LOONA ♡ ‘ FLIP THAT ’ MV

"it was in 2020" oh so like a year or so ago. a couple years. im sorry 5? did you just say five? five years ago ?

maybe this time picking at Textures on my skin will lead to being silky smooth

Fanbinding(ish): Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Leather on bookboard, with hot foil stamping on the spine. The endpapers are a Japanese wave design, partially as a reference to Canaan House being on the water, and is also a reference to the fact that this book was a birthday present for @eebeesee, who is a giant weeb. (Fun fact: I bought that paper in 2012 and have been waiting uh, 11 years, to find the perfect project for it.)

Process under the cut.

Remember two months ago when I said I wasn't wild about doing another paperback-to-hardback conversion? Well. More fool me. (I did try and find a sewn hardback to take apart, but apparently this book was not sold as a sturdy hardback. Cue rant.)

I've tried debossing with leather before, so obviously, for embossing, I decided I'd just pick the most complicated design possible. I had to modify the skull a bit--taking out the IX, which did NOT cut well, and I had to make the lines around the glasses thicker.

After several hours of cricut cutting and experimentation, here is the cover pre-leather. (I also had to floss the skull's teeth with an awl to get some fuzz out, which I found very funny.)

Then, leather:

As you can see, I lose a lot of details in the teeth there, so I went around the edges with a heated brass stylus.

I bought a special skull stamp for the spine: it definitely wasn't made for heat, because while it did serve the purpose, it also came with a metal handle which made handling it awkward. (Oven mitts did not give me the necessary amount of dexterity. I ended up sort of wrapping a paper towel around the handle. My cousin has since informed me that we do own fire resistant gloves, but I did not remember this at the time.)

The stamp was also a pain to get even: it had to be at juuuuust the right temperature and pressure, or you'd either get too much or too little, as shown. It was also pretty picky about foil, but the brass color matched the endband cloth and insides best anyway, so that worked out. (White was a definite no.)

The other fun bit of this was doing the edges: I did them with black foil, but as we established in my earlier foiling experiments, that's not the most reliable. I think I got the best results so far on the top, but kept getting flakes on the others. I ended up painting the outside edge with ink, and then foiling on top of that. The bleed onto the pages ended up looking pretty neat, but since I hadn't done it on the top, I didn't do it on the bottom so that it wouldn't look weird on the inside. I'm not sure the foil added as much gloss as I was hoping for so next time I might just do the ink.

It did mean that I had to separate all the pages twice; I ended up bringing this to my girlfriend's haircut appointment and working on it in the corner. I hope it was the most strangely specific thing the stylist had seen someone doing when they tagged along.

I don’t think I can stress enough how many people on here need a hobby like 95% of what people refer to as jobless behavior is actually just hobbyless behavior. Take up watercolors or tabletop or join a hiking group or something you probably won’t feel as much of an incessant need to freak out on the internet every day

Be high maintenance to be low maintenance: a checklist

daily

- AM and PM skincare

- shower (cold shower for the last 3 minutes)

- moisturize !!!

- floss, mouthwash, brush teeth, clean your tounge

- walk 6-10k steps

- 7-9 hours of sleep

- take your supplements

- drink 1,5-2 liters of water

weekly

- shape eyebrows

- wash hair 2-3 times

- exfoliate your body

- face, hair, feet and hand masks

- hair oiling

- full body shave (face and body)

- change bedding

- clean your room

monthly

- deep clean your room

- everything shower

- mani and pedi

- hair trim (every 3 months)

- teeth withening

- hair glossing

- laser hair removal

annually

- dentist appointments

- doctor checkups

- clean out your closet

- set goals for yourself

All the terminology relating to tech and the Internet is English, and one of the endearing features of the French public broadcasting in Canada is that every time they use an English neologism they have to immediately perform a ritual penance where they apologize and grope for a French translation, whether sanctioned or improvised, and so this comes up all the time in that context.

Often this is sort of dry but when the English word is already stupid it has a lot of comic potential. I've previously heard "doomscrolling" translated as défilement morbide, which is already great -- you must understand that the speakers grab at these terms like drowning sailors grasping for floating debris -- but today I heard it translated as défilement funeste, which is just impossibly charming

i think about this at least five times a day

nosferatu (2024) dir. robert eggers // kiss of death (1908) by włodzimierz błocki