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spockandawe · 6 days
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And finally, the big conclusion! When I was planning to not really binderary, getting copies of these books was my big goal. And then when I did binderary after all, I, uh, ended up with two sets of two books. And let's not even talk about how late these are in the grand scheme of things, these have been in my plans for literal years, and I originally intended to get them done well before official translations started releasing (I'm doing great!!). But here they are! Thousand Autumns and Peerless! TWICE!!!!
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Okay. Okay. So here's the thing. These books are long. Thousand Autumns is something like 450k, and Peerless is closer to 550k. I hate splitting cnovels. I didn't want to sand instead of trimming. I wanted to keep these books as pairs (because Peerless has my favorite danmei ship of all time, but doesn't hit as hard without the Thousand Autumns context, and EVERYTHING hits less hard without knowing that yan wushi is out there. existing.)
These goals are not terribly well aligned with the facts! The facts are that those are awfully big books to fit into a single volume, if I want to use my guillotine! This is another driving force behind my small text theme of the month. It made the typesets a goddamn nightmare, and my initial copies of the books were done on half-legal paper, which I've never done before and may never do again. I finished those, and those are... big, heavy books. Not super portable. Time to see if my eyes are good for four point georgia, and spoilers, they ARE.
Set one, the large set, I wanted to use more of my snake leather. I had this GORGEOUS purple and green and black iridescent hide that i was determined to use, and fortunately I had just enough of the perfect fabric to pair with it.
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But.... meanwhile, I've been buying peacock fabrics since 2021 for the sake of Feng Xiao. I had to use at least ONE of them! Fortunately, I've hoarded enough fabric that I was able to find a nice harmonious floral fabric to cover thousand autumns, and then had a nice duo bookcloth to make spines for them both! These books are quarter-legal, and the font is genuinely SO small, but still, pleasantly readable for me, my favorite customer 😂
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These books were SO MUCH work to typeset snd bind, but I'm still so excited about how both sets came out! Because of my own impatience with repeating myself like, literally two days later, i redid a number of decorative elements in the typeset as well as the binding. Different chapter headers, different dividers, totally different vibes for the endpapers! This was a big project to ask from myself in such short order, especially when I was starting to flirt with burnout, but I genuinely couldn't be happier with the results :D
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spockandawe · 7 days
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So. I know I just did a binding of The Disabled Tyrant's Pet Palm Fish, but that was a lectern book, and it's been tough to get a lectern binding that I'm completely and unreservedly happy with. If more practice is what it takes, then I'm game! But in the meantime.... this is the fish book. The romancing a fish book. The impatiently waiting for a fish demon to..... devour my essence book. The 'my servant thinks I'm fucking my fish' book. The fishpreg book. The fish themed wedding book. What, was I supposed to NOT use my exciting new fish leather??
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Now, the struggle with fish leather is thst it comes in very irregular oval-y shapes. I wanted the spine to have the right weight, so I cut the biggest rectangle I could wrangle from the hide, and belatedly realized my remnants weren't large enough to get good corner pieces. So that's something to consider in the future! But despite that, the fish handled like a dream, the gold and brown aligned BEAUTIFULLY with a wave fabric I had in my stash, and I shamelessly went back to the scale themed endpaper well. I usually don't like repeating myself so quickly, but I had a lot of fun designing this typeset, and this story is just a delight on every level!
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spockandawe · 8 days
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Meanwhile! I was trapped in the liminal space of a remote work summit, and finally managed to power through the last few assembly steps for my beautiful daughter. Here, have an uninformative preview image with horrible office lighting, let's see how long it takes me to excavate enough of my house to take real pictures
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spockandawe · 8 days
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Amazing, I knew it was a long shot to aim for a promotion this year, but it was my only shot before the boss who hired me retires as my direct manager, and instead. Despite a goddamn stunning year. Forced distribution (only 5% of the company can be exceptional and only 15% can be significant), i ALMOST made it into that significant category.... until department-wide "normalization" of scores brute-forced me down into the C's get degrees category. And then my raise was similarly mediocre and I guess apparently my whole division has kinda. Stopped doing promotions also.
I already knew things probably wouldn't be great this year, I know nobody up my management chain is happy about this, but it's kind of wild to see how hard it cut off my motivation at the knees! Trying to muster the energy for ANYTHING work-related is a total nonstarter, which isn't great, because big things are happening across the board, and i DO have leadership roles that could help me maybe next year. I could at least be studying the things I find interesting and making myself eligible for even more work I enjoy, and instead I'm rotting at my desk.
And it's torpedoed my personal activities too! Im 70% of the way through paneling and painting a room, and its terrifying and doing horrible things to my strained wallet, but it was COOL, and i can date the evaporation of that enthusiasm to the performance review. Which was good! I did well, and my boss and my teams thought so! But goddamn! And it's not like other activities are clicking into place either, and I'm SAMPLING plenty. All i want to do is go to craft stores and shop for materials I'm patently not using, and I'm already broke, and even annual raise doesn't fix that as much as I hoped.
What DO i want to do? My home is still too cluttered (because tools and shit are everywhere to paint a bedroom, which isn't helping), but identifying anything appealing is.... NOT going well. I'm even back to half-assed meals instead of real cooking. And this is so stupid! I did a good job! Everyone acknowledges I did a good job! But this must have been the straw that broke the camel's back or something, I know I'm perpetually stupidly stressed, but I didn't think something this trivial and unsurprising would knock me over such a cliff
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spockandawe · 8 days
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NOW. We get into a section of binderary I like to call exciting new leathers. So what happened. Well, I read Moby Dick for book club, and frankly, there was a lot more bookbinding content in that book than i EVER would have guessed. Not that much, by volume, but any bookbinding is always a fun surprise! And one detail that SNAGGED me was the mention of a book bound in shark leather. Naturally, i immediately went on a quest to see if I could find 1) affordable and 2) ethically sourced shark leather, and never mind point two, because I struck out hard on one. So in a fit of self-pity, I bought a scattering of snake, fish, and ray leather, and then had to start thinking about how to use it.
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I spent a while kind of paralyzed, but the first thing that REALLY caught my eye was this one white and gold snake hide (with purple tones here and there around the scales), and how it made me think of lyctoral robes, and that means it's time for another round of 'It's About The Bones 👌,' babey!! By the incredibly talented @sunderedstar, of course. Benefits of being friends with an incredible writer include the constant supply of gourmet food that's a pleasure to bind and practice with!
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And since this fic had been one of my earliest test subjects for a k118 binding, I wanted to keep that going, and try one of my favorite fics in one of my favorite styles, testing out then new leathers in this format! And the book is a success, but the k118 thing, uh, didn't work. A fun feature of the snake leather is that its so thin I'd be afraid to even try paring it further. Which is great, that's the step I'm worst at! But now I wonder if that thinness means that paste isn't able to saturate the hide the way it would with goat, because the first time I opened this book, the spine IMMEDIATELY popped off the text block 🤣
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I'm not mad at all, the book still works great, it's just got a breakaway spine now and can't do the k118 360 degree party trick. And the binding came together gorgeous! This is a typeset I'm still proud of, and I think i found the right fabric in my stash to match and contrast to the snake leather colors, and the embossed endpapers gave it a nice weight and elegance, all without losing that locked tomb flavor, but capturing a very different vibe than my prior bindings. All things told, I'm very pleased, this was so fun to work with!
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spockandawe · 9 days
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Next, a pair of fanfics! I've been fighting really bad reading brain for a while now, which is SO frustrating when I have a fandom I know I love, authors I know I love, fanfic summaries that have my full attention-- and I can't get myself to start reading. So to try to sidestep that, I went ahead and bound two tossawary fics blind, Servant to a Different King, and A Child Once. It was hard not to go for some of the tossawary fics I've read and loved, but I really want to kickstart my brain into reading new things.
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Both of these were a lot of fun to work with! I wanted to get blue somewhere in the binding for both books, because mobei-jun, but I didn't want to just take the lowest-hanging fruit. For Servant to a Different King, it slips in through the endpapers, and for A Child Once, it's the navy bookcloth. The bindings also weren't designed as a pair, but I still like to link things in quiet ways, so I took the endpapers from the same pack, and went with chaotic, high-energy ones, for Shang Qinghua. So I love how these came out, and I'm pleased to report that I've now read A Child Once! (not from my nice new book, that would be silly, i just suddenly unlocked my ability to read it on my phone)
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spockandawe · 10 days
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Oops, just, uh. Ignore that! The fish was premature. I tried to cancel the upload (because it's scheduled for Thursday) and tumblr LIED and agreed that the upload was canceled, and I wrote the whole thing again and scheduled it properly. An intervening post has the context for weird leather, so the chronology matters objectively matters to me for silly literary reasons 😂
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spockandawe · 10 days
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Next up, another round of mistakenly saving the villain! I did make a silly error with this one. I wanted a teensy weensy misvil, and I also needed a last second sewing project to bring to a local fiber guild meeting on the morrow. So I printed my existing typeset at a smaller size, and... well, there's a reason most of my tiny font documents use georgia as a body font. This is still readable, but the newt serif (my beloved) is fighting for its life.
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But other than that, I'm delighted! My other editions of this have gravitated toward very busy, very red fabrics, and I do love those energies for this novel, but I've been trying to use more of my duo stash, and it does make for a very classy case. And I used these gorgeous embossed endpapers that I've never quite gotten right before, but I nailed it for this set and another book this month! And this paper is just SO pretty, I'm so pleased that I'm doing better at managing my hinges with it
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spockandawe · 13 days
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Another set! I might have tripped over my own feet with this one. What we have here are the four Doom novelizations from the nineties. I've never played doom (only chex quest), I've never read the books. However, I do have a lot of affection for the first one, based on the I Dont Even Own A Television review from back in the day. The 'I'm a born lever-puller' bit lives in my head rent free. HOWEVER, I was under the impression that these were some of those out of print books that are basically impossible to buy normally, and when collecting info for my front matter, I... learned that I may be mistaken! So I need to work on sourcing those through legit channels, but in the meantime, my maybe-unnecessary preservation efforts!
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They're so cute and tiny and I love them 🥺 I was binding these blind, so I have no idea where this is going, but I caught snippets in later books about story focus on... a mormon guy wrestling with the idea of sex before marriage? I don't know if that's bad, but not what I thought I was getting into, hahaha. We'll see how this goes! I'm very pleased to have it, and delighted with how cute it turned out, and I'm stoked to have it on my shelves
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spockandawe · 14 days
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Okay, I have thirty new books to post about, so let's start by knocking out half of them right away! So, recently, I went to a vintage store and bought an adorable little shelf, thinking to use it for my tiny books. And then I got home and realized that most of my tiny books had been given to their authors. So I needed a project to fill this out, and settled on the oz books as a fun public domain set that would look really nice on the new shelves! This set includes the 14 books written by baum himself, and then the 15th book written from his notes after his death.
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Now. Here's my first self-inflicted stumbling block. Each of the books is a pretty small chapter book. Nice and bite-sized, right? A real easy, laid-back lift? Right???
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Yeah, once you stack 15 of them, they totaled something like 675k of text. So this is where 'tiny text' became a theme of the month. My eyes are very good, and I have natural monovision that will probably keep them very good. But all my binderary books are for me this year, because I'd be reluctant to inflict most of them on anyone else, haha
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I ended up wrangling that all in a single word doc so I could keep my formatting consistent, and My God. Then the resulting books were also so small that getting consistent trimming on the guillotine was a real adventure too. But I'm very happy with these! They're so cute and fun, and these were some of the favorite books of my childhood, so I'm delighted to have them now!
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spockandawe · 15 days
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Okay! Binderary! I wasn't going to do it, and then, two thirds of the way through the month, I was like 'but what if i DID.' So naturally, after my attempts to avoid exhausting myself like in previous years, I once again immediately exhausted myself. But I've got everything together, I've got photos, I just have to string together words to post! So that will start publishing by tomorrow or so.
In the meantime, summary info. Binderary 2024 was more restrained in terms of scale and materials than previous years, by design. I made 30 books, for a total of about 8000 pages and just under 4 million words. Two pairs of novels account for about half that word count. My themes were: 1) tiny print that's good for MY eyes, while everyone else's are out of luck ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, 2) legal paper (and the using up thereof), and 3) interesting new leathers. So here we go! More specific posts coming soon.
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spockandawe · 16 days
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i ate'nt dead
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Here's a VERY mediocre midnight picture where i managed to lose the reflection on the foil i was photographing while catching it for every other book on the table, but! BUT! I haven't forgotten this all exists. All the binderary books are ready to photograph, as soon as I can scrub the green paint from my fingers, apply new polish to the nails, clean a table, and find a few minutes when I'm not running late for a meeting. This year has been.... so tired and lethargic, but simultaneously, so overstuffed and frantic. Honestly not super into it!!!!
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spockandawe · 22 days
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What is UP, it's the excuse waterfall hour for obligations that Literally dont exist and that nobody has attempted to enforce. But I get the unhappy fidgets when I don't have anything to post!
In process of painting a room. This sucks! I'm thrilled! It's awful! I'm already addicted! I'm also on day two of three of all-day telecon hell, so i haven't been able to progress.
To procrastinate on this i also started applying peel and stick wallpaper to my stair risers. I cant cross THIS task off either there's a running theme of all the paint jobs in my house being superficially pretty but REAL goddamn sloppy and i need to clean old paint spatters off my wood because boy, the contrasting risers make them POP. A knife and cutting mat now live on my floor, to motivate me
As a result, my home is a disaster! I can't photograph binderary or a crochet blanket because Oh God everything is a mess and it's also too cluttered to focus on anything new
I did spend an entire evening halfway combing out the fringe on my giant macrame i still haven't photographed tho lmao
Oh and i shotgunned dungeon meshi in two days, a++++ do recommend, one of the most erotic sfw things I've ever read, a few stray succubus boobs aside. Highkey considering trying to woodburn that one mithrun panel, with the eye. Would be cool if i had coherent thoughts to share, but nope!
I also dissociated at work and made 60 millipede legs. This is. Slightly less than half of the millipede legs I need. Kill me now!
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spockandawe · 27 days
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THIRTY, eyooooo
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Every so often I'm like hee hee hoo hoo i escaped the seasonal depression slump this year, and then I'll languish and languish until I abruptly do something objectively stupid, like deciding a week ago that i should actually do a full binderary or ill Die, and while i can tell that things aren't exactly working RIGHT, at least they're working at higher speed, and hello hi i just finished building 22 cases and casing in the associated books in one day
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spockandawe · 28 days
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Every so often I'm like hee hee hoo hoo i escaped the seasonal depression slump this year, and then I'll languish and languish until I abruptly do something objectively stupid, like deciding a week ago that i should actually do a full binderary or ill Die, and while i can tell that things aren't exactly working RIGHT, at least they're working at higher speed, and hello hi i just finished building 22 cases and casing in the associated books in one day
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spockandawe · 2 months
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What would someone like Lord Feng think upon suddenly finding himself in such a situation?
One word: Vomit.
Two words: Absolutely disgusting.
Three words: Feeling absolutely murderous.
Four words: Rather die than live.
Guyssss, Peerless is so fun, and also i would die for Feng Xiao. This isn't my favorite danmei novel, but it IS still my favorite danmei ship of all time
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spockandawe · 2 months
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get to know you better game! tagged by @veliseraptor, thank you!! :D
last song i listened to: this is the cruel wars, by the dreadnoughts. i loooove songs about recruiting sergeants, and i was delighted to recognize the first part from fighting for strangers by steeleye span, but that song is from the seventies and you can kinda tell! It's really awesome to have a more modern version that's a bit more of a bop and easier to sing to
currently reading: oh man, I'm actually a little stalled now. I read like 80% of moby dick in a day and a half last weekend, and I've still got a hangover. I'm reading Peerless, and reading One Piece (chapter 750/1100), and reading tossawary's sqh/yqy fic, for generous paused interpretations of that present tense 😆
Currently watching: not much! I guess LOADS of soulsborne theory while i do other stuff (I don't soulsborne), and a friend and i might be starting the mandalorian on our very slow star wars quest this weekend
Currently obsessed with: macrame, crochet, one piece. None of these are things i should be focusing on! My hands are suffering, and my head is full of silly nautical men in ridiculous makeup, ahaha. The winter Dead Inside times have apparently passed, but my focus is NOT cooperative right now, oh my god
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