• If you have ANY trouble breathing, feel faint/dizzy, or are in pain: Take your binder off immediately, stretch your arms above your head then to your side, take several deep breaths in a row, cough to loosen any build up fluid in your lungs, and do not put your binder back on.
• If you are experiencing a cold/flu/allergies, and you feel you MUST bind, please consider using a looser binder, or one with a zipper/velcro for quick and easy removal.
• If you know you have a cold/flu/any infection in the lungs/ or stomach bug, please do not wear your binder until your symptoms have passed. (I know it’s hard, but be safe. Throwing up or having a coughing fit with one on is painful and dangerous.)
• When the weather starts to get cold, remember that layers are your friend, but overheating can still happen. Be aware of what you’re wearing with your binder, and keep track of your amount of exertion.
• If you are someone who suffers from panic attacks, anxiety, claustrophobia, etc, try to keep track of your usual signals and be ready to loosen/remove your binder when and where you can. (Again, zipper/velcro binders are the best for this) I would also suggest coats and jackets you can easily remove/open for this exact purpose.
• Again, if you suffer from any sort of anxiety disorder (or even if you don’t) , consider mapping out private spaces and restrooms ahead of time, in case you need to remove/adjust your binder.
• PLEASE do not wear your binder when you are sick. Seriously.
After spending a week with the 6.25“x10” Monoprice, my Yiynova and Cintiq remain unplugged and I gave my Intuos away to a friend. The Monoprice tracks subtle pressure variances and small movements with less lag and more crisp fidelity than any of the others. It is, put crudely, fucking awesome, in both OSX Lion and Windows 7 x64.
I have one of these, 10×6.5 I bought about two months ago for 48 bucks. It’s a billion times better than my old Wacom Bamboo and works like a fuckin dream.
ATTENTION ALL PENNY-PINCHING ART FRIENDS!!!
ooo reblogging this for potential future purchase
oh
I’m definitely thinking of getting one of these, or asking for one for Christmas. ‘Cause as much as I appreciate Ian giving me his old tablet, I think the pen might be on it’s last legs. ;~;
Oh my god these start at $25 for a little one.
I would be so okay with a little one.
Reblogging this again because I fucking lost it and don’t want to forget it again.
Apparently concentrated Kool-Aid can be used as a pretty effective leather dye.
I was making a drink while cutting the snaps off some new straps for my pauldrons and I got curious, so I tried it, thinking, “ok even if this works, it will just wash out.”
Nope.
It took the “dye” (undiluted) in about 3 seconds. After drying for about an hour and a half, it would not wash off in the hottest tap-water. It would not wash out after soaking for 30 minutes. It did not wash out until I BOILED it, and even then, only by a tiny bit and it gave it a weathered look that was kind of cool. Add some waterproofing and I’d wager it would survive even that.
That rich red is only one application too. Plus it smells great, lol.
So there you go, cheap, fruity smelling leather dye in all the colors Kool-Aid has to offer.
WELL THEN!
this may be important to some of my followers *and certainly not just getting reblogged because of my costuming and my boyfriends desire for leather armor*
When I was in middle school we used to use it to dye our hair. Potent stuff.
If you’re dying anything with kool-aid it’s best to use SUGAR-FREE ones otherwise the thing you’re dying might get all sticky
the flavor only packets where you are supposed add sugar are the best. they will dye any natural fiber: leather, wool, cotton, hair, flax, jute, silk and so forth. heat the dye water so it is more potent. let dry then rinse excess out in cold water. there’s a whole system to this.
Oh my god
This will prove very useful for any future cosplays I wanna do.
my mom taught me the therapeutic power of cleaning. open all the windows. throw out the old. wipe down the entire house. burn some incense. roast some coffee. then rest. that way the tears from last night don’t feel as heavy.
She just wanted you to clean the house
No it’s actually been studied and proven that for people with anxiety and depression that it’s really good for us it gives us a sense of control, setting, and being well grounded. It allows to make a new place out of the old and is really relaxing
It is such a catch-22, that cleaning when you are depressed (and likely less able to gather the executive functioning to do so) also alleviates it. After having a good clean, I always feel more in control and less stressed. It’s the getting started that is the hardest part. The good news is, even a tiny bit of cleaning has a positive effect, so start with what you can manage.
Even if you just clean up the immediate area around you, even if you clean a little at a time or spaced out over days, you’ll feel lighter.
This!!
Even if all you can do is put three dishes in the dishwasher, or move the dirty laundry pile to outside the laundry door, or throw out that box of leftovers that have been sitting in the fridge for 2 weeks
it counts.
My therapy professor always gets his patients to just wipe the bathroom mirror when they’re feeling that way. Just the mirror, nothing more. But then by the time his patients are done with the mirror, most of them report “well, I was already in the bathroom, so I did the sink and tub too.” And before they know it, they’ve cleaned an entire bathroom.
My therapist once told me that, every day, I should try and do at least one thing that I either enjoyed, or gave me a sense of mastery. And honestly, the enjoyment thing can kind of seem overrated, especially when you feel like crap, but the mastery thing? Doing laundry or taking out the trash or whatever else I can bring myself to accomplish?
Holy shit, man… it’s /good/
This stuff saved my ass back when I had depression. Vacuuming the room, spraying some febreze shit and wiping some countertops works wonders.
tiny baby steps are helpful
do what you can, forgive yourself for what you can’t, and challenge yourself to do better tomorrow (and it’s okay to fail at this; just try again the next tomorrow)
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of decoden and polymer clay questions about what to use to as a gloss/glaze. Almost every time the first response is “Clear nail polish, duh!”.
This needs to stop if people want to be creating quality items. Sometimes I’m afraid to buy handmade things for fear that they have been sealed with clear nail polish and they will deteriorate over time. I want to buy things that will last!
I’ve reblogged this before – but it’s sooooo important. crafting signal boost
Oh jeez, I didn’t even know that was a thing. No – never use nail polish thats a horrible idea.
Everything in the image above can and WILL yellow, with epoxy resin being the worst (seriously, ever seen a old tabletop with pennies or newspaper clippings in the clear stuff? and said clear stuff is very yellow? that’s old epoxy resin.), and the best being, off the top of my head, Mod Podge.
To put it another way, when I am being a professional artist, I don’t use any of those in anything I sell. Ever.
If you can use a water-based coating, or need no smell or brush application, try acrylic Gloss Medium. Liquitex brand is easiest to find – places like Michael’s carry it.
If you need solvent-based coating, and/or you need to spray it, use one of Krylon’s **Gallery Series** clear sprays. I use these and I like them, but they stink like holy hell – even dry, the art needs to air out for several weeks.
Krylon is tougher, for items that may be touched. Acrylic medium tends to be soft – there are ways to make it harder, but for the moment I am sticking with products that are pretty easy to lay hands on.
If you need a matte finish, look for Testor Dullcote – it’s also pretty easy to find, (Michael’s or Hobby Lobby), look in the model train section. It is also tough, but be warned – it is MATTE. It will dull your colors, but if you want a velvety/soft look instead of a “plastic” shine, it’s good stuff. It is a spray can and also extremely stinky, so use with care.
Pasta is great. It’s like hey, let me take delicious things like butter,or meat, or tomatoes or basil and then let me just fuckin mix whatever the fuck i want in and combine it with some random ass noodles.
That’s basically pasta.
BUT, there’s a big difference between “basically pasta” and “holy shit food of the gods” pasta, and that is that the latter has some rules that must be followed.
10 PASTA COMMANDMENTS COMIN UP:
Always boil pasta in boiling SALTED water. Ever had a dish where you forgot to salt it before cooking it, and no matter how much seasoning you did post saute/sear, it still sort of tasted bland on the inside? Same goes for pasta. Your sauce could be fuckin on point, but if you don’t salt dat pasta water, ya fugged, bruh.
Always have your sauce ready BEFORE the pasta. Pestos, emulsified butter sauces, bolognese sauces, they should be in their respective sauce pans, heated and ready to go (unless we’re takin pesto or carbonarashit, as those go bad with heat). The worst thing you could do is fuck up and overcook your delicious pasta bc you were too busy making or finishing up your sauce.
Always TASTE your pasta. I don’t care if the package says it’s ready in 1 minute or an hour, taste your pasta from the boiling water at least 2 minutes in, and every 2 minutes after that. Al dente’s usually the way to go, but you’ll never know when to take it out if you’re not constantly tasting.
DO NOT strain your pasta, wasting your pasta water and allowing your pasta to cool. Use tongs to take pasta straight up form the boiling water (don’t dry it, nerds) and throw it in your sauce. A little pasta water gets in? no probs, and I’ll tell you why.
If your sauce is reducing too much, or it’s too tight, add pasta water. It’s salted and hot and ready to go, it won’t dilute the flavor at all, you’re golden duude. golden.
Finish your pasta in the sauce, allow it to become homogenous, let the sauce stick to the pasta, BECOME ONE WITH THE PASTA BRUH.
Add cheese last, because cheese get’s weird and fucked up in hot pans, so it’s best to throw that on right before you’re ready to eat that shit up.
4 oz is a normal serving size for pasta. If you don’t have a scale, that’s basically like the first pic above. If you hold the pasta like such, and the width of the bunch is a little smaller than an american quarter, then ur good 2 go bruh.
Dry pastas are not better/worse than fresh pasta. They’re legit just made with different flours using different procedures. One isn’t ‘fancier’ than the other u pretentious buttrockets.
PASTA IS NOT SCARY, IT’S DELICIOUS. These rules look tough, but honestly it’s not that bad bruh. I believe in u.
and now, onto the recipe I used for my pasta. It’s a restaurant favorite, we always make it on the line because it’s simple, delicious and super filling.
~
Caciopepe Pasta serves: 1 (lol like id share this with ppl lolol)
–
Ingredients-
salt water for boiling (just salt some water, don’t fuckin travel to the beach in hopes of created the most bomb pasta ever)
1 bunch of pasta
2 bay leaves
1 sprig thyme
cold butter (approximately 2/3 cups cut into small pads
parmesan cheese to taste
a shit ton of black pepper to taste
–
Procedure-
Throw some pasta into some boiling water and do that thing where you constantly taste test the pasta to see if it’s ready. In the meantime, make ur sauce u lazy bumbum.
Add a little boiling pasta water to a saute pan over low heat, and whisk/mix in the butter quickly till it’s creamy and emulsified. If it’s too thick, just whisk in a teeny bit of pasta water. Add 2 bay leaves and a sprig of thyme for aroma, remove when pasta’s ready.
Once the pasta’s ready to rock and roll, use tongs to scoop it up and place it in the sauce. Flip and mix using tongs. Add cheese and crack a lot of pepper. Add salt if it needs seasoning, add more pasta water if the sauce tightens.
and bam, ya ready to roll.
~
I promise u if you use these pasta techniques, people will think ur literally a GOD. ur welcs.
Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”
You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.
Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.
First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.
Example:
Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.
Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.
There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.
There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.
There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as
punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good
upon.
Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside
world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for
sustenance and shelter.
Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.
Mages who only wanted to see the sun.
This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.
Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice.
For more neat tricks (aka figures of rhetoric) like epizeuxis and anaphora, read THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE by Mark Forsyth. It’s both educational and delightful, not to mention overflowing with wry wit. Great book.
Holy shit.
Forsyth’s other books, “The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language”, and also my firm favorite “The Horologicon: A Day’s Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language” are also well worth the read if you have the opportunity.
For anyone who feels this, let your first sentence be crappy.
Building up momentum while writing is the easiest way to get the story flowing but you need to start somewhere. And the start might just have to be crappy.
Like, let your first sentence be “It was raining.” “He was unhappy.” “When he woke up, his head was hurting.” It’s easy to be hyper-critical of the first sentence you write and that can lead to typing and erasing for hours and giving up. Let it be bland and generic and dull just so you can get the ball rolling.
Edit it later.
Write a place-holder first sentence (sentences, paragraph) that sucks, and then write the rest of the chapter, and then go back and fix that sentence last.
i’d like to add that those opening sentences aren’t actually ‘crappy’ at all, storytelling-wise. ‘it was raining’ sets a tone and states a fact, and allows for the placement of characters in relation to the rain. ‘he was unhappy’ is a fact that sets a hook and allows for expansion, giving the pov character a problem to deal with right off the bat—why is he unhappy? how are we gonna fix that? (or make it worse, but yknow.) ditto ‘when he woke up, his head was hurting‘—it stands to follow that, at some point, he’s going to get out of bed to fix that, or lie still and suffer and regret whatever made his head hurt.
so, second piece of writing advice:
start with a statement of fact
any fact, just pick one thing about the beginning of the story you wanna tell. if it gives the pov character a dilemma or trouble, all the better. it’s not the only way to start, but it’s simple and fairly concrete as a starting line.
definitely still give yourself permission to suck and rewrite later on, but if you just don’t know how to start, see if you can identify something about your story—where are we (location, time, in relation to some other event), what are we doing (verbs!), and/or what’s troubling us (pain, worry, discomfort, confusion, suspicion, etc.)—and slap it down.
AO3 has reached 25,000 fandoms! To celebrate, we’ve put together info about fandom tags and how all tags work: https://goo.gl/W4wPxH
Hey folks who use AO3 – please read and reblog widely. In addition to the celebration of our 25,000th canonical fandom, this post contains some great tips for making our tagging system work for you.
As a Support Staffer and Tag Wrangler for AO3, I beg you:
Among the tips:
Separate your / and & ships / is for romantic and/or sexual
relationships. & is for platonic relationships only – ones that are
neither sexual nor romantic. (Pre- and Post-Relationship are still /.)
& was created for those Gen fans who don’t want anything
non-platonic in the ships they’re searching for. You can help both Gen
fans and shippers by carefully choosing the tag that matches your work!
Look, I know you’re writing a slow burn where the friendship aspect of the relationship is important. I applaud that; I love it in my romantic pairings. But it’s a /, not a &. Please save & for those of us who want to find the three truly and purely gen fics for a popular romantic ship.
Folks, I LOVE AO3, please read and share!
As someone relatively new to using AO3, I did not really realise this. *goes back to check tags* THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS.
Time's Vengeance 