#so I bought it online and the £1 was the cost of shipping

[stone-monkey]

So, at work for Christmas we got given a...substantial voucher for John Lewis. If you are lucky, you can get some good deals in store on discounted items. I also got a generic voucher that can be used in Argos.

What I’m saying is I managed to get a LoZ themed Switch and both TTOK and BotW and I only spent about £1 of my own money.

[gautierprotectionsquad]

i need to stop making purchases

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Inkjump Linkdump

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

It's the start of a long weekend and I've found myself with a backlog of links, so it's time for another linkdump �� the eighteenth in the (occasional) series. Here's the previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Kicking off this week's backlog is a piece of epic lawyer-snark, which is something I always love, but what makes this snark total catnip for me is that it's snark about copyfraud: false copyright claims made to censor online speech. Yes please and a second portion, thank you very much!

This starts with the Cola Corporation, a radical LA-based design store that makes lefty t-shirts, stickers and the like. Cola made a t-shirt that remixed the LA Lakers logo to read "Fuck the LAPD." In response, the LAPD's private foundation sent a nonsense copyright takedown letter. Cola's lawyer, Mike Dunford, sent them a chef's-kiss-perfect reply, just two words long: "LOL, no":

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/19/apparel-company-gives-perfect-response-to-lapds-nonsense-ip-threat-letter-over-fuck-the-lapd-shirt/

But that's not the lawyer snark I'm writing about today. Dunford also sent a letter to IMG Worldwide, whose lawyers sent the initial threat, demanding an explanation for this outrageous threat, which was – as the physicists say – "not even wrong":

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2024/05/lol-no-explained.html

Every part of the legal threat is dissected here, with lavish, caustic footnotes, mercilessly picking apart the legal defects, including legally actionable copyfraud under DMCA 512(f), which provides for penalties for wrongful copyright threats. To my delight, Dunford cited Lenz here, which is the infamous "Dancing Baby" case that EFF successfully litigated on behalf of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her adorable (then-)toddler dancing to a few seconds of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was censored by Universal Music Group:

https://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal

Dunford's towering rage is leavened with incredulous demands for explanations: how on Earth could a lawyer knowingly send such a defective, illegal threat? Why shouldn't Dunford seek recovery of his costs from IMG and its client, the LA Police Foundation, for such lawless bullying? It is a sparkling – incandescent, even! – piece of lawyerly writing. If only all legal correspondence was this entertaining! Every 1L should study this.

Meanwhile, Cola has sold out of everything, thanks to that viral "LOL, no." initial response letter. They're taking orders for their next resupply, shipping on June 1. Gotta love that Streisand Effect!

https://www.thecolacorporation.com/

I'm generally skeptical of political activism that takes the form of buying things or refusing to do so. "Voting with your wallet" is a pretty difficult trick to pull off. After all, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and generally, the monopoly party wins. But as the Cola Company's example shows, there's times when shopping can be a political act.

But that's because it's a collective act. Lots of us went and bought stuff from Cola, to send a message to the LAPD about legal bullying. That kind of collective action is hard to pull off, especially when it comes to purchase-decisions. Often, this kind of thing descends into a kind of parody of political action, where you substitute shopping for ideology. This is where Matt Bors's Mr Gotcha comes in: "ooh, you want to make things better, but you bought a product from a tainted company, I guess you're not really sincere, gotcha!"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

There's a great example of this in Zephyr Teachout's brilliant 2020 book Break 'Em Up: if you miss the pro-union demonstration at the Amazon warehouse because you spent two hours driving around looking for an indie stationer to buy the cardboard to make your protest sign rather than buying it from Amazon, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

So yeah, I'm pretty skeptical of consumerism as a framework for political activism. It's very hard to pull off an effective boycott, especially of a monopolist. But if you can pull it off, well…

Canada is one of the most monopoly-friendly countries in the world. Hell, the Competition Act doesn't even have an "abuse of dominance" standard! That's like a criminal code that doesn't have a section prohibiting "murder." (The Trudeau government has promised to fix this.)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-an-overhauled-competition-act-will-light-a-fire-in-the-stolid-world-of/

There's stiff competition for Most Guillotineable Canadian Billionaire. There's the entire Irving family, who basically own the province of New Bruinswick:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/dynasties-2-the-irvings/

There's Ted Rogers, the trumpy billionaire telecoms monopolist, whose serial acquire-and-loot approach to media has devastated Canadian TV and publishing:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/canadaland-725-the-rogers-family-compact/

But then there's Galen Fucking Weston, the nepobaby who inherited the family grocery business (including Loblaw), bought out all his competitors (including Shopper's Drug Mart), and then engaged in a criminal price-fixing conspiracy to rig the price of bread, the most Les-Miz-ass crime imaginable:

https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2023/06/what-should-happened-galen-weston-price-fixing/

Weston has made himself the face of the family business, appearing in TV ads in a cardigan to deliver dead-eyed avuncular paeans to his sprawling empire, even as he colludes with competitors to rig the price of his workers' wages:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-12/a-supermarket-billionaire-steps-into-trouble-over-pandemic-wages

For Canadians, Weston is the face of greedflation, the man whose nickle-and-diming knows no shame. This is the man who decided that the discount on nearly-spoiled produce would be slashed from 50% to 30%, who racked up record profits even as his prices skyrocketed.

It's impossible to overstate how loathed Galen Weston is at this moment. There's a very good episode of the excellent new podcast Lately, hosted by Canadian competition expert Vass Bednar and Katrina Onstad that gives you a sense of the national outrage:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-boycotting-the-loblawpoly/

All of this has led to a national boycott of Loblaw, kicked off by members of the r/loblawsisoutofcontrol, and it's working. Writing for Jacobin, Jeremy Appel gives us a snapshot of a nation in revolt:

https://jacobin.com/2024/05/loblaw-grocery-price-gouge-boycott/

Appel points out the boycott's problems – there's lots of places, particularly in the north, where Loblaw's is the only game in town, or where the sole competitor is the equally odious Walmart. But he also talks about the beneficial effect the boycott is having for independent grocers and co-ops who deal more fairly with their suppliers and their customers.

He also platforms the boycott's call for a national system of price controls on certain staples. This is something that neoliberal economists despise, and it's always fun to watch them lose their minds when the subject is raised. Meanwhile, economists like Isabella M Weber continue to publish careful research explaining how and why price controls can work, and represent our best weapon against "seller's inflation":

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/

Antimonopoly sentiment is having a minute, obviously, and the news comes at you fast. This week, the DoJ filed a lawsuit to break up Ticketmaster/Live Nation, one of the country's most notorious monopolists, who have aroused the ire of every kind of fan, but especially the Swifties (don't fuck with Swifties). In announcing the suit, DoJ Antitrust Division boss Jonathan Kanter coined the term "Ticketmaster tax" to describe the junk fees that Ticketmaster uses to pick all our pockets.

In response, Ticketmaster has mobilized its own Loblaw-like shill army, who insist that all the anti-monopoly activism is misguided populism, and "anti-business." In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tears these claims apart, and provides one of the clearest explanations of how Ticketmaster rips us all off that I've ever seen, leaning heavily on Ticketmaster's own statements to their investors and the business-press:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-break-up-ticketmaster

Ticketmaster has a complicated "flywheel" that it uses to corner the market on live events, mixing low-margin businesses that are deliberately kept unprofitable (to prevent competitors from gaining a foothold) in order to capture the high-margin businesses that are its real prize. All this complexity can make your eyes glaze over, and that's to Ticketmaster's benefit, keeping normies from looking too closely at how this bizarre self-licking ice-cream cone really works.

But for industry insiders, those workings are all too clear. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on our book Chokepoint Capitalism, we talked to insiders from every corner of the entertainment-industrial complex, and there was always at least one expert who'd go on record about the scams inside everything from news monopolies to streaming video to publishing and the record industry:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The sole exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation. When we talked to club owners, promoters and other victims of TM's scam, they universally refused to go on the record. They were palpably terrified of retaliation from Ticketmaster's enforcers. They acted like mafia informants seeking witness protection. Not without reason, mind you: back when the TM monopoly was just getting started, Pearl Jam – then one of the most powerful acts in American music – took a stand against them. Ticketmaster destroyed them. That was when TM was a mere hatchling, with a bare fraction of the terrifying power it wields today.

TM is a great example of the problem with boycotts. If a club or an act refuses to work with TM/LN, they're destroyed. If a fan refuses to buy tickets from TM or see a Live Nation show, they basically can't go to any shows. The TM monopoly isn't a problem of bad individual choices – it's a systemic problem that needs a systemic response.

That's what makes antitrust responses so timely. Federal enforcers have wide-ranging powers, and can seek remedies that consumerism can never attain – there's no way a boycott could result in a breakup of Ticketmaster/Live Nation, but a DoJ lawsuit can absolutely get there.

Every federal agency has wide-ranging antimonopoly powers at its disposal. These are laid out very well in Tim Wu's 2020 White House Executive Order on competition, which identifies 72 ways the agencies can act against monopoly without having to wait for Congress:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

But of course, the majority of antimonopoly power is vested in the FTC, the agency created to police corporate power. Section 5 of the FTC Act grants the agency the power to act to prevent "unfair and deceptive methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

This clause has lain largely dormant since the Reagan era, but FTC chair Lina Khan has revived it, using it to create muscular privacy rights for Americans, and to ban noncompete agreements that bind American workers to dead-end jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

The FTC's power to ban activity because it's "unfair and deceptive" is exciting, because it promises American internet users a way to solve their problems beyond copyright law. Copyright law is basically the only law that survived the digital transition, even as privacy, labor and consumer protection rights went into hibernation. The last time Congress gave us a federal consumer privacy law was 1988, and it's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

That's left internet users desperately trying to contort copyright to solve every problem they have – like someone trying to build a house using nothing but chainsaw. For example, I once found someone impersonating me on a dating site, luring strangers into private spaces. Alarmed, I contacted the dating site, who told me that their only fix for this was for me to file a copyright claim against the impersonator to make them remove the profile photo. Now, that photo was Creative Commons licensed, so any takedown notice would have been a "LOL, no." grade act of copyfraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

The unsuitability of copyright for solving complex labor and privacy problems hasn't stopped people who experience these problems from trying to use copyright to solve them. They've got nothing else, after all.

That's why everyone who's worried about the absolutely legitimate and urgent concerns over AI and labor and privacy has latched onto copyright as the best tool for resolving these questions, despite copyright's total unsuitability for this purpose, and the strong likelihood that this will make these problems worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Enter FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has just announced that her agency will be reviewing AI model training as an "unfair and deceptive method of competition":

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4682461-ftc-chair-ai-models-could-violate-antitrust-laws/

If the agency can establish this fact, they will have sweeping powers to craft rules prohibiting the destructive and unfair uses of AI, without endangering beneficial activities like scraping, mathematical analysis, and the creation of automated systems that help with everything from adding archival metadata to exonerating wrongly convicted people rotting in prison:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

I love this so much. Khan's announcement accomplishes the seemingly impossible: affirming that there are real problems and insisting that we employ tactics that can actually fix those problems, rather than just doing something because inaction is so frustrating.

That's something we could use a lot more of, especially in platform regulation. The other big tech news about Big Tech last week was the progress of a bill that would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act at the end of 2025, without any plans to replace it with something else.

Section 230 is the most maligned, least understood internet law, and that's saying something:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

Its critics wrongly accuse the law – which makes internet users liable for bad speech acts, not the platforms that carry that speech – of being a gift to Big Tech. That's totally wrong. Without Section 230, platforms could be named to lawsuits arising from their users' actions. We know how that would play out.

Back in 2018, Congress took a big chunk out of 230 when they passed SESTA/FOSTA, a law that makes platforms liable for any sex trafficking that is facilitated by their platforms. Now, this may sound like a narrowly targeted, beneficial law that aims at a deplorable, unconscionable crime. But here's how it played out: the platforms decided that it was too much trouble to distinguish sex trafficking from any sex-work, including consensual sex work and adjacent activities. The result? Consensual sex-work became infinitely more dangerous and precarious, while trafficking was largely unaffected:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-385.pdf

Eliminating 230 would be incredibly reckless under any circumstances, but after the SESTA/FOSTA experience, it's unforgivable. The Big Tech platforms will greet this development by indiscriminately wiping out any kind of controversial speech from marginalized groups (think #MeToo or Black Lives Matter). Meanwhile, the rich and powerful will get a new tool – far more powerful than copyfraud – to make inconvenient speech disappear. The war-criminals, rapists, murderers and rip-off artists who currently make do with bogus copyright claims to "manage their reputations" will be able to use pretextual legal threats to make their critics just disappear:

https://www.qurium.org/forensics/dark-ops-undercovered-episode-i-eliminalia/

In a post-230 world, Cola Corporation's lawyers wouldn't get a chance to reply to the LAPD's bullying lawyers – those lawyers would send their letter to Cola's hosting provider, who would weigh the possibility of being named in a lawsuit against the small-dollar monthly payment they get from Cola, and poof, no more Cola. The legal bullies could do the same for Cola's email provider, their payment processor, their anti-DoS provider.

This week on EFF's Deeplinks blog, I published a piece making the connection between abolishing Section 230 and reinforcing Big Tech monopolies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/wanna-make-big-tech-monopolies-even-worse-kill-section-230

The Big Tech platforms really do suck, and the solution to their systemic, persistent moderation failures won't come from making them liable for users' speech. The platforms have correctly assessed that they alone have the legal and moderation staff to do the kinds of mass-deletions of controversial speech that could survive a post-230 world. That's why tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg love the idea of getting rid of 230:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/facebooks-pitch-congress-section-230-me-not-thee

But for small tech providers – individuals, co-ops, nonprofits and startups that host fediverse servers, standalone group chats and BBSes – a post-230 world is a mass-extinction event. Ever had a friend demand that you take sides in an interpersonal dispute ("if you invite her to the party, I'm not coming!").

Imagine if your refusal to take sides in a dispute among your friends – and their friends, and their friends – could result in you being named to a suit that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle:

https://www.engine.is/news/primer/section230costs

It's one thing to hope for a more humane internet run by people who want to make hospitable forums for online communities to form. It's another to ask them to take on an uninsurable risk that could result in the loss of their home, their retirement account, and their life's savings.

A post-230 world is one in which Big Tech must delete first and ask questions later. Yes, Big Tech platforms have many sins to answer for, but making them jointly liable for their users' speech will flush out treasure-hunters seeking a quick settlement and a quick buck.

Again, this isn't speculative – it's inevitable. Consider FTX: yes, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange was a festering hive of fraud – but there's no way that fraud added up to the 23.6 quintillion dollars in claims that have been laid against it:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/US-v-SBF-Alameda-Research-Victim-Impact-Statement-3-20-2024.pdf

Without 230, Big Tech will shut down anything controversial – and small tech will disappear. It's the worst of all possible worlds, a gift to tech monopolists and the bullies and crooks who have turned our online communities into shooting galleries.

One of the reasons I love working for EFF is our ability to propose technologically informed, sound policy solutions to the very real problems that tech creates, such as our work on interoperability as a way to make it easier for users to escape Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Every year, EFF recognizes the best, bravest and brightest contributors to a better internet and a better technological future, with our annual EFF Awards. Nominations just opened for this year's awards – if you know someone who fits the bill, here's the form:

https://www.eff.org/nominations-open-2024-eff-awards

It's nearly time for me to sign off on this weekend's linkdump. For one thing, I have to vacate my backyard hammock, because we've got contractors who need to access the side of the house to install our brand new heat-pump (one of two things I'm purchasing with my last lump-sum book advance – the other is corrective cataract surgery that will give me lifelong, perfect vision).

I've been lusting after a heat-pump for years, and they just keep getting better – though you might not know it, thanks to the fossil-fuel industry disinfo campaign that insists that these unbelievably cool gadgets don't work. This week in Wired, Matt Simon offers a comprehensive debunking of this nonsense, and on the way, explains the nearly magical technology that allows a heat pump to heat a midwestern home in the dead of winter:

https://www.wired.com/story/myth-heat-pumps-cold-weather-freezing-subzero/

As heat pumps become more common, their applications will continue to proliferate. On Bloomberg, Feargus O'Sullivan describes one such application: the Japanese yokushitsu kansouki – a sealed bathroom with its own heat-pump that can perfectly dry all your clothes while you're out at work:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/laundry-lessons-from-japanese-bathroom-technology

This is amazing stuff – it uses less energy than a clothes-dryer, leaves your clothes wrinkle-free, prevents the rapid deterioration caused by high heat and mechanical agitation, and prevents the microfiber pollution that lowers our air-quality.

This is the most solarpunk thing I've read all week, and it makes me insanely jealous of Japanese people. The second-most solarpunk thing I've read this week came from The New Republic, where Aaron Regunberg and Donald Braman discuss the possibility of using civil asset forfeiture laws – lately expanded to farcical levels by the Supreme Court in Culley – to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for the energy transition:

https://newrepublic.com/article/181721/fossil-fuels-civil-forefeiture-pipeline-climate

They point out that the fossil fuel industry has committed a string of undisputed crimes, including fraud, and that the Supremes' new standard for asset forfeiture could comfortably accommodate state AGs and other enforcers who seek billions from Big Oil on this basis. Of course, Big Oil has more resources to fight civil asset forfeiture than the median disputant in these cases ("a low- or moderate-income person of color [with] a suspected connection to drugs"). But it's an exciting idea!

All right, the heat-pump guys really need me to vacate the hammock, so here's one last quickie for you: Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier's new paper, "Seeing Like a Data Structure":

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure

This is a masterful riff on James C Scott's classic Seeing Like a State, and it describes how digitalization forces us into computable categories, and counts the real costs of doing so. It's a gnarly and thoughtful piece, and it's been on my mind continuously since Schneier sent it to me yesterday. Something suitably chewy for you to masticate over the long weekend!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/25/anthology/#lol-no

[blueteller]

wait, you can BUY tcf????? is it the whole first part or???

Yes, the official translation by Seven Seas Entertainment, titled "Lout of Count's Family", is now officially available since September 1st, 2024, so it's still very fresh and new.

No, it is not the whole first part; remember, it's a very long series. Volume 1 covers the first 42 chapters (combined into 9 chapters in total, as they're all parts of one section of the story under the same name – example: "They Met" 1-4), so right before the Plaza Terror Incident happens.

So, we're currently predicting something between 18 to 22 Volumes in total for Part 1, with Volume 2 already scheduled for December – the cover image was already released, and I believe Volume 3 is scheduled for March 2025? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong with that last one.

The physical copy of Volume 1 costs $20, which is the price I bought it for, excluding shipping. Not sure how much the online version costs just yet, I'll have to check.

[nerdykeppie]

So! NerdyKeppie is working on a test program to permit exchanges of our clothing for size/fit purposes. This will be a little long, so bear with me.

As most of you know, our clothing is produced to order. This approach is part of what permits us to offer most of our patterns in over a dozen different flags as a matter of course (currently: Ace, Aro, Bear, Bi, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, Gilbert Baker/8-Stripe, Lesbian, MLM/Gay Men, Non-Binary, Pan, Progress, Rainbow, Trans). If we had to carry stock, we would have to restrict ourselves to The Big Flags, simply as a matter of practicality. So, as long as we've been in operation, we haven't been able to offer exchanges as a matter of practicality. We had nowhere to store the returned items, and we didn't carry stock or have the ability to sell those returns.

But on the other side of practicality is the reality of shopping on the internet. While we do our best to provide sizing charts and good images, shopping online has a certain amount of risk to it, and that risk centers a lot on whether or not something fits.

We are looking at instituting the following change to our return/exchange policy:

Customer's first item exchange: NerdyKeppie pays return postage on your first item exchanged, and we'll file the replacement order with our manufacturer as soon as the exchange is confirmed. You must still return the item & may be charged if it isn't returned in resaleable condition. Exchanges must be requested within 15 calendar days of item delivery.

Customer's subsequent exchanges: On subsequent items, the customer pays the return postage to NerdyKeppie, and the replacement order will be filed when the item is received in resaleable condition. Exchanges must be requested within 15 calendar days of item delivery.

1. What happens if NK gets the item back and it isn't in resaleable condition (odor, stains/wear, shoes worn outside)?

You can pay to get it back from us if you'd like, but we can't exchange what you didn't return to us in good condition. If this is your first return, and we've already shipped your replacement, you may be liable for the cost of the 2nd item.

2. Can I return things and get my money back if they don't fit?

We'll be happy to help you with an exchange to find the right fit for you.

3. Can I exchange for a different item?

We may permit this in the future if this policy works out, but we need to start with exchanging only for size so we can see if this works, first. Too many variables make it harder to assess for us.

This policy is not yet in place; we are finalizing some logistics bits. :) Once it goes live, we will announce the length of the test period as well.

[apreslulu]

A Guide to My Luminary Cosplay pt 1: The Wig

No it is NOT my own hair!!!

I get a lot of questions about this wig, and honestly there’s a lot more going on here then meets the eye so I thought I would walk through the process. I hope this helps at least one person.

Firstly, this is a high quality Wigisfashion synthetic lacefront wig. Would I recommend every Luminary cosplayer go grab themselves a stupid expensive fuckass bob wig? Absolutely not. I decided to invest in a lacefront as I knew I was going to get a lot of use of it, and I wanted to make Eleven’s other outfits. If this is more of a casual cosplay then honestly don’t do this, I’m just deeply unnormal about the guy. It cost me about £70 (about $90 in freedom units) without shipping. Who needs to eat anyway.

This is how the wig looked when it was shipped to me. Importantly, I had to check before I bought it that it had a movable parting. A lot of bob wigs don’t come with a centre front part cause its pretty unflattering so make sure you can move the parting!!

This is the wig after just being cut. It was missing a lot of that volume Eleven has in spades. I think my main issue with this wig was how stylized Toriyama art is. If I’d decided to recreate his hair 1-1 to the game, I might as well be wearing a helmet, but if I just used this limp ass bob, then really it doesn’t give Eleven either. So I had to find a way to add a realistic amount of volume.

My solution was to rip apart my old Eleven wig (Not my first rodeo at making his outfit, so I had an old badly cut bob from the last time lying around) and add all that hair to my new wig. I hand sewed them in and it took ages, but I didn’t want to glue them as I didn’t think it would be sturdy enough. I then crimped and teased these added hairs only. This texturised them and gave them volume, but by not doing that to all the hair, it kept the volume manageable and realistic. Also this style is like everything-proof- I fucking washed this wig and the volume remained. Unintentional but very helpful.

I did a trial run with this wig and a mockup of the coat at megacon 2024 and I spent a lot of time studying the pics of the wig afterwards as I wasn’t happy with how it looked but couldn’t work out why. It's because the ends are too thick! Eleven’s hair curls under a bit, and to achieve that you need to thin out the ends of the hair (I know this because in 2019 I too had a stupid curled under bob, no the pics will neve go online)

You can see in this side pic how the hair angles inwards. I wish I had a better picture but I used thinning shears on the bottom of the hair and just kinda went ham on them. Make sure you thin out a little above the tips too, to make the curve more subtle and realistic.

My most recent outing in the wig, at Square Enix’s DQ3 remake event at their London offices.

That’s about it really. Getting the wig hairline to look realistic is a tutorial for a different person I think I’ve been using lash glue for the past year anyway don’t do that. I also resized my wig on the inside with sewing as I have a small ass head but thats also something thats very individual and best covered by a different tutorial. Please lmk in the comments if this was helpful or if you have any other questions!

[vurelly]

Hey I've got 2-ish questions, if we buy the sun n moon Christmas ornament pin, do we get them both? Like is it a "2 for 1" deal?(sorry if that sounds a little silly, I've never bought anything online before!) And 2, does it go to your fundraiser?

The pins are unfortunately not a two-for-one deal, but! If you're willing to wait, they're likely going to be going on sale either after Christmas or the day of (they're unfortunately not one of my better sellers, and I've got quite a few extra).

As for the second part, the short answer is yes it does go to my fundraiser, but the long answer is a little more complex than that.

I can't really work a job outside of my shop, so ultimately the shop is my income. I'm very fortunate to live in a situation where I have family willing to support me, but I do still have bills. Shop profits pay those bills. So, it's only whatever is left after manufacturing, mailing materials, shipping costs, and my bills and utilities, that goes into the fundraiser.

Whatever is donated goes directly into my savings. It is not touched, and I have no plans to touch it outside of what it is intended for (unless I have a related medical emergency that requires me to pay for it then and there).

[odddrawingsandwhatnot]

I have fallen into a fiberart hyperfixation,

And it's spinning out of control!!!

It all started when in the midst of big anxiety moment I started crocheting this blanket (almost done, it's just a lil guy that is partially made from an abandoned sweater project).

Then I started watching more videos about crochet and knitting and began stumbling across a video of a woman growing her own flax on her patio deck and making her own linen out of it. In the video she used a spinning wheel, but it got me thinking of highschool social studies and the word "drop spindle" sprung to mind as a small portable spinning tool. My highschool had one and I held it in my hands, but the class was teaching us that it existed, not how to use it.

So then I started looking up videos about how to use a drop spindle and the history of hand held spindles.

I briefly looked them up online before realizing I live in a fairly densely populated city that is known to have a lot of hippies in it, so I found a fiber arts store locally that I could go to after work (no shipping wait/cost baybeeee). I bought a $26 CAD student drop spindle and a $5 CAD bag of 50g unspun wool fiber.

I started spinning while sitting on the bus ride home from the store, it really is as portable as they say.

The right bundle there on the pencil was on day 1 and the one on the left was done on day 3 (today). You can see it's looking much more consistent.

I wound the newest thread into this here ball and then made some sample swatches to choose what hook gauge I should use.

The smaller hook as you can see makes the inconsistencies far less obvious and for my purposes I like having the smaller gaps too.

My purposes are as follows:

When I was at the store I saw some wool that was dyed various green and I want to spin that, and then crochet this cloak.

Is that all? Is that all I'm planning on doing with this project? FOOL! I SHALL THEN FELT IT!!! THE WIND SHALL NOT DARE TO TOUCH ME!!!! Imma be the toastiest bitch in the land.

tldr: I am become old lady spinning my own yarn for crochet and giving myself a simple but big long-term project to make.

Thank you for your time.

[nielsmichiels]

Toy envy.

Not many people know this but i'm a novice customiser of toys. Only did a couple here and there. Now back when i was a kid i had a friend that had this back in the 90's.

The Gi Joe USS FLAGG. This thing was humongous, like the size of a coffee table and it was VERY expensive.

His dad bought it back in the 80's for 4144.10 belgian francs ($109.99 dollars). That would be 332.48 US dollars now. Yeah, those people were loaded. I allways was jealous of that thing and 30 years later, i sometimes caught myself looking up how much they would cost now, just for a goof. For a second hand semi complete one you can get it for almost 3000 dollars. So i tought to myself. "You have some skills, and you have a Dremel tool, let's try to make one ourselves." "Maybe just a small one, like a amphibious assault ship instead of an full fledged aircraft carrier." So i looked up what the smallest gi joe fighter jets were. And it were these.

Gi joe TigerHawks. So i bought two of these and a Gi Joe GhostHawk.

Next i had to find a viable platform that already existed. And you never guess where i found it. Fisher Price. That's right, the company that made toys for babies made an aircraft carrier. Introducing the Fisher Price Imagine Next aircraft carrier!

Yeah...........disspointing isn't it. But it was the one platform that was close to 1:18 scale. And it had a lower deck that perfectly fitted the TigerHawks.

Now came the hard part. "Would i have to make a deck and a island (command tower and bridge) from scratch?" I figured i didn't have the tallent for that till i noticed these two things online.

Just some random chinese made aircraft carrier toy. Now wouldn't you know it, "that deck would fit the lower deck almost perfectly if the measurements were right" i thought. Now for the island. Every option i sought up from existing toys were either too big, or too small. Till i by accident hit this.

The kid connection battleship playset found at your local wallmart (which there aren't any of here in Belgium) for 15 bucks. So i looked one up on ebay ,bought it for 25 bucks, and then spent 90 bucks just on postage to get it here. XD "That was an expensive piece of plastic" i thought. And then i got to work with the Dremel and ripped all three boats apart ,put them together and SOMEHOW it turned it into this.

I call her the USS Ledger.

She can easily fit two TigerHawks on her deck and below because of their folding wings. (It's like they were made to be carrier jets. ;) )

And thanks to the deck modifications it could even store a Ghost Hawk below.

I realy had fun making this. And i was planning on sharing this on a Gi Joe forum called Histank but well......... lets just say the aren't realy tollerant if you accidentally fuck up making a profile, so you make another profile aaaaaaaaaaaaaand you get banned for that.

apparently you can't have two profiles (which wasn't said on the disclosure) and you have to be vetted by the administrator before you can even change a thing on your profile. I wonder why a toy forum has to have such draconian rules. Is the toy collecting/toy customisation business that competitive? So i decided to share it here with you nice folks who probably aren't realy interested in it. Enjoy!

[asyastudieskorean]

9/20/2023 — Hello, studying world. Today I start my journey of learning Korean with my first university Korean class (online). We didn't have any work on the first day, so all I did was read the syllabus (the most basic, non-informative syllabus I've ever read, ha), set up my new desk space, and updated my student bio on Canvas. I haven't been a college student for about 3 years, so it felt like I accomplished a lot. When the readings and assignments start coming in, I'm sure reality will hit.

I've always wanted to learn Korean, and my goal is to reach a near-fluent level, but I know it'll be hard, especially with my full-time work priorities. Eventually, being able to teach and work in translation is my goal. FYI, Chinese, Thai, and Japanese are on my list, too, but I'll be realistic and focus on one language for the foreseeable future.

Last week, as it so happens, I had to move from my family and childhood home, and I am lacking in the positivity department rn, so I think having a place to chronicle my studies and the progress I make will be good for me. I tend to start a new blog on here when I'm having a hard time, and it helps.

So, the plan is to take two full academic years of Korean (that's 3 quarters per year at my university). That's just how much Korean the school offers. I graduated in 2020 from this same university with a BA in English with a focus on professional and creative writing, and I really enjoyed the overall experience studying here.

I spent a whole lot of time obsessing over grammar, reading new and old literature, trying to understand poetry, and just enjoying the inner peace I felt when writing fiction. It was maybe my most happy time because I had no other real responsibilities or worries besides school. All I did was read and write.

Anyhow, fast forward to now, after pondering different language learning options (which are limited in my area), I decided to take my Korean classes at the university level because the classes will show up on my official university transcripts, and I imagine that will be best when I apply for future Korean-related jobs. I am also hoping that by taking university-level language classes, they will have some sort of superior level of... intensity? accuracy? efficiency? Something like that. Granted, this route isn't the best for my finances, as there is no aid for non-matriculated post-grads, and the cost of a single class is quite ridiculous. But alas, here I am, with an empty wallet and hope in my eyes.

Upon reading the syllabus today, which could basically be summarized as "TBD," I realized the textbook I bought, the textbook I waited over a week for, the one listed on the online course materials list, is, in fact, not the correct textbook.

And, icing on the bitter cake, the correct textbook appears to be a rare Pokémon that isn't available anywhere except the dark corners of eBay, where shipping will take at least 2 weeks. Like how did other students get this? Did they order it two months in advance? Meanwhile, I have my first assignments and readings due Monday.

I quite literally just sent an email to my professor and asked what I should do, so we'll see what she says, but I really wasn't hoping to be that one student, emailing the professor about an issue on day 1.

Since this is my first post here, here also is a tiny bit about me:

My name is Asya ("Asia"), and I'm a 24-year-old English grad based in Washington; no, not the one followed by DC, but the state with a lot of rain and trees. Twilight? Starbucks? Amazon? Yes, that one.

Since graduating in 2020, I've been a freelance editor and writer. I'm taking Korean both for passion and for work purposes, and I really should have started sooner. But I guess we're all on our own timelines.

I've been on Tumblr for a long, long time, but I've never been part of the studyblr sector. I'm glad to be here. :)

[wolfhidewinter]

I was wondering how does shipping work? I thought I read 10 pounds worldwide, but is that limited to some countries, or is it a case to case thing? I'm from south america and was considering ordering one to arrive on the usa when I visit for holiday, but if it's the same price, I might simply have it to my house. It does sound strange though that the fee stays the same, so I'm asking here

Hello, worldwide is anywhere outwith the UK or Europe. The shipping cost ranges anywhere from £7 - £11+ depending on the country I send it to as it's weight specific. Due to sending packages of varying weights and covering the costs of packaging materials and time, I made worldwide a blanket £10 which covers the vast majority of overseas countries. It would be too difficult to guesstimate per country the exact cost involved down to a tee due to parcels fluctuating depending on what products people buy. They all do fit in the 'large letter' category though across the board which starts the shipping at a higher amount. Hope that helps :) if you have any more questions feel free to ask! Edit: The USA for instance averages about £9.20 (if more than a book is bought), just for shipping, without including packaging etc ________________________________________________________ On the topic of shipping costs as this was totally new to me. Depending on the service you use here you have weight categories and the lowest (and cheapest) weight here caps out at 100g (the book weighs more than that lol), so I'm pushed into the next category which has an upper limit of 750g and a height of 1 inch on packages. They also add on costs for the type of delivery after you've worked out their base charge and the weight charge. I opted for heavy duty cardboard mailers because I know the postal service isn't overly kind in transit to things that look like they shouldn't be bent (which also adds extra weight). The absolute cheapest I can send things for would be via standard economy which is basically 'your parcel might arrive in the next 90 days, who knows'. I go for the higher cost for Standard delivery which has a 3-5 busines day aim for Europe and 6-7 days for the rest of the world. It's still often over this aim just due to backlog in certain countries and strikes etc. I know this is a lot of waffle for a simple question but I like to be as transparent as possible and also help people understand shipping processes :D This is just my personal experience with it so far this year. Also the packing process is done by meeee by myself. I have to manually take the info from the shop to open online address labels, fill in a spreadsheet with the items from the order to make sure everything is correct before I take it to the other room to pack it all, weigh each parcel, then come back to sort the postage and customs information for each order to make sure it satisfies a countries importing criteria. then I pay and print the labels and have to go back through to match them all up. And my favourite part is where I go stand in the post office and watch a grumpy af worker lament their frustration at having to scan and enter the post codes of each parcel cause of course I only exist to make their job harder.

[backtoneverland]

Well I guess now that the collection’s complete I can make a merch post about these beasts. Ominous in nature

Please excuse the lighting - hurricane Helene is on her way right now. More pics under the cut!

These dudes are from a 2013 series of peter pan plushes made by the disney store. Its a set of 15 plushes with pretty much all major characters from the original peter pan film! (16 if you count the twin twice). Pretty sure the set was made in celebration of the film turning 60 years old.

also all the prices I mention include shipping and tax fees! All plush received a sponge bath and air dry when I got them

I'll go over them in order of when I got them!

Starting with Slightly - the only one I didn't buy for myself. He was a gift in 2018 - the one i've had the longest. He's traveled outside of the country with me so he's a little roughed up on the back, but otherwise in good condition!

I think they did a good job translating his 2d design into 3d, my main gripe is that they opted for giving him a 1 piece suit instead of a 2 piece suit (the 1 piece suit is his return to neverland design) but thats a problem most Slightly merch has so its not a big complaint.

I really like just the design in general here, the color is great and i think his big nose is really funny. good stuff

Next up is Nibs! Got him in May 2024 for about 29 bucks on Ebay which was a good price. Other than his tail falling off and needing to be sewn back on I've had no issues. Such is the nature of buying a 11 year old stuffed animal

To be honest he is my favorite plush design, his face is perfect and in general the plush is very faithful to his movie counterpart. His big haircut is doofy but Nibs' hair is inconsistent across all disney peter pan media (he's essentially the red headed step child of the lost boys in terms of merch and movie relevancy lmao) and its fun, no complaints here

Then we have Cubby! Bought him on Mercari in August 2024 for 30 bucks.

Definitely the funniest looking of the bunch - that face. He's also pretty flat, not sure if that's just an issue with mine or if thats a problem consistent with all cubby plushes. Not a big gripe but it is funny and again a consequence of buying a well-loved stuffed animal online.

I swear he looks better from the side and the back - that front view is just hilarious. He's seen some things. Overall wonderful and whimsical

Up next is Tootles! I managed to get him still in the bag for about 46 dollars on Ebay in September 2024. Haggled the price down from 50 which was a score

He's the softest one I have, probably due to the fact that he was in a plastic prison for 11 years and untouched by sticky children hands.

The colors are great here and I love his round freckled face. Very cute and the tail is very nice, too

And lastly we have one of the twins! This one broke my wallet costing 80 bucks by the time all was said and done - ouch. Unfortunately thats a steal when compared to the prices for every other twin plush on the market right now. (my twin is the same one in the second listing on that post). Was the price worth it? Seeing as I have a first grade teacher salary and I'm fresh out of college - I'll let you decide. Let's just say theres no plans to get a second twin for the foreseeable future

This dude is great - very appealing colors. His big ass head and tiny feet are also great to look at. I like what they did with his hair - the twin's hair is also inconsistent in nature across disney peter pan media - but I think they struck a good chord with this one!

Overall I'd say yes it was worth buying, especially when all other prices hurt so bad, but still .... ouch.

And that's all I have to say! Overall having these dudes feels like a great part of my collection, I'm glad to have them :]

[thedoubteriswise]

a couple days ago I had to go to the guitar shop because they were done working on mine and while I was there I bought a stand so I could stop leaving my *other* guitar awkwardly in the way on the couch, and I was struck with this weird. euphoria? I think? over how, although I did have to go somewhere, I didn't have to shop for this thing. like I could have (and would have) bought a guitar stand online. had I done that, I would have spent like an hour looking at different options and reading reviews and shit, not really felt that good about the one I bought even though it was Fine, and waited a week for it to show up with free shipping because I also bought a set of strings I don't need yet in order to get the free shipping. instead what happened was I asked the guy at the store where the stands were and he pointed to the pile of the one (1) type of stand they sell because this place is basically the size of a rural convenience store but with high ceilings and they don't have room for options. for a second I was about to ask if they had others and then I was like. why the fuck do I care. what's wrong with this one. the answer was nothing. it was 15 dollars, does exactly what it's supposed to, and the process of purchasing it did not make me feel weirdly like a pile of shredded cardboard the way online shopping increasingly does because of the inescapable cognitive spiral you get caught in while researching shit that doesn't need to be researched and doing shipping cost math

[johnnyutah]

top most embarrassing mel fandom phases 1-10 organized but not by most to least embarrassing

genuinely thought the MCU avengers family was the height of literature and shipped most of the popular ships. do not text

fully convinced that the boys in one direction were all having secret relationships with one another. you know what you'll never dissuade me from this one

has literally read more social network fanfiction than published literature. also has read a disgusting amount of tsn rpf... like rpf FOR the rpf movie...... in my defense red white and royal blue is getting a fucking series so i guess this is our #society now

read and wrote a truly embarrassing amount of not-quite-rpf for the spielberg shows band of brothers and the pacific. this one i don't regret at all and will in fact do it again. the reading not the writing. the writing was fucking harrowing. i still have a spiderman/deadpool AU for two characters from the pacific up on my ao3

made everyone in my high school musical theatre production of les mis read enjolras/grantaire fanfiction (many times, if memory serves)

read that entire fucking destiel vietnam war/HIV au and cried so much i nearly threw up and then sent it to a friend and made him cry and nearly throw up and then for years afterward any time the song 'twist and shout' came on i would start crying and tearing up like as if i personally had lost a lover to HIV

read the all for the game/foxhole court books while in a vulnerable state (just very addicted to drugs) and genuinely thought they were good and recommended them to people and wrote popular fanfiction for them

lied about liking star wars to get online kik he/they pussy from an internet friend who ended up in a real normal offline gay marriage with an internet friend of theirs. i gambled everything and fucking lost

moderated several glee roleplay servers ranging from mid (normal glee roleplay server but i accidentally catfished another member by playing multiple roles, this is one of my greatest shames) to bad (titanic crossover roleplay server. this understandably did not get anywhere but not because the idea wasn't fantastic, just because honestly nobody knew as much about titanic as i did and it pissed me off). i truly have never let any online community dictate my real life emotions as much as the glee tumblr rp fandom did

roleplayed and wrote LOTS of fanfiction for rvb. red versus fucking blue. the HALO show made by roosterteeth. yes i fought in those trenches too (i voluntarily signed up for those trenches). i am writing this post currently wrapped up in a fleece roosterteeth blanket. it is fuck ugly. it cost me ninety canadian dollars. i bought two of them and gave the other one to a straight cis girl that i was madly in love with. we also used to watch red vs blue together. my skin is peeling off

[artsinus]

I just got me an anime figure.

Jk this is actually my 3rd figure so far. $59. It’s smaller than I thought it would be but I guess it’s higher quality than most.

This is my first legitimate anime figure. Not like the 2 others aren’t legit… it’s just that they are prize figures. Prize figures are a lot more cheaper and are usually found in claw machine games. They are way cheaper than actual anime figures like pop up parade, nendoroids or scale figures.

This ain’t the last either. Got one preordered from amiami. Should be releasing by this month…

This oughta be the start of a very expensive hobby…

Anyways, here’s the figure! It comes in multiple parts and I can practically pose it in any way I want!

You can tell it’s a lot better quality when comparing it to the two other prize figures I have, which both costed around $25-$30.

1. Tokino Sora Nendoroid

2. Some girl from FGO(Fate Grand Order) named Sei. Only bought her because I was on a time crunch, it took a long time to drive to Violet (some store that sells kpop and anime stuff. Just buy what you want online because it’s not guaranteed to have the figure you want.), and I liked her design (turned out the artist of this character is the same as the artist for a character in the franchise I like. One reason for me to even keep this figure. Might be coping tho)

Her foot broke first day I bought it and came home to unbox it. Contacted Violet and they said I could exchange for another one. I went back and there musta been some miscommunication because they said I couldn’t. Cut back to me in the car getting ready to leave when Violet suddenly texted me clarifying their mistake and asking me to come back. I come back, get a replacement figure, go back home, and the next thing you know her fecking head pops off after my baby cousin came into my room and played with it without me knowing. I felt like it would be embarrassing to come back again so I ended up just gluing it back together. That’s when I decided I would buy my figures online instead (though, shipping costs are way too expensive imo). This whole story backs up my claim that prize figures are cheap stuff and can break easily. Wouldn’t go back to Violet again though unless there’s a new figure from the franchise I like.

3. Minato Aqua relax time- bought her at Violet as well. Heard from my friend that there was a figure that he knew I wanted but he never told me because he never thought I’d actually go there just to get it. Well… I think it’s pretty obvious what happened. Later, I went back to see if there was any more from the same franchise but there wasn’t and that’s how I ended up buying numba 2. This is legit one of the only mass produced figure that the franchise I like sold. I wish it wasn’t so goddamn skimpy so I could just display it without feeling weird.

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

Does the O'Rahilly translation contain both recensions in one Volume or are they sold separately? I've been looking around for em for a while but haven't pulled the trigger yet because I can't figure if I'm supposed to buy both or just one.

they're published separately. recension 1 (1976) is published as "táin bó cúailnge: recension 1", and contains the edited irish text and the translation. book of leinster (1967) is published as "táin bó cúalnge from the book of leinster" and contains the edited irish text and the translation, with a slightly more detailed introduction. stowe (1961) is published as "the stowe version of táin bó cúailnge" and contains only the edited irish text, a select glossary, and an introduction; there is no translation in this text.

(o'rahilly did not edit r3, r3 is incredibly fragmentary and has been edited half by nettlau and half by thurneysen in two different academic journals, these are online somewhere i think. you don't need to bother with r3 99% of the time, most academics generally forget it exists / don't include it in discussions because there's not really enough of it to sustain arguments a lot of the time, unless you're looking at something really specific that happens to show up in those fragments!)

both recension 1 and book of leinster are available to read on CELT, in irish and in english, so if it's purely for reading purposes, that's super useful. but for line numbers and stuff the physical copies come in handy (and for aesthetics).

whether you get just one or all of them really depends on what you want. i bought recension 1 first because it was in their black friday sale a few years ago and i could get it cheaply, and that was useful, but for the work i was doing at the time i wanted the book of leinster version, so i acquired that one a couple of months later. i didn't bother buying stowe because of the lack of translation, until i was doing work that required translating parts of stowe and figured it would be easier if i had my own copy -- i'd photocopied some pages from the library but it wasn't really cutting it, especially as i wanted to flip back and forth to the glossary

if you aren't in a position to work directly with 15th century irish (most people aren't) then there is no point buying stowe, frankly. but whether you want both of the others or just one is up to you! most people think the book of leinster text is "better" -- the redactors smooth out the story, get rid of a lot of the continuity errors (not all of them), and make it more of a continuous narrative, plus it has the extended 'comrac fir diad' episode with the 4-day fight, compared to r1's 1-day fight. so if you want a readable narrative and/or are focused on ferdia etc, i'd go for book of leinster in the first instance. however, r1 has slightly more supernatural/otherworldly stuff, with marginally more emphasis on the role of the morrígan and lug, since book of leinster really understates those elements. so if that's your interest, you want r1.

but if you're having to pay big shipping costs to buy them from ireland then to some extent you might as well get them both at once if your budget will stretch to it lol. it definitely changes your perspective on the story to start engaging with it on the recension level and understand how the priorities and emphasis shift from one version to another, it really disrupts your thinking of it as a set narrative and lets you see it as something much more complex and fluid, which it is

when i first started working with recensions i hated it but now it's like the first thing i do when i'm interested in a new strand of it, is go see how each version tackles that strand

as i say though, you can read o'rahilly's translations of r1 and LL on CELT, so if it's purely reading you want, you do not need to spend €35/€70 on buying one/both of them unless you wish to!