#twas fun while it lasted

[leonleonhart]

gonna suck it up and lower my difficulty back down so i can romance emmrich faster

[theseimmortalsouls]

2025 has killed heavily pigmented blush

[moviebunny]

end of an era

[ehlnofay]

attack on @hellmett of zana :)

[wtnv-comments]

elaboration: atp i don't think this is coming back from hiatus and id rather delete in the interest of keeping my sideblogs at a minimum but idk maybe theres someone out there who still would want to have it possible to visit? whatever just cast your vote

[stairset]

Going back to work after a week off

[frecht]

my friend is flying to england rn to begin her semester abroad and i'm thinking abt how my flight to ireland last year felt like the longest 6 hours of my life but this is going by quite quickly for me as an observer watching her on flightaware. and i'm thinking abt how my sister texted me "u made it!" as soon as i landed. and how now i am not the one who has made it but the one who has to stay up to 12:30 am to send the text! much to think abt.

[thedeathdeelers]

going into an old fandom discord server feels like walking into an abandoned town post-apocalypse it’s very eerie

[suntails]

anyone that ever thought i was crazy for doing this pmv full color: i am two files from fully drawn. i. oughh. i've planned a rough schedule around my job and i am tentatively planning to post on friday 3/1. i can feel it in my BONES im so close to done

[penitenteyeball]

Dum de dum dum

Gonna add max tags and max characters to each cause who cares

[supnerds]

Yu Ijin: I've only had my sister for a day and a half but if anything happened to her I will destroy everyone in this school and then myself. Fantastic in just the first few chapters, thanks for the recommendation!

oh it’s so good!!! I’m glad you’re enjoying it!!

I need to reread that one again, I binged the whole thing over a few days ago month or so ago and I wanna see ijin and his sister again I love them

[melissa-titanium]

sighs deepl;y . puttingthis here bc im gonnadie if i dont put it somewhere and i dont think theyll see it but i just was in a vc with some one i know for thefirsttime in a while and they justhad to go and idk ihavent felt that sad ina W;HILE;

[saltcxrcle]

i love going to places spontaneously with friends last minute

[chaoticallyfuckingstressed]

RIP to my phone's aux, I had to pry a headphone jack out of it and now it makes every song sound like it's being played underwater. I don't know the exact damage it has, but it lived a surprisingly long and musical life until now.

O7 RIP aux port. 2022-2024

[morglien]

holy shit i have the equivalent of that energy vampire from wwdits in my inbox!! begone and let me play barbies in my head!!!!

[mpchev]

Update on fanbinding dissertation: binding the dissertation itself!

After many days and nights of writing and wrangling footnotes and proofreading (where I couldn't convince my laptop that yes, I meant textualisation, not sexualisation), 'twas time to bind the beasts! In three copies, no less! Which I approached with way too much confidence from my one fanbind experience, and came with many fun little surprises due to the format guidelines I had to follow 🤡

This is going to be a long one, so here's my happy unfocused mug to confirm that it all ends well:

First pickle: The typesetting. I absolutely loved typesetting fanfic, but the dissertation had to be A4 (way less fun, boo-hoo), one-sided, with every page numbered. Did you know that LibreOffice won't let you add blank pages and only number the non-blank ones, without skipping numbers? In order to print signatures I could fold into one-sided pages, only numbered on the right-hand pages, I ended up switching to landscape orientation and including the equivalent of a blank page in the left margin.

Second pickle: The imposing, which I couldn't figure out using the amazing bookbinder with my weird landscape 2-page layout. I finally gave in and rearranged all the pages manually, which looked like p. 1 on the recto / p. 10 on the verso, then p2/p9, p3/p8, p4/p7, p5/p8, p6/p7. And because there was no way I was paying print-in-colour prices for all of this, I further split the manually imposed pages into two files, one for the greyscale printer (cheaper) and one for the colour printer (highway robbery). Still came up to ~£70, just for printing.

Very glad I went in chunks of 10 for the signatures, it made both the math and the folding using sheets from two different piles much easier, highly recommend (if for some absurd reason you also want to bind one-sided numbered pages in folded signatures).

Third pickle: Linear time. Had planned on having so much time to print and bind this thing, but kept writing and rewriting and proofing and oops! It was due in less than 24 hours and it was still not out of the laptop. So.

22/09/24, 6pm: Got to the library, started printing.

6.45pm: Found another printer where all the paper was the same shade of white, started printing again 🤦‍♂️ (kept the the misprints to use as scrap paper when glueing)

7.30pm: Started folding the 150 sheets of paper (3 x 100-page dissertation, 2 pages per sheet). Went from the last episode of The Magnus Protocol, to an episode of Welcome to Night Vale, to deciding restart The Magnus Archive, which felt almost poetic.

9pm: Headed back home, trimmed the edges (with a borrowed guillotine), folded the endpapers, stabbed everything. Lack of pictures to be blamed on my inability to mess with linear time, and the eventual sleep deprivation.

10.30pm, I think? Started sewing the signatures together, again with Supernatural (which I started rewatching when I submitted my first dissertation assignment in mid-May, and finished 2 days after submitting the dissertation itself, again, such poetry).

2am, probably? Tipped the endpapers and glued cheesecloth over the spines. Somehow figured out where to set the three textblocks to dry (I don't have a press). Sadly gave up on sewing on (or glueing) headbands, because time.

3am-ish: Cut the missing cover pieces out of millboard (had already cut 4 of 6 covers, since I knew it had to be A4), measured the spines of the three textblocks and cut those as well.

???am: Did some math, because sure, that's the right time for that. Cut the bookcloth to size, glued the cover pieces on the bookcloth. Remarkably only messed up the measurements on one of them! That means one of the copies has a millimetre of millboard showing in the inside corners of the back cover, but not enough time/bookcloth/millboard to redo it, onward we go!

Way past dawn: Took a break for food while the covers somewhat dried. Cased the three textblocks in the three covers, with the endpapers bubbling, which took me by surprise since it was the same paper and same glue I had used for the fanbind without any problem. I'm now thinking that bigger book = more time needed to apply the glue = endpapers getting warped, but I was so exhausted by this point that who knows. Again, no time to redo it!

9.30am: Stacked the dissertations under the heavy reference books I used to write the dissertation. Toute est dans toute hein. Went to bed while they (mostly) dried.

2.30pm: Woken up by my neighbour's dj set. Eventually put all that hard work in a tote and walked to school to hand it in at 4.30pm.

Fourth and last pickle: The titling. Couldn't find paper long enough to do a half-dust jacket like I did last time. Had big cutout plans, ran out of time and couldn't finish testing those. Also had some thicker textured paper I thought of cutting and glueing to the cover as a title card, but it turned out too thin and was warping. Finally resigned myself to submitting it with a blank cover, but one of my teachers asked if I would mind adding the title on with metallic markers to make it easier to identify (one copy will eventually be on the shelf at the Institute), and I'm SO HAPPY with how it turned out. Metallic markers. Why didn't I think of that. (I did, however, think about dressing appropriately for the occasion.)

So, is it possible to print and bind 3 books in less than 24 hours? Yes! Am I glad I did it? Also yes, very satisfying, love being extra! Would I do it again? God no, I've been sleeping for two weeks and I still haven't recovered. Can't wait to start binding something else though, so I guess it wasn't that bad.

That's it! That's over! Aaaaaah! Now waiting for the grade and comments, and hopefully soon I'll be able to share the content as well.

I'll also try to post some more about the research/writing process itself, somewhere between the late nights reading international treaties on income tax and the early mornings spent figuring out how to apply for a phd next.

Thank you so much to everyone who followed along, this was way more fun than I ever could have hoped!