest, and some other g word tie in books i've read.

For Scale

The Books presentation is gorgeous. While I got the paperback version because i'ts what they had, so it's not likely 1:1 like the other re-creations Disney has done, I appricate both having a cheaper option, and that even with that it still looks and feels like a journal: it's got the size, the more yellowy pages and some marking on it. It seems like the kind of journal Marcy would pick out because it looks kinda fantasy ish.

The inside though is where it really shines: besides the page every entry has in addition to the carefully crafted words, painstaking and fun drawings of Marcy's. The book deftly switches between two styles for her portions: Smaller more cartoony drawings to help emphasizes full events due to the journals size, and lavish DND style fantasy drawings for her close up, neither fully matching the shows style, but still remaining just enough in it. We also get a nice running gag of Marcy drawing someone in a picture for Scale, using herself, Sprig and Polly. Another nice detail is when the Book shifts to Anne for the final third (more on that later), the art style changes, going completely to smaller more cartoony drawings, but in a completely different style. It's a small change, but it helps sell that these are anne's chapters. Her penmanship is also slightly different, and where Marcy uses red pen for underlines, Anne uses blue. It's a very small touch but it helps the book feel that much more real by giving it's two very different authors different yet similar styles.

So now we've got how it looks and feels out of the way, we can get into the meat of the book. The book is easily chunked up into four sections: The first third or so of the book detailing what happened to Marcy from waking up in Newtopia and falling down 200 flights of stairs to reuniting with Anne. Literally, there's a page of her going off to rescue the Plantars unaware Anne's there before the next page is her gushing over Anne for several paragraphs. The second deals with what we saw in Season 2 from Marcy's perspective, as well as fleshing out the bits of her story we DIDN'T see as clearly: We find out just what she was up to with Frobo for an episode, as well as exactly what offer Andrias made between "Day at the Aquarium" and when we see her next. The final main part of the story has Anne takeover post True Colors. It's a clever way to both have content related to season 3 and makes sense since that's the season that emphasized marcy's journal at all and parts of her passages actually do bring up the stuff Anne used for Clues. There's then two brief Epilogues: one covering the weeks after the girls return home up till Marcy leaves, and another 10 years later covering the events of the epilouge.. and a little something extra.

So with that in mind let's begin with…

Part 1: Captain Marcy and her Fearless Night Guard

So part one opens exactly with what we saw in the Theme Song Takeover, and a nice touch is ALL the thigns seen in that show up here.. and naturally that includes her memetic fall down a flight of stairs.. or rather 200 FLIGHTS OF STAIRS

We then get her recovery at the hosptial, as she realizes these are newts (after comparing them to some salamander aliens. Apparently Newts are senstive about being called salamnders. Who knew?), and gets adjusted to the world and her Iseki adventure. Seriously she calls it that. And in a few pages i'm reminded why I love this character: She's nerdy, awkward, and thus.. really relatable to myself. I too spout off about stuff only a few people care about for hours on end. It's how I got this as a career. She's a well defined character.

We see her meet olivia, and go into a LOT of detail on her, and Andrias, evne climbing into his robe pocket as you'd expect, and the two becoming buddies… and the audience wincing knowing, even if Marcy ultimately forgives him on some level.. he's going to cause this poor child a LOT of pain. A LOT.

We also get a rather painful detail.. any time Marcy gets close to talking outright about what LEAD her to amphibia in the first place.. she backtracks. She scribbles anything she writes about it out to the point I can't read it and is clearly panicking about the implications of what she's done and the pain she feels. It both hurt a lot.. and was somehow nice to see.

Hear me out: One complaint I saw crop up occasionally after True Colors was people wondering if Marcy could be forgiven after what she did. I did because A) SHE'S ONLY 13. and B) it was clear she had a lot of guilt: She's HORRIFIED when Andrias starts to outline it, not because she's been caught.. but because this is the worst thing she's done and someone she loved as the healthy father figure she never had and trusted was just outing it, taking everything he hadn't already from her. She tries backtracking and justifying.. but it's clear she's trying to talk HERSELF into it being okay as much as she's trying to talk Anne into it. At the sheer idea of loosing the people she loves most has broken her.

The book backs this up…

As i'ts clear from the getgo she feels massive guilt, but as we saw in the series tends to bottle that shit up instead of actually dealing with it. She's trying to just enjoy the adventure and not think abotu what she's done and the pressure just builds and builds for some time until eventually, it explodes during the game of Flipwart. After Marcy beat Andrias.. she poured her heart out to the guy, admitting what she did and why: See turns out Marcy's dad's only actions in the series, dumping a job transfer away from her friends without telling her and then getting mad when a 13 year old is understandably upset he didn't feel it important to talk about ANY of this with her prior to dropping this bombshell nad never considered her a factor.. was exactly who he was. Yeah, while he wasn't phsyically abusive or gaslighty, Mr. Wu was still a shitty dad who was overly strict on his daughter, pushed her way too hard from what we could tell, and it was clear the move was simply the last straw. We still don't learn MUCH about the guy though we do get to see him, Marcy's mom and sasha's parents thanks to some photos Anne puts in there later, but it puts a lot of Marcy's actions into context: She tried so hard to be good at school, to keep going, so long buckling under his pressure.. that she broke once he pushed too far and expected her to give up the only things besides her various fixations that made her happy.

It also makes Andrias' manipulations.. that much more horrible and why she didn't see all the red flags that much more obvious: He was the dad she always wanted, a kind jovial man who loved her quirks, gladly endulged in her intrests, didn't push her too hard, and actually listened. It also explains his own care for her despite his manipulations: He saw in himself someone pushed by an abusive (if not nearly to his dad's extent but to be fair his dad is a multiversal conquerer and right prick so fair enough) parent to be everything THEY want and not what the child actually wants. It's no wonder he kept trying to protect her from the core: he didn't want to shuffle her from one abuser to another despite ending up as one himself.

And yeah.. Marcy's dad is abusive. He does seem to change after everything , realizing what he was doing, but putting that much pressure on her, not remotely carring what she wanted, being overlys trict.. it's still not good parenting. Not being evil fantasy overlord bad dosen't mean you aren't a prick.. it just means you have a chance to correct it before it's too late.

Andrias encourages her to not tell them, to wait, that it'll hurt them and blah blah blah self serving nonsense.

We also get some of the infastructure stuff Marcy talked about in New Wartwood, and her bonding with Olvia who clearly worries about Mar Mar, though not as much as I would've liked given how much Olivia clearly cares for the girl on screen.

What we do get thoguh is a grand, epic adventure that explains where Marcy's cool new duds came from. Soon after arriving she sees The Night Guard, an elite squad dedicated to the city's defense, essentially why she responded to stuff like the ants. Naturally as would be most people's first repsonse to seeing a squad like that, she wants to join. I mean their no Ank-Morphok City Watch but they'll do in a pinch.

So after whipping up an explosive with some herbs she found, as she do, she impresses their head Albert who sends her on a major task: Get a golden egg from a golden crab. And look I loved this missoin already because it's a giant crabby boy. I love giant crabs. It's also the second time this month i've gottne to talk about them

So i'm eating well. Marcy of course solves it, studying i'ts patterns for days and figuring out a very clever trap for it, digging under it with a trench and using the various volcanic vents, which she'd figured out the timing for as it made a good clock, and knocked the fucker out and took the egg.

What makes this one of my faviorite moments in the book though, is that this was a training setup similar to the Kobiashi Maru in star trek only with more murder crabs, which makes it instantly better. She wasn't SUPPOSED to win, it was, much like that scenario , designed to teach recruits how to deal with failure. And just like James T. Kirk, she flipped the bitch.

Naturally this and the giant pile of money the egg brings in means Marcy gets fastracked from simply JOINING the Guard, to being a CAPTAIN and leading her own squad. And they are a fun bunch, original characters not hinted at in the series proper but still every bit as fun as the characters we got to know and love. Her squad consists of Javi, an egotistical too cool for school swordsman, Kettle, my favorite, a short newt with a hair trigger temper and tons of arrows and Femur, a senstive giant with a degree in classical muisc. And I guarantee this happened at least once

Team buildling takes some time, as the team was all brougt together by by Captain Ernst a totally swell guy who recently died and who i'm positive isn't evil. It's never hard when some new guy has to come and run a team someone else brought together, trained and made into a fighting force. It's why when Cyclops left the x-men he handed them off to Storm, who had been on the team for years at that point , knew them well and had the potential instead of Gary that guy down the street from the mansion who keeps offering to buy the New Mutants Beer.

Thankfully Marcy is more a Storm than a Gary. Granted she tries a very marcy move in trying to get the team to function via a rousing game of DND… also it's wild to realize that this universe has two diffrent versions of dnd as it also has Dungeons, Dungeons and More Dungeons.. though also plausable given just HOW many rpgs are out there.

This dosen't quite work, which makes sense. No what brings the party together is what brings most teams together: a giant ass fight forcing them to get their shit together: sometimes it's an island that walks like a man, sometimes it's a blue david tennant dragon, sometimes it's tryiing to get Gary home after he passes out on your lawn. For Team Marcy, it's a giant cobra, a bit i'd FORGOT was in the takeover. Using their teamwork and with Marcy playing on their various personality traits they beat the bitch, and now accept Marcy as one of them.

The main plot kicks in though with the next case, as a cult known as the order of the olms has been burning books

Yeah as someone who loves books and things being avaliable i'm with marcy in finding this heartbreaking and wanting her to catch the bitch. Having the outfitter guy from season 3 give them some galoshes, Team Marcy treks into the sewers. Sadly there aren't any teenage mutant ninja turtles or even regular presumably massive fire breathing ones, but we do meet my favorite addition from this book: Hamby, a weird newt who dresses up like the hamburglar and talks like Gollumn. Despite all appearance he isn't the one who did it and Marcy confirms it herself, realizing from his apperance and general..vibe that this sewer man isn't their guy and in exchange for a friend, Marcy's tamabuddy, he gladly gives them some spare robes and the time of their next meeting

From that Marcy learns about their leader gold mask, who has a sweet and horrifying ornate gold snake mask and the cult's next target, planning a massive intercept. We also get a sweet moment as we find out where Marcy got her sick crossbow: her team gifted it to her as thanks, formally and warmly welcoming her as their leader.

The sting.. goes pearshaped as while they manage to intercept the cult, Snakemask reveals himself.. to be ernst!

Yeah not a huge suprise. I had it spoiled for me via my thumbing around the book, but even then it's kinda obvious this is where it will go. Thankfully the twist itself isn't what's important.. it's how it impacts the character. Marcy was two steps from telling Anne and Sasha the truth when she found them.. but finding out about ernst, who also successfully destroys the old scrolls and what not he was sent after and gets away, challenging them all to come find him like the early game rpg big bad he is, destroys her team emotionally and leaves them scrambling for answers

Albert however refuses to let their team follow up as since they caught the cultists the mission seems over. Marcy however knows that A) maybe leaving a dangerous former captain who easily got the best of them despite being surrounded isn't a good thing and B) that there's more to this. Andrias naturally says his hands are tied and has no interest in actually searching into this more. If this comes off at all suspicious to you .. good it means you haven't forgotten what a lying dickhead this man is and are keenly picking up how burning down libraries full of ancient historical documents might benefit a guy who say, doesn't want history coming out before his evil plan is finished. We'll get to his exact hand in this soon enough.

So Marcy says

Partly because this is her perfect rpg quest.. I mean her reaction to the reveal before the reality of her friends depression set in was.. as you'd expect

But it shows her nature: she can get caught up in her hyper fixations, as I can, and loose the bigger picture.. but once she sees it she focuses on what matters. Her friends need answers and she's going to get them even if she has to go behind her best friends back to do it.

So they set sail for Dawnblood Island, and run into

GENERAL YUNAN, SCOURGE OF THE SAND WARS, DEFEATER OF RAGNAR THE WRETCHED AND THE YOUNGEST NEWT TO EVER ACHIEVE THE RANK OF GENERAL IN THE GRAND NEWTOPIAN ARMY!

Naturally Marcy is the only person in the canon to love that speech. She's a bit frosty to Marcy… and we later find out for hilarious reasons as she's mad Marcy didn't remember her from the hospital which is only because Marcy was hopped up on MMMM drugs. They quickly bond offer fighting some method actors. I mean who wouldn't want to punch newt jared leto in the face amirite?, pretending to be pirates, and Marcy saves them form certain death at yunanas hand.

Yunan plans to come back and fetch our heroes after she's done dealing with Grime.. given how that goes, i'ts no shock the two don't cross paths again in the book. That does leave them without a ride but that's not an issue for now as it's DUNGEON TIME BABY! I bet matt had a LOT of fun putting together what was basically a combination of a dnd campagin and an rpg dungeon.

Our heroes head through the castle, and Marcy gets her own eye flash moment like Anne's, though unlike anne's it dosen't go without notice: the rest of the party see it and comment on it and while Marcy isn't sure what happeend and assumes she just saw a puzzle she is curious.

The real show of course is finding Erest.. and despite so little page time he ends up being an engaging, intresting villian with nice parallels to marcy , a cool deisgn and a hell of a speech: As it turns out he faked his own death because he found the roll of a well regarded hero and mentor EXAUSTING. The more he kept having to do good.. the more he kept being crushed by the expectations people put in him and wanted a new life… just like Marcy. And just like Marcy andrias gave it to her… while Ernst's mysterious benefactor isn't named given his mission was to burn down libraries likely containing any trace of Andrias scheme.. yeah it's clear who it was. It also cleverly plugs the hole of "did newtopia have any records of the before time?" I mean I assumed Andrias had cleared them earlier but it makes sens eto use a public arson and a massive cult as a smokescreen. He even much like Marcy plans to have his friends and protges join him and is confused why they'd turn him down.. before deciding to kill them all.

The fight, as we find out after.. is brutal. Ernest easily takes out the team sans Marcy and even she is near death by the end, only winning thanks to a truly cool gambit that still nearly gets her choked out: She improvises a poition fo rplant growth, throws it down his armor and thus it rapid grows and almost treeafies him and he thus fall sinto the ocean. It's a tragic end.

The team spends the next few weeks stranded and recovering, till Marcy finds a boy.. yes WE FINALLY MEET JOE SPARROW. She tames him with song, befriends our boy of boys and future snail fucker,a nd uses him to get them home

While Andrias MILDLY dresses her down, he quickly lets the facade drop, being proud of marcy and giving her the royal advisor position we saw, likely to keep her from running off and possibly dying again or finding out his plans. As for her team they all retire: Javi and Kettle had a very obvious bout of belligerent sexual tension going that Marcy was shockingly genre blind to, and retire for the quite life, and Femur never really liked fighting in the first place and retires to herd sheep bugs with his soft tones. It's a fond farewell as while Marccy misses her friends, she understands this batch has to go and thier story is over. It also explains why the stuff with Anne and the Plantars pull her off. To her it's just her friends departing at the end of the journey it happens. For anne it's loosing her family.

Speaking of which

Part 2: Now We're Only Falling Apart So we go right up to the part where Marcy meets the Plantars and reunites with the love of her life: The Ants are attacking, Marcy manages to herd the newt advisors into actually doing something, and then goes to rescue the plantars and reunites with Anne.. and spends two paragraphs gushing over her, at first not even making coherent noises, and drawing her with an aura of light around her and with Anne blushing.

So yeah this brings me to something i've been saving up till now: If you like shipping sashanne, annearcy, marcsha or like me sashanarcy..

This book.. is gay as hell. There's a picture of Marcy in a heart blushing surronded by sasha and anne, an artists interpretation of them reuniting with all three blushng and like I said Marcy spending TWO WHOLE PARAGRAPHS on gushing about having anne back. And that's not getting into Sasha's anime drawing of the Anne vs Sasha fight having both blushing. And while Marcy DOES tend to throw blushes into her style from time to time it mostly happens with her self portraits specifically whenever one fo the girls is around. Like ti's the only timne it happens. Her subconscious coudln't be flashing

Harder if it tried. If it wasn't clear enough in seris it's very clear the girls are romantically interested in one another and the only reason matt didn't persue it is that it'd clash with the ending of the work. And he still manages to help us eat good as she outright calls Sasha and Anne "my loves" in her epilouge, and Sasha outright invites Marcy to live with her as an adult… followed by Adult Marcy talking about how love is a wonderful thing. Subtly is not matt's strong suit when it comes to this sort of thing and i'm here for it. There is a lot of sweet adorable content here and i'm glad it's here.

Unlike part one I won't be recaping this one piece by piece, but that's because parts 2 and 3 are MOSTLY simply the episodes we have seen.. just from the characters perspective. This isn't a bad thing: it's nice to get Marcy's own take on what happened, and to see what she was going through integrally, as well as gets nice bits and bobs of what we didn't see. It's similar to the dipper section of Journal 3 and parts of ford's second section: we saw most of this happen, but it's still neat to see what the characters thought of these events.

As such most of it just nice little stuff like Marcy gushing over Anne, talking about bonding with Sprig.. and most importantly her reaction to Sasha. We didn't really see it on screen.. but needless to say she's horrified. It also fully confirms that Anne didn't tell her the full story. It wasn't out of malice or anything, it's clear the event traumatized the poor girl and she didn't want to relieve one of the loves of her life attempting to throw herself off a tower after trying to kill her new best friend.

It makes things nicely complicated: Marcy understandably clings to Sasha and Anne reconciling both because loosing them would destroy her so she likely would've pushed for them getting back together either way.. but without the full picture she does so halfphazzardly, trying to shove them back together, as this helpful graphic shows

Instead of adress thier underlying issues. Sasha had a LOT to work out and as we'll get into in a moment with part 3, a reason why she was the way she was. It shows Marcy for what she was: a scared child who badly needed therapy,k had been pushed too far and has trouble relating to people at times. She has friends, girlfriends can connect with people.. but as someone on the spectrum myself, there's a fine line between that and being able to read people emotionally sometimes. I also have a bad problem of badly trying to fix an emotional issue instead of maybe letting it sit a second so the person can cool off, of wanting so badly to be liked and loved I forgot I don't have to try so hard. So I get where Marcy's coming from and my heart breaks seeing her like this.

We of course get her perspective on various episodes, including the fact she never really found out what went on with Hop Pop and Anne's schism, and that she loved getting to stay in the Fwagon between adventures.

The main stuff though is mostly what we didn't see. For starters we do get to see exactly what happened, or at least marcy's version of , what happened post "Day at the Aquarium". Marcy's former experince saying goodbye.. helps make it clear WHY she thought Anne would just leave the plantars and stay with her, and to her credit while Marcy writes down some pretty self destructive thoughs about anne possibly not wanting to be her friend or choosing them over her.. she snaps herself out of it, pointing out of course she wouldnt' want to say goodbye to her found family this soon, that she loves them, and it's really just Marcy worrying MORE about everything falling apart.

We also see exactly waht Andrias did: he gave Marcy her comfort food, Chicken Fly Nuggets (Which ngl even with the fly part in the title made me hungry enough for chicken nuggets I made some, as my dad sent a big frozen bag of em home with me after christmas dinner earlier this month), and outlined his fake "explore the multiverse plan". So yeah if you thought pre-face turn andrias coudln't get worse.. he manipulated a stressed out child's insecuritiys to further his own diabolical scheme to rob her of power that was rightfully hers.

The other extra scene so to speak we get is what exactly whe was doing with Frobo in that shed

Turns out she just spent the day testing him out. Though we do find something interesting about Frobes as a result: turns out part of why he ended up the way he was wasn't just being woken up early, something overwrote his UI with Rules of the Road.. which at first I thought they just crammed the book in there, but clearly Leif, on her way to the valley, must've stopped at the nearest factory and overwrote it with the family document. It also leaves fanfic possibilities for all of ya'll overflowing as it possibly means any other frobots coming out of that dome.. would've had the same basic start as Frobo, and as a third, which I can use for.. future projects, it means said UI COULD be used as the base blueprint to repurpose the war made frobots and give them the same chance Frobo got.

Finally for the wartwood portion of things we have her thoughts on Maddie. Which of course i'd focus on, she's my spirtual adopted daughter, but what's nice about it is the freindship seems like a first for BOTH of them. It has Marcy realising she's never really just been able to blab about her hyperfixations with someone whose gneuinely intrested and vice versa for Maddie, and that whlie Sasha and Anne "listneed" they weren't really paying attention. While Marcy didn't get AS much growth right away as the girls, it's nice to see her have some introspection during her journey.

So we finally come to true colors.. and all we get is a very gutwrenching page barely scribbled together in time after Marcy rescues Sprig.. and it HURTS as much as you'd expect, with it starting with a giantly written out and underlined he lied, more panicked thoughts, another large sentence this time "What have I done?… " and then a very small "i'm so sorry"

Part 3: Now For Someone Completely Diffrent

So Part 3 is written by Anne, switching things up entirley. And out of the three sections this is the one that most feels like Matt listneed to what fans had constant questions about. We do get some nice self reflection from Anne as she realizes both how little she used to care about her parents.. and how much things have changed, from seeing them as overprotective hovering jailers.. to the wonderful people they are.

We do get some common questoins I and others had first. The biggest is WHY DIDN'T SHE TELL SASHA'S PARENTS. As it turns out there was a good reason for that: The story was hard to belivie (as Oum himself said, if he wasn't seeing frogs first hand he wouldnt' see it) and there's no guaranttee they woudln't call the police or goverment or something. It was a crappy situation and Anne felt terrible.. but telling them would've been too risky to try. That said

Unlike some other things we'll get into.. there was PLENTY of room to adress this in a line of dialouge. So while I do appricate Matt explaning it here.. it's one of the few things I felt could've been squeezed into the series easier.

The book more than makes up for it though by giving us a LOT of answers on Sasha and Marcy's parents. Granted

But we get photos taped into the diary of both, and what exactly their situations are. With Marcy we already got most of it from her end, we do find out her parents didn't leave right away as they waited for her and were clearly stressed over loosing her. It's a low bar to clear but.. it's proof they aren't as horrible and there is hope for them to change. There's more hope later, but we'll get to that.

We also get Sasha's background and while I feel the character was fleshed out well in the series, both this and marcy's pressure should've ben threaded in right now as it explains a lot. The book confirms what fans thought from the seperate letters: her parents are divorced and while Sasha didn't tell Anne much, unsuprisingly she was very private.. what she does know fiills things in a lot: Sasha's parents both basically started new families: her dad remarried and her mom is dating someone with his own children. I don't think they fully threw her to the side.. but as Anne says it seems like Sasha got lost at sea.. and thus her control issues come from wanting something in her life. Anne also clearly forgives both.. she admits it'll still take a while for the wounds to heal, she leanred that from the incident with hop pop.. but gets that with Sasha they maybe leaned on her a bit much and while it dosen't forgie he ractions, it makes how much she leaned into the roll, coupled with being the only stable thing in her life, understandable, with with Marcy she's just worried why she didn't talk and admits she and sasha also fucked up plenty. We also get a ncie moment as this is all because her nightmares, incudling being DEATHLY afraid Marcy died and unable to admit it to herself, kept her up.. and Sprig noticed she wasn't in the room, made her coco and went out to comfort her.

We also later get more on Marcy as Anne finally reads her entreis.. and is sad she had no idea how much pain Marcy was keeping inside, and wishes she coudl've helped her. We also find out how they met: They were three, at the beach, and Marcy built an elaborate sand castle when Anne asked her to play. Marcy then went on about some game she loved, and Anne liked her and helped try to keep the waves back. It's as sweet as it is just.. painful.

We also get a nice coda to the episode abotu Sprig wanting Bee to be his mom. By the way it's an adjustment getting to use their names. I went through the WHOLE of the season 3 recaps desperatly trying to find a name.. nad Matt revealed them five minutes after the finale

So it's very nice to get to refer to them with actual names. Naturally once Anne told Oum why he did all that, she understood, felt bad for him, and made him bug pancakes , realizing the kid really did need a mom. She also taught him to sew later, which anne found nice.. then regretted when she found out about the whole Frog Man thing. We also find out Trantulad was a faviorite of Bees. Big nerd just like me. Knew there was a reason I liked this man…. besides everything else about him.

We also get what i'm sure anyone reading this was hoping for: Anne on MMMMM Drugs entry! Yeah we get the wacked out on painkillers entry my dudes.. and it turns out the Domino bit of foreshadowing for the finale was a bit more direct as the Gem God visited her directly during that dream, and said your fun, still using the domino form just with wings. So apparently getting stoned allows you to talk to them directly. Intresting

Also intresitng is that Terry is nonbinary. Yeah, it never came up in series, as they werne't sadly in it long enough but they are. They use they them prounouns. I love it and i'm sorry all my old entreis have all she's and her's. I didn't know.

Outside of some nice reflectoins on Anne realizing just how much her parents missed her and what she was missing out on not being as close, there's a LOT of wholesome anne and parents content in her part of the journal, a delcious recipie and Anne unsuprisingly having wanted heelies at some point, we're done with the earth portion of things.

For Amphibia , it turns out Marcy isn't the only one to melt into a very gay pile over a new look from Sasha as Anne also spends several paragrpahs talking about the nw and improved her, and drawing it. SO yeah these three were meants to be. We get some nice stuff on the various season 3 episodes, mostly Anne and Sasha's reconciliation, but the two episodes anne wasn't there for give us two bonus stories: While Sprig and Ivy were on their missoin and during "Grime's Pupil: for the former we find out she took time to catch up and as such we find out what exactly everyone did in the resitance besides missions: Wally composed Jingles, Mayor Toadstool took care of rationing suplies, Maddie was their medic, Croaker was their spymaster and intellegence, Grime their weaponsmaster and trainer and Logel.. taught exercise classes. I mean.. everything helps and he didn't get that buff overnight.

The other is Marcy and Anne just having a nice relaxing spa day. It was mentiond in the episode buti 'm glad they really done did it. They certainly earned it. We also get several sketches of Domino 2 and babies for a page. But with that we reach the final entry and entere the finale. .and unlike Marcy Anne dosen't journal like crazy, so her sectoin ends here

part 3 is incredible , a nice bit of fleshing out and of ironing out parts that were missing. That leaves us with

Epilouge 1: You're The Part of Me That Makes Me Better, Wherever I go.

So we find out what happened between our heroes leaving Amphibia, which Marcy writs an entry on, and the time skip. To her shock, Marcy's parents werne't mad at her, undersrtood what happened and felt she had nothing to apologize for, hinting that things seemed to get better after this. Marcy's Dad did have to leave early for the job and left her with her mom after a bit of her recovery, as Marcy needed plenty of doctors to check her out, got therapy

And generally calmed down. This also gave her one last summer with the girls , which depsite al lthe pain of recovery.. was nice. We even get both of them on the last day trying to play cauldrons and caverns, with Marcy appricaiting the gesture and them trying to show intrest in her stuff , and genuinely this time. She lets them off from having to do that as she gets they didn't quite enjoy it, but finds a ncie medium: they can find stuff they both enjoy and Sassh and Anne can at least try to find stuff marcy loves they enjoy to instead of jus tchecking out> Their their best couply selves as things end.

We also find out why they coudlnt' just use the portal: While I figured it was power issues, without the stones around in any form, seemingly, getting the portal working is hard. It dosne't help said portal is being kept top secret, though for VERY good reason: Mr. X feels no one country should have this power. Unless tehir krakoa but the mutants have earned it after about 80 or so geoncides so.. Terri and Him plan to keep working on it, it just may take a while.

So with that we get a tearful godobye and marcy calling them her loves because this book hadn't torn me the fuck up enough yet apparently. and thus

Epilogue 2: No One Needs To Say Goodbye

So we get a short section with Marcy 10 years later. We find out more about her web comci, which is directly based on Anne's adventures (Presumibly with her consent) Amphibi-Anne, likely a working title for the show and nicely worked in, and it's getting a print version soon. Nice girl, webcomics don't get those enough these days. We also find out Marcy decided to stay in LA with the girls…. no reallys he moved in with sasha and says love is a wonderful thing afterword. This is canon. It also made sense, as a webcomic writer she can work anywhere as long as her tools come with her and i've seen at leas ttwo have huge moves from one state to another, whcih were worked into the comics themselves. We also get a nice tease for a possible future sequel as Terri invites the trio to the lab as they have something for them.

NEVER THE END

Marcy's Journal is truly excellent, possibly the best of these three books though Journal 3 is still pretty close with it's immaculate drawings. This one is close though, and offers keen insight into the series, helps paper over what Matt missed the first go round and sets us up for a possible sequel down the line, in print or otherwise. It's everything you could hope and ask for and more so buy it. Buying these helps make sure we get more books like this and with Disney's new deal with tokyopop might mean these are more afordable for them to do too. Granted they still need to pay them, yeah I didn't forget the owl house light novel thing, but it gives me hope for the future> Thanks for reading and happy holidays.

[inky-thoughts]

How to Organize a Zine 101 #16

So, I promised a very quick and dirty design crash course for zines, especially zine printing. This will still be spread over multiple posts because otherwise, it'd be way too long. But first off, let us start with

Designing your Zine Pt. 2: A Format (because I couldn't hold my horses)

Typically, looking for your format should happen fairly early in the whole zine creation process before you even hand over the specs to your contributors.

However, I will give you a small guide how I personally go about picking out a fitting format for my work (not necessarily limited to zines, this can apply to art prints or other shenanigans as well):

Inspiration gathering. This is kind of optional but ever since I worked more on editorial design, I found it just nice to do some research on what other people do at the moment and if there's something that tickles my fancy. Given, this has more to do with the overall layout and partially with the concept of the zine rather than the format directly, but some layouts work better in landscape or portrait or square etc. I know Pinterest has a notorious problem with illegal reposting and art theft, but it can serve as a good source for inspiration. Sometimes it's enough to just search for "magazine layout", "zine layout", or "book layout" to find some interesting ideas. However, don't use these as your difinitive blueprint for your zine design. Observe which aesthetics, sizes, proportions, shapes, colours, and font styles you're drawn to. That's the point you can jump off of.

Go through your bookshelf and feel what lays good in your hand. I also would recommend using books or magazines that have the same binding as you want to use, and roughly the same page count. This gives you a better feel of how people can actually use and display the zine. I personally want the eventual owners of the zine to look through it every now and then, kind of like a coffee table book, and, depending on whether it contains stories, revisit it like a shortstory collection. I do own a few very big and very heavy books which are a well of information BUT it's literally exhausting to go through, so I rarely do. Think about which items you love to handle, not necessarily because you like the content, but because you like to touch it and the weight and size in your hands.

The Concept of your zine. If I, for example, want to make a zine about a series that sets place in a newspaper press, it wouldn't be far fetched to actually use a newspaper format for the zine. Sure, it's fairly big and occasionally a bit difficult to handle if not bound, but it makes sense on a conceptual level. If my target audience is younger children like toddlers to elementary school kids, I might pick a bigger format so they have bigger pictures and bigger texts to read. I was part of a zine that used the square format to mimick Instagram posts, which was the central theme to the zine (characters + their instagram posts). If the concept of your zine is e.g. postcards from different regions, it would make sense to have a postcard-sized landscape format.

So. Unique or standardised format? It's a pro and con list, mostly. If this is your first zine (it probably is, let's be real), a more standart format is probably the best. There is a lot you need to take care of, especially if it's the first time printing a zine, that worrying about more uniquely shaped pages might be more of a hassle. Standard fortmat is typically also cheaper to print. I personally don't know the exact measurements that the US uses, but in most other places in the world, you won't have trouble finding a printing service for fairly cheap that offers any of the DIN A formats, and DIN B isn't too uncommon either. Especially A4, A5, and B5 are fairly common for zine printing. However, square format in the DIN A measurements (A4: 210x210mm, A5: 148x148mm, etc.) has become quite popular within the last decade or so and many printing services do offer those as standart formats in their shop as well. My personal favourite format for zines and books in general lays between A5 and B5, 170x240mm (portrait). It's quite comfortable for me to handle and strikes a nice balance in size for both illustration and text. I had a printing service that used this format specifically as one of their standarts, but their services have become so unreliable and bad within the last couple of years that I don't use them anymore. So now I need to order what some printing services call "unique", "free", "other" etc. formats. Here you often need to check whether you have properly picked landscape or portrait (or square), depending of what you want. Also bear in mind that they tend to be slightly more expensive (not extremely, but slightly).

But what about REAL unique shapes??? I want a zine shaped in a cloud! This is where you definitely need some experience under your belt, or you get someone onto your zine who does. Also have close contact with your printing service of choice. Let them teach you their requirements, because that can vary a lot from printing service to printing service. Here I also actually would recommend using a local printing service that you can directly drive to and check how things are going. And, please remember, they can get crazy expensive.

Do a mock-up. Typically it's enough to just do one page/one spread, like I did with this zine idea I had in mind (I wanted to test if 148x148mm was big enough for my purposes, and I can happily say it is). The level of detail I can put into an illustration at this size is comfortable for me and I think it's a cute size for a zine centered on vignettes and "collaged" items. This step isn't always necessary but sometimes it can help to get a better feel for the project you had in mind, if you need to size up or down. you can also print out your mock-up. This can also help to see how big you want possible borders at the edge to be. In this example, they are 1cm wide

Obviously, this process works for pretty much any project within the realm of print that you might want to tackle.

Usually it also makes sense to match other rewards/extras like sticker sheets, prints etc. to the format that you picked for the zine. It's for example easier and also safer for the products to have prints the same size or smaller than the zine, that way nothing creases unintentionally or requires more support within the packaging since you have the zine for support and can maybe even insert the print into the zine. It's not a requirement, but it's something worth bearing in mind, in my opinion.

Since this is, once again, much longer than I initially planned, I will explain more of the constructional aspects and how to create a zine file in InDesign properly in the next part.

« last | next »

Masterpost