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communal_creators)

Earlier:
- part 0: preliminaries (includes partial glossary of terms)

I know there are a lot of people who haaaaaate being forced to sit through video but since audio playback is inherent to the enterprise...This is under a minute, promise.

This is a brief demonstration of the opening of one of my compositions partially engraved (~sheet music typesetting) in Dorico. The two industry-standard engraving apps in media composition scoring are Dorico and Sibelius; Finale used to be a third but was sunsetted to much consternation.

If you come from classical music (especially classical orchestral music), you may be ??? about the score formatting. This is because scores for session orchestra and concert/classical orchestra have different formatting! (See part 0: preliminaries for more detail as to why). Differences for session orchestra you see here include:

- Score is in C (NOT a transposing score for the conductor - nota bene, transposing is "allowed" for octaves), but we won't have e.g. horn in F or trumpet in Bb. ( Read more... )

As for playback:

- Guess what, Dorico and Sibelius at the level of orchestral scores are spendy. :]

- I'm using NotePerformer, which is the standard higher-quality playback engine, especially if you don't have time to mock it up in the DAW (or you're an art/concert composer for whom a mockup is not part of your workflow). But that's also money (~$130 USD).

NotePerformer is pretty credible with a lot of orchestral instruments. You still have to massage its output. For example, in Sibelius [not shown] you can set playback to molto espressivo (LOTS OF FEELING) vs. senza espressivo (NO FEELINGS EVER!!!) (etc). My experience is that particular instruments can be less "real"-sounding and the "vocalists" (both SATB choir and associated "solo" voices) are absolutely terrible, as in "my vacuum cleaner sings more credibly than this" terrible.

Aside: There are some good vocal VST libraries for specific use cases. I hate that I am often able to straight-up identify "Oh yeah, XYZ floating ethereal ~Celtic Twilight vibes soprano 'ahhh' ululation in this trailer/score/whatever was $SPECIFIC_VST_LIBRARY" because, apparently, I have no life; but this is not unusual in this field.

I know at least one full-time composer/orchestrator/musician who straight-up bounces NotePerformer output and then processes that in the DAW (reverb etc) and, you know, this person makes a living doing this. So that's one route one can take.

Why, you ask, can't we just export this score-stuff into a DAW with all the fancy (...spendy) VST instruments and "paste in" nicer/more individualized instruments? Dorico (and Sibelius) do in fact export to MIDI and MusicXML. [1] This is a very reasonable question that will be the topic of the next walkthrough (part 2), mainly because it's a surprisingly (annoying) complicated topic as to why this is rarely straightforward. (Let me tell you all about negative track delay...)

[1] Missed these glossary items earlier! ( brief explanations of MIDI and MusicXML )

Happy to answer questions, although I have no idea if anyone else finds this interesting. :p

Tags:

music: composition

Hi, it's been a while. I'm going to try to post like once a month on Palestine stuff so there's some more awareness of things that are going on. Because there's a lot.

Israel continues to bomb multiple Arab nations and threaten them; they last struck Qatar attempting to assassinate Hamas leaders who were there at the invitation of the US to discuss a ceasefire with Israel. The result of that is now Arab nations are rethinking their relationships with the US. They are also continuing to bomb Gaza daily and round up people in the West Bank.
Laura Loomer got the US to stop issuing travel visas to Palestinian children traveling for humanitarian and medical treatment.
Meanwhile, in the US, the House just passed a Lauren Boebert amendment to the Pentagon budget that would target the BDS movement.
Rep Brian Mast just introduced a new bill that would allow Marco Rubio to revoke US passports, including US citizens, at his whim, but basically if you criticize Israel.
Earlier this week, progressive House Reps and others like Mahmoud Khalil and Cynthia Nixon did a big push for HR 3565 Block the Bombs Act, which would block the President from selling certain munitions to Israel, except under specific conditions. There are now 46 cosponsors, all of them Democratic. 7 joined this month. Although Reps Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene have both made statements opposing Israel, they have not joined as cosponsors.

Orgs and places to donate to:

The New Yorker is trying to convince me that Bluesky has become annoying and everyone’s back on Xitter. Not linking because it’s paywalled. True or false?

I never got the hang of Twitter. I have similar problems with Bluesky. I don’t need a social site to deliver me more links. I want conversation. Is conversation dead? Where is it? (I know there’s some here…)

I miss Usenet, lol

Watch on YouTube

Dreaming Robots' Electric Eel Wheel 6.1 e-spinner with some sacrificial Rambouillet/Gotland wool blend. Sorry about the mess; too hot to go outside with this. I don't claim this is good spinning, just a brief demonstration of Getting The E-Spinner To Do A Thing.

Tags:

crafts: spinning

Watch on YouTube

Ashford Traveller (single treadle although you can see that, Scotch tension). Spinning mulberry (bombyx) silk from combed top.

Tags:

crafts: spinning

Or: if your goal is threadweight/cobweb, why silk fiber is not quite as profligate an expense as you might think:

The white is mulberry bombyx silk; the tawny stuff was my briefly foraying into eri silk. This is for personal use/enjoyment (needle lace) so it's fine that I'm wandering off like this. This is several hours of admittedly inefficient spinning, since I take frequent breaks so there's a very start-stop nature to it, but because the spin is so fine, this bobbin is...not very full.

This is what I have REMAINING in 2 oz. of mulberry silk combed top (about $25 USD). It exploded out of the package (typical) and also, it barely looks like I've even used any of it. As it stands, I suspect I'm going to be spinning this combed top for the next 30,000 years. :)

That said, silk is my absolute favorite to spin and I prefer spinning threadweight, so this is not a hardship.

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882720.html

0.

Hey, Americans! Look sharp, the Trump Administration is trying to play a head game on you about Covid vaccines, and it's apparently working, because I see nobody talking about this in the news or on social media.

There's a lot of complexity and chaos right now about what is available to whom and how to get it. Things are changing fast, especially on the state level. I hope to discuss it in another post, but there's one thing in particular I want to clarify for you.

As you've probably heard, week and a half ago, the FDA changed the authorization for the Covid vaccines, in a way which curtails access. The thing that people are hearing is that for people under 65 years old the Covid vaccines are not authorized with some exceptions.

That's technically correct, but badly misleading. A lot of people hear "not authorized" and stop really listening to the rest of the sentence. They hear "with some exceptions" and assume they're not likely to be one such, and won't qualify to get it, and tune right out.

To be cynical for a moment, you're meant to assume that.

But it turns out you're one of the exceptions. Probably. How can I know that?

The actual language from the FDA authorization just issued ( Read more [2,750 words] )

This post brought to you by the 218 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

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Ex Tenebris: a gothic space opera TTRPG [Kickstarter, already funded!].

Beyond the dark emptiness of space, beyond dreaming, lies the Tenebrium. Only you can unearth its mysteries, defeat the twisted horrors that lurk there, and keep humanity from becoming prey.

In Ex Tenebris, you play a ragtag team of investigators, protecting the Republic of Stars from terrifying supernatural threats. You will face sorcerers and cults, dark technology from lost civilisations and the slobbering terrors lurking in the nightmare realm of the Tenebrium.

Ex Tenebris is a complete TTRPG containing all the rules, setting and scenarios that you need to embark on adventures amongst the stars.

[...]

Ex Tenebris takes inspiration from the grotesque imagery of the Aliens movies, the existential dread of Event Horizon, the mysticism of Dune, the dark gothic setting of Warhammer 40,000, and the weird science/magic fusion of Ninefox Gambit.

- Josh Fox, lead designer & writer
- Becky Annison, writer
- Juan Ochoa, illustrator
- Nathan D. Paoletta, layout and graphic design
- Andriy Lukin, logo design
- Jog Brogzin, cartographer
- Chirag Asnani, writer
- Sarah Doom, writer
- Eleanor Hingley, writer
- Kieron Gillen, writer
- Yoon Ha Lee, writer (howdy!)
- Tejas Oza, writer
- Galen Pejeau, writer

So I recently had a weird interaction with a local politician, Jack Perenick. After I mentioned that the Election Commission sent me a mail-it voting packet that did not include a ballot, he told me that was because I was declared an inactive voter and would need to apply to be reinstated. He then pulled out his phone, brought up an app, and stated that, of the listed voters I live with, two were not active. I was declared inactive a couple months ago, and one of my house mates, G___, had their voting address changed in the last month to an address they have not lived at in years. He then showed me their entry on the phone app that listed the old address. He then told me to not worry, that he would take care of everything. After that, he then fiddled with his phone a bit, touched the screen a few times, and then said 'There, done, I have take care of it, I have updated the election commission records. You and G___ can now vote again.'

So, when I looked into things, none of that was true. I was not declared inactive, G___ did not have their address changed to an old one within the previous month, and candidates can not update election commission records with a phone app**. All of it was a lie.

** There is a phone app that shows them the names, addresses, etc, but it only displays information, it does not have the ability to alter any of it.

Current Mood: aggravated

2 pounds of potatoes (mostly purple-skinned, some not)
4 yellow onions
6 heads of garlic
2 bunches of leeks
6 long green peppers
6 medium-small eggplants
30 small tomatoes
1.5 pounds of arugula
2 big bunches of French breakfast radishes with their greens
take-what-you-want herbs and hot peppers (I chose none)

First thoughts: yay, alliums! Sauted radish greens. Roasted eggplant and potatoes. Yet another ratatouille variant. Potato salad with arugula and diced pickles plus hard-boiled eggs. Caramelized leeks in a savory bread pudding, maybe with roasted tomatoes and peppers. Green salads.

Tags:

farm share

Test spin of small experimental alpaca floof batch.

For lagniappe, the completed smol woven object made from my handspun that's headed to

eller, mostly wool/silk/angelina blends (both colorways). :3

Tags:

I don't know who needs to know about this, but:

I just discovered the Android app "Periodically". It's described as an "event logger". It's for keeping track of when a recurring thing has happened, and figuring out what the average time is between occurrences. You just keep it updated each time the event happens, and it will do the math for you to figure out the frequency, and even give you a notification when it predicts the event is likely to happen again. If you're tracking more than one thing, it will try to suss out correlations for you.

I mention because twenty five years ago or so, I needed exactly this functionality and could not find any application that would do what I needed, so I wrote a thing for myself, and since then a lot of people I've mentioned it to have wondered where they can get one like it. Mine was Mac/Palm Pilot, so not of much use to most people, especially these days.
Lo, somebody seems to have realized the need for this functionality, and brought it to the market. So I thought I'd mention.

Now, in this day and age, a lot of people, especially in the US, are concerned with security. Especially if they're tracking something to do with their health. This app is not specific to health, so nothing about it immediately reveals that it is storing health information on casual inspection; you could use some sort of other term for whatever health condition it is you are actually tracking. So, for instance, If you were tracking how often your migraines happened, you could call that "new box of cereal".

This app defaults to local-only data storage on your Android device, and the developer claims that it only collects "app activity" for analytics, and shares nothing with third parties. It outputs CSV and has an option to back up to Google Drive.

I haven't tried it myself, but it has a rating of 4.6 stars out of five on the Play Store.

Reviewers on the Play Store note that tracker apps that are specific to the kind of event – such as health- specific loggers – often have needless complexity, and often some weird ideas about graphic design. They praise this app for its clean, elegant look and simple, effective functionality.

In addition to its obvious applicability to episodic health conditions, it strikes me as potentially extremely useful in one of the trickier parts of prepping: figuring out one's burn rate of resources. I think I might trial it to help me figure out how often I should expect to have to buy a fresh bale of toilet paper and how long the big bottle of ibuprofen will last me.

Tags:

pols,
tech

H.R.5106 - Restore Trust in Congress Act is bipartisan legislation that aims to ban Members of Congress and their families from engaging in insider trading. The supervising ethics office will impose penalties and issue any additional guidance, as well as publicly disclose fines that will be set to 10% of the stock’s asset value, plus disgorged profits.

The STOCK Act of 2012 has helped expose the extent of potential conflicts of interest and provided the public with transparency into lawmakers’ financial activities, but a lack of enforcement has stopped it from achieving the goal of curbing insider trading.

(In related anti-corruption legislation: Close the Revolving Door Act of 2025, legislation that would impose a lifetime ban on former Members of Congress from becoming lobbyists.)

Contact your representative.

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I used hand carders after washing, then drying outside. It's extremely fluffy (and probably de facto blended with catten floof). I've never spun alpaca before, so that's next!

Tags:

crafts: spinning

Wrapping up this tiny DIY loom + handspun (the yarns and the silk thread) for

eller. :) Mainly bobbin-end leftovers from plying yarns that went to their furever homes. :)

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The adventure begins. :)

(Alternately, I have misidentified the bag and it's really mohair?!)

Some views of the McKenzie River, which we got a great look at since the road we took followed and crossed over it.

( Read more... )

Tags:

water: river

(cross-posted with slight adjustments from

foxmoth at

communal_creator)

Howdy! I’m Yoon, an MFA student in media composition and orchestration. I am here today to talk to you about sampled orchestral mockups in composing music.... It’s a niche field even in (media) composition due to the cost + tech barriers to entry. I thought folks might be curious (and maybe interested in trying their hand at a lower-cost version of it).

To the extent that I have musical training (mostly Obligatory Asian-American Piano Lessons by volume), it’s classically inflected. Even folks who hate classical music :) probably know it exists. A more “traditional”/conservatory approach to writing for (symphony) orchestra might involve pen-and-paper composing to generate sheet music. This is my background and I still do a lot of sketching on staff paper.

This inherently means you’re reading (Western classical) music notation (of which more anon) and often means you’re wrassling explicitly with music theory and related topics.

However! These day, hiring a session orchestra is semi-doable by a dedicated individual if you have the money lying around. ( Read more... )

So most mortals who are doing orchesstral or hybrid orchestral scores for film or TV and especially non-AAA video games are using sampled orchestra mockups.

Note: unless otherwise specified, if I say “music notation” or “music theory” I’m referencing more or less common practice Western (European-derived)-style music notation simply in the interests of avoiding unwieldiness in this overview. ( some further observations )

Hiring a session orchestra may be surprisingly semi-doable by a normal human but most work in orchestral media composition (film, TV, video game scores) is now done in software via sampled orchestral mockup. This includes classical-ish, e.g. John Williams everything or Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score for The Queen’s Gambit, or hybrid orchestra (e.g. Two Steps from Hell) with synth or “modern” instrumentation elements.

A quick and dirty (incomplete) overview of terms you might come across in this space, with simplified explanations. There’s a LOT of jargon, some of which is obscure or confusing even to e.g. classical musicians entering this space! ( Read more... )

This has all been in the way of preliminaries, apologies! This is an extremely technical field so the jargon alone is A Lot.

These days, composers often write (in that workflow) using engraving software. In this context, this means “music typesetting for sheet music,” and for session work specifically there are strict formatting rules to save time (money). The other workflow for computer-based composition + production (i.e. not tracking live instruments, of which more discussion later) involves taking everything into the DAW and producing realistic-sounding mockups in software. I will (in future posts) run through DAW examples of this (hopefully with video + audio capture so you can see the workflow).

Happy to answer any questions; it’s almost impossible even to gesture at a bunch of the music or tech stuff in a small space, and I have almost certainly missed some useful jargon because it's UNENDING. :p

ETA #1
next: part 1: brief demo of engraving software + playback

Tags:

music: composition

Perhaps overly ambitious for a project, but I'm doing this as a fun hobby fidget with no expectation it'll turn out "well." (In real-life, this is fiber-based trolling.)

I started this a few years ago but life got busy.

(Technical details posted elsewhere to

prototypediablerie.)

I figure if I'm spinning anyway, I may as well entertain myself by spinning my own silk thread (largely the white on the left, mulberry/bombyx, with a random foray into the darker yellow on the left, eri silk) for needle lace.

(Ignore the red/yellow nonsense on the bobbin, which is sari silk; I was too lazy to reel it off because my bobbin situation is hilariously dire.)

I had a visitor this week: a very earnest German Shakespeare scholar and teacher who I met last year on a writing retreat. She was swinging through Oxford to attend a conference and stayed in my guest room for a few nights.

When she came into my sitting room she first admired my bookcases, as one does, and then did a double take: "Oh! You have a really big television! What do you watch?"

"Cycling, mainly," I said, but this didn't help. Didn't compute. I could practically see steam rising off the top of her head as the gears clashed. And actually she's the second friend of mine who's been visibly perplexed by my TV.

No doubt they had assumed I'd be the sort of elitist literary snob who wouldn't allow such a thing into the flat. Whereas in fact I am such a massive elitist literary snob that I don't feel any lurking status threat from the presence of a 55" flatscreen. (Plus my favorite cycling commentator is a devoted fan of Fitzcarraldo Editions, so.)

Very minor anecdote but I've never seen anyone so obviously realizing in mid-stream that they'd gotten their assumptions about my preferences and habits all wrong. Do you ever find that you surprise people by liking something that you "shouldn't" like?

Tags:

musings,
sport

At this point, because life is too short, I block on sight people I see recommending anything by/to do with the serial racist TERF harasser Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Zen Cho's summary), who now writes as "Maria Ying" (with someone else)? (WinterFox, Requires Hate, whatever the hell other pseudonyms and/or monikers). There's a chance current readers/recommenders/etc. have no idea and just haven't heard, but like I said, life is too short, so why give any more time of day than "nope, blocking" to someone running around reccing a harasser?

(I was in her targeting crosshairs but fortunately only in a glancing fashion, unlike people I know whom she harassed in pretty awful ways, in an ongoing pattern of behavior.)

Taking a break from MUD coding.

Latest singles preparing for a 3-ply "leaf" yarn!

This one is also slated for Local Astronomer Knitter Friend. :)

This book has genuinely been my favorite read all YEAR. It's so engagingly written (I love technical/craft instructional books), wry moments of humor, but incredibly clear explanations of the engineering of a spinning wheel along with the MATH.

Music reel. :3 Thoughts/feedback welcome (although I'm still learning industry norms for composition/orchestration); I graduate in 2028 but figure I'd hit the learning curve accreting a reel starting now.

Note: it's the norm for people in composition/orchestration to have audio-only reels (unless, I suppose, you have some gigantic AAA-videogame or Star Wars-level movie credit you have permission to show off as a video clip!).

3 pounds of new potatoes
2 pounds of orange carrots
6 medium-small Italian eggplants
2 big bunches of collards
2 green peppers (I chose long over bell shape)
24 medium-small red tomatoes
1.5 lb salad greens (lots of arugula)
10 thin leeks
take-what-you-want hot peppers and herbs (I only wanted some sage this week)

First thoughts: I’ll need to get some onions. More batches of ratouille variants. Tomato-based vegetable puree soup with barley. Potato salad with hard-boiled eggs, minced pickles, arugula, and dill and/or parsley. Colcannon with potatoes and collards. Beans and greens using collards and some of last year’s’ hot sauce, also some carrots for color. Green salad. Vichyssoise, if I have enough potatoes.

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farm share

a.k.a. I haven't had time to code anything yet lol.

cf.

telophase's once-upon-a-time of sketch featuring BUSTY BLONDE CHERIS with her SPACE FERRET. (I still have the pic,

telophase, not sure if I have permission to reshare or where there's a link? XD)

One real plus of our hotel room was that it faced west, so lots of sunset views!

( Read more... )

Tags:

sunset,
water: sea

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

Back to school for my kiddo! And I bought the Pelikan Pura to replace my Pelikan Twist and I have zero regrets.

Here’s this month’s stationary supplies:

Stickers

household stuff sheet from Eggtart Studio (via stickii; I think this was an advent sheet)

day to day icons sheet from Neko Mori Arts (via stickii, I think I bought this one specifically because I needed more habit stickers. Currently tracking writing days with these!)

Calendar from Mossy Pine (as usual; I got a whole year’s worth!)

These were the intersection of being a little bit back to school-ish and also having the right colour vibe to go with the inks I wanted.

Paper Products

Campus Diary free monthly calendar (new)

Clairfontaine Triomphe blank notebook (going since April 2025)

Koyuko campus notebook cover

I already talked about my new calendar for the year, a Campus free monthly diary. It worked great with the fountain pen I used for numbers in September so I’m pretty happy with it so far, and I’ve got it slotted into the green cover (pictured below) on the opposite site of my current journal. Because they’re slotted in opposite sides rather than using strings or clips in the middle, there’s a bit of a gap in the centre. I was worried this would be a problem for writing but so far it seems to be fine. I’ll try some ink testing with dip pens on the back pages when I next do swatching.

Three fountain pens and inks: Pilot Elite E95S with Diamine Aurora borealis, Pelikan Pura with Diamine Snow Globe, Pelikan Twist with Diamine Winterberry. The latter two have sparkles.

Fountain Pens and Inks

Pilot Elite E95S <m> – Diamine Aurora Borealis (dark teal, carry over from last month)

Pelikan Pura <b> – Diamine Snow Globe (blue with blue shimmer)

Pelikan Twist <m> – Diamine Winterberry (red with red shimmer)

The theme of this month is “omg I finally have pens that work with shimmer ink“. I loved these colours in the Inkvent 2024 calendar but was worried I woudln’t be able to use them.

Since my blog post about the Pelikan Twist I managed to find someone selling the particular model of Pelikan Pura that I’d fallen for with the broad nib I wanted at a sale price, so I decided to jump on it even though I’m unemployed and should probably not be buying $100 pens. But I *love* this pen as much as I hoped I would and it fills a gap in my collection so I don’t feel like I made the wrong choice. The Pelikan Pura anniversary design with the little Y geometric snowflake shape and the pretty teal colour is fantastic, and obviously I’m very excited about having a feed that doesn’t clog up with sparkle. It has a round grip so no issues with that (the way there were with the Twist’s odd triangular grip). I expect this pen will be inked almost constantly since it will likely be my sparkle pen going fowards, and I have a lot of sparkle inks from Inkvent to use. Honestly, this pen jumped immediately into second place in my collection (behind my beloved Pilot Elite).

After this month, the Twist will probably go back to being relegated as a sometimes pen because of the annoying triangle pen, although I’ve been playing with a coil grip thing on it that helps a bit and we’ll see how I feel about it after a month of use.

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Sorry about the laundry in the background. Meanwhile, it's not even 8 a.m. and it's too hot already to stay outside. Nice sunny day means at least the laundry will dry quickly?!

There were five posts in the community in August:

On August 6,

hermionesvioln posted about a ballot measure to restore voting rights for people in prison: Massachusetts Universal Voting Restoration: https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/314335.html

August 7, I posted about calling RFK Jr about covid vaccine access:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/314506.html

August 13,

fabrisse asked people to contact our senators and congressmembers about the presence of the National Guard in Washington, DC:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/314678.html

August 27,

watersword posted about a bill to make wage theft a federal felony:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/315039.html

On August 30th, I posted about covid vaccine access at pharmacies, which is partly a state-level issue:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/315293.html

Thanks to everyone who posted.

Here's a poll to tell us what you've been doing:

Poll #33566 August check-in

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

View Respondents

In the past month, I

View Answers

called one or both of my senators
6 (35.3%)

called my member of Congress
8 (47.1%)

called my governor
4 (23.5%)

called my mayor, state representative, or other local official
4 (23.5%)

did get-out-the-vote-work, such as text banking or post carding
1 (5.9%)

voted
0 (0.0%)

sent a postcard/email/letter/fax to a government official or agency
8 (47.1%)

went to a protest
2 (11.8%)

attended an in-person activist group
1 (5.9%)

went to a town hall
1 (5.9%)

participated in phone or online training
2 (11.8%)

participated in community mutual aid
2 (11.8%)

donated money to a cause
11 (64.7%)

worked for a campaign
1 (5.9%)

did textbanking or phonebanking
0 (0.0%)

took care pf myself
9 (52.9%)

not a US citizen, but worked in solidarity in my community
1 (5.9%)

committed to action in the coming month
3 (17.6%)

did something else (tell us about it in comments)
1 (5.9%)

As always, everyone is free to make posts about any issues and actions they think the comm should know about. You can also drop some information into a comment to our sticky post if you'd like the mods to do it.

If you're looking for information on anything else, you can use our tags to check for any ongoing actions or resources relevant to the issues you care about. I (#redbird) try to keep the tag list up-to-date. If you need a tag added, you can DM me.

I had some leftover of a single I'd spun and decided to be cheap and DIY a loom to explore weaving it in a smol format. Still in progress but this will be going to

eller. :3

Cardboard, polyurethane clear coat (to stiffen it up a bit. I used an X-acto knife and Japanese push drill because I had them around.

Tags:

Still fussing with the settings on the wheel (especially how aggressive I want takeup). Cloud seems to think the e-spinner is purring.

Finished yarn! This one's going to

niqaeli. Spun on an Ashford Traveller, plied on an EEW 6.1.

This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.

Back to school! As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve decided to use September as my “new year” because it works well with my kid’s school stuff. So it’s time to bid farewell to last year’s calendar, and set up a fresh one! I’m moving from the Traveler’s Notebook free monthly calendar to the KOKUYO Campus one, mostly because the latter is a bit bigger. (Spoiler: the squares are about 18% bigger.)

Last year’s calendar was a Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar. I love the idea of the system of inexpensive refill notebooks and accessories in a planner cover that stays with you, but I wasn’t sure the slimmer form factor was going to work for me.

Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar with stickers on the front and a zippered pouch attached to the back cover. The biggest sticker is a shiny aurora over a mountain. On the upper left there is a smaller sticker of a fox-person sitting in lotus position with the caption “breathe” and in the upper right corner there is a sticker with a cat sleeping beside a witch had with the caption “today is a good day for getting cozy”

Overall, I thought it was a great little calendar. I liked the textured cardstock cover, and I liked the whole setup even more when I picked up the zippered pouch that I have attached to the back cover and use for stickers.

Traveler’s notebook calendar with plastic zipper pouch accessory attached to the back. In this photo it’s flipped open so you can see the sticker sheets I have stuck in there.

I particularly liked this format when travelling this summer, when I decided to use the blank back pages I hadn’t used for testing pens as the place for travel journal entries rather than dragging my regular A5 journal around with me. The tall-thin format is pleasantly easy to pull out of a bag.

Traveler’s notebook calendar with zippered pouch accessory attached to back cover. This shows the loose stickers I have in the pouch.

But when I’m *not* out of the house (which is most of the time) the calendar is just a little small. I use my monthly calendars for tracking a bunch of things, and while some days there’s enough space, that’s not true of all days when I have more stuff I want to record. I’ve also found that a lot of my favourite “small” stickers that I use as habit trackers take up a lot of space. (The dogs below were marking days that I’d spent time writing.)

A peek inside my calendar showing fairly full calendar squares including some tracking runes, dog stickers, washi tape (marking longer events) and a note marking my last day at Intel.

Since I already use an A5 notebook for my journal, I decided I might as well match it for the calendar this year. Honestly I wanted to do that last year but a lot of the A5 options are Monday start and I thought that might be annoying when Sunday start is the more common format around here. The Traveler’s refill lets you fill in your own days of week. But this year I’m just gonna lean into Monday start. I conceptually like it better so I’ve changed my phone and stuff and we’ll see if I start having off-by-one errors.

So my new calendar for the 2025-2026 school year is a KOKUYO Campus Diary Free Schedule monthly calendar. I should note that although this is a blank calendar, the year overview pages are Jan-Dec still so … I dunno, I guess I could cover the labels or just start in the middle, but I apparently barely used those overview pages last year so I’m guessing it’ll just remain blank or I’ll doodle on it or something. While the book itself is clearly bigger, the layout is such that each day’s square is a bit shorter but wider.

Here’s some size comparisons:

The KOKUYO Campus blank monthly calendar with the Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar sitting on top. The Campus notebook is noticeably wider and the squares are bigger, although not as much as they might be since the Campus design leaves some blank space around the edge and the Traveler’s does not.

I did some measuring too:

Measurements comparing the squares in the Campus blank monthly calendar to the Traveler’s one. Numbers in post below this image.

Traveler’s Calendar: 27mm wide by 33mm tall (total 891mm squared)

Campus calendar: 34mm wide by 31mm tall (total 1054mm squared)

So the Campus notebook squares are about 18% bigger, I guess. I don’t know yet if that’ll be enough, but I’m unlikely to start carrying around anything bigger than an A5 notebook so if this doesn’t work out I’ll likely have switch to a weekly planner for at least some of my tracking. My calendar seldom leaves the house but I carry it from room to room and into the backyard in my knitting bag, and A5 is my preferred size for that.

The Campus notebook is cheap enough that it won’t be a tragedy if I bail on it part way through the year. It looks like I paid $5.50 for the Campus one and $11 for the Traveler’s one, so it’s half the cost but also neither of them is exactly going to break the bank. And yes, I did intentionally buy this earlier in the year to help me resist getting too curious about fall planner launches.

The cover is considerably less nice (thin enough that I will need a flat surface or pencil board to write in this, no pleasant texture) but I have a cover for A5 notebooks that should compensate for the thin cover, and I already own several pencil boards that I use with my current journal, so neither of those is deal breakers at this moment.

Campus Monthly free Diary cover. It’s grey and has a picture of some calendar squares on it.

I’m also curious to see how I like the Campus paper. It’s supposedly decent enough for fountain pens, and although I only use those for date numbers currently, I’ll be using the pages in the back of the calendar for ink testing. I’m curious to see how I like it, mostly for the fun of testing a different paper. Although they do have a lot of other cute paper products geared at students that are quite reasonably priced, and I’m never sad to have options.

Some things that did work well this year:

Thin washi tape for marking longer blocks of vacation and events. I love the way it looks even if it takes up a few precious mm of space.

Sticker “rewards” for habits. I’m amused by how much more rewarding these are than drawing tracking icons.

Switching to pencil for calendar writing. I tried pen for a while but didn’t love it.

Getting a pen shaped eraser so it fits in my pencil case better.

Getting a pencil board and using it also as a bookmark so my calendar always opened to the right page.

The zipper pouch for stickers.

I may keep the zipper pouch for stickers even though it won’t be stuck on a notebook any more (I mean, I could, but I’m going to try having both A5 notebooks in a single cover so it would be kind of in the way).

I haven’t actually written in the new calendar yet (I’ll be setting it up on labour day and I’m writing this the night before it posts) but I’m excited to try it out!

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hyounpark has recently started watching the 2022 revival of Quantum Leap, and tonight's episode? Revisited the World Series quake. As somebody who lived through that? ROFL, pedantry ahoy!

Me: "Hi Candlestick! ... wait, happy hour during Game 3 of the Bay Bridge Series? GET UNDER A SOLID DOORWAY NOW."
Me: "WHAT THE HELL YOU WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SEE THE FERRY BUILDING FROM THERE IN 1989, NOT EVEN WITH THE FREEWAY COLLAPSE."
Me: "You can't get across the Bay in the time you have! The bridge is down, BART is down, that utility tunnel is at least FIVE MILES LONG, and even when you come up on the Oakland side you still have to get through the entire-ass Port of Oakland. And you're playing a white family, highly unlikely they would have lived in West Oakland at the time, so now you have at least another two miles of running to get anywhere where the apartments look like that and you could plausibly have none or very few Black neighbors, and OH WAIT YOU'D HAVE TO CROSS THE CYPRESS STRUCTURE TO DO THAT, which also fell down in the quake! Your 90 minutes are up, tick tick BOOM."

hyounpark: "Watching this ep with you is WAY more entertaining than watching it by myself would have been!"
Me: "And this didn't even account for going back to their new apartment in SF at least two miles in the wrong direction, RUNNING UPHILL, to look for the kid!"

*

The Strategist interviewed Sally Jessy Raphael a few weeks ago on some of her favorite things, and I feel seen.

"Let me explain. The first thing people say when they see me is, “Oh my God, you’re so short.” This is terrible. I am slightly under five feet. This means that if I go to buy grown-up clothes in the store, everything is too long. Everything. Every skirt, every pair of jeans, it doesn’t matter what I pay or where I shop. So, I have pinking shears. Everything I own, I pink with the pinking shears. It doesn’t make sense for me to go to Kohl’s and buy $9 jeans and then send them to be hemmed for $30. In New York, that’s what it costs to hem. So I gave up on having anybody hem them. And I’m having trouble threading my sewing machine. So pinking shears do everything."

I mean, not that I own a pair of pinking shears, but I'm always on the lookout for jeans that are short enough for me off the rack. Usually, they end up being some form of slim-to-straight fit cropped style, but the best pair of jeans I ever had was a flared sort of baby bellbottom style that I got at a clothing swap like 15 years ago. They didn't last terribly long (got holes on the inner thighs within a couple of years), but I loved the hell out of those jeans - they were button-fly (look, I bought my first pair of jeans with my allowance from the Gap in the early 90s and that's what I imprinted on), they had embroidered cuffs, they flared out below MY knee height just enough to balance my curvy hips better than any pair of then-trendy skinnies ever did, and I wore them at least twice a week while I owned them except in summer.

They were my holy grail of jeans, and I've been looking for anything like them ever since. I've tried on jeans from probably every American mass-market brand in the interim, but no. At this point, I own two pairs of Levi's Wedgie Straights because they are not "cropped" and come in a 26" inseam (so the knees hit where they're supposed to), and are suitable for the times when I just need plain old jeans that don't stand out. They are reliable. But they don't feel like ~me~ the same way these old jeans did.

I know the real answer is that I just need to buy a sewing machine and learn how to make my own jeans, but. Sigh.

Current Mood: dorky

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Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882100.html

0.

With all the eager discussion of the possibility of Trump dying in office, I am in the delicate and unfortunate position of not actually being in favor of it.

Don't get me wrong. I, too, would enjoy to seeing something very bad happen to Trump. What I'd best like is him getting his just deserts – ideally being arrested, indicted, tried, found guilty, sentenced, having appealed, the appeal failing, appealing again, having that appeal fail, petitioning the POTUS for clemency and it not being granted, him being duly executed by the state as the traitor to the Republic and the Constitution he was proven to be. I'm not generally a big fan of capital punishment, but I am in fact willing to make exceptions; he seems to think he's an exception to a lot of things, and here I would agree with him.

But that's not going to happen, not in this time-line, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.

Perhaps he will simply keel over dead, and I confess I will take at least a little bitter satisfaction in it.

And it's certainly not that I don't wish us all to be spared even another moment of this Trump presidency. Of course I do.

Alas, as much as I hate to crush the pleasant fantasy of us being redeemed by the deus ex machina of artheriosclerosis finally doing its job and carrying off our oppressor: Vance is worse. Much, much worse.

1.

( It's perhaps understandable that you would not realize this.... Read more [6,770 Words] )

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Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

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