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Sticky: Oh hello, I'm pinned, I think

I think one can do pinned here? Or "sticky"?? Anyway, I just went and cleaned up some weird code that the linkback from my WP plugin was doing and figured that I should note: more often than not, what you see here is just mirroring my blog-blog! But I do reply to comments here, obvi, the posts just *originate* mostly from another place.

In the spirit of putting some useful things right up top, here's a the intro from my Tumblr, where I am the most active:

I go by B most often and if you are wondering how to pronounce my handle/name, this post right here has visual and aural examples, thanks to a wonderful podficcer ask.

I’m all over the internet because I’ve been here a long time, see my Beacons for the regular places. Tarot card stickers can be found here!

I’m also on AO3 as bzedan as well because the fact that I’m very googlable has yet to be a problem with work.

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Now that’s a 3D asset

Now, I’ve made some Fallout: New Vegas themed items before, because I’m super normal about the game. Big as my fannish love is, I have avoided making props because I live in a very small apartment and don’t need more clutter. That said, I had a realisation last playthrough that I could both have a game prop AND use up some crafting supplies in one go, so: the Sierra Madre Casino snow globe.

A video gif of a hand setting a snowglobe on a stack of beat up old books. The snowglobe is labelled "Sierra Madre Casino" and has a pip boy standing in a pile of coins in front of a hotel type building. Red glitter swirls around. — Ta-da!

A few years ago, Chase got me a cute kiddy craft kit to make snow globes. The theme was sparkly baked goods. I made one, it was delightful, then packed the pieces for the other two away because I don’t need three snow globes around that aren’t quite my style. Now, in FNV, you collect these from different locations, it’s a fun little bonus thing. I realised while playing that they’re close enough to the same shape as those in the craft kit and was very !!! about it.

A screencap from Fallout: New Vegas of the Sierra Madre Casino snow globe on a crate. It has a red backing and shows the pip boy standing in a pile of gold coins in front of the casino. — Honestly, I got the red background really close and I’m very proud of that.

The problem was, as with any craft I do: how do I do this while not buying anything and just using what I have to hand (which to be fair, is a lot of stuff). If I had one of those laser cutting machines then heck, this would be a simple build, I could knock out the figures inside from acrylic, do the letters, build the paths for it all from the asset itself. However, I am not so blessed.

You know what I did have though? Shrinky Dinks. I could blow up an image of the asset, trace it, paint it, shrink it, and it would look (close enough) to the screen-printed acrylic that a perfect facsimile would have. Thanks to poking around I found the “oh that’s obvious” solution to calculating the shrink size that my oven would give (thank you craftmehappy), you make a ruler and shrink that. I also very carefully outlined Pip Boy, then realised I forgot to flip him. THEN carefully outlined him again and realised I forgot to trace him sized up (because: shrinking) and then third time was the charm.

A close-cropped photo of a makeshift paint palette, frosted clear plastic painted with a building, and the outline of a Pip-Boy mascot standing in a pile of gold. Through the plastic is visible a black and white print out of a snow-globe of Sierra Madre Casino from Fallout: New Vegas. — BTW I gotta recommend the pre-roughed version of this stuff, lifesaver, lasts forever.

Which is why the proportions are not so perfect, on the letters specifically. I ah, my main enemies are precision cutting and lettering. But I think I did a very good job despite it all, cutting them from craft foam. Then! I glued them onto the base upside down and had to do it all over again. Very me-coded thing to do.

A photograph of a workspace cluttered with cutting tools of various specialities. Letters spelling "Sierra Madre Casino" cut from green craft foam are laid out on a scrap of cardboard. — This is from the second go of it.

In the end though, it was all worth it. I broke up the build over two weekends, it was my reward for meeting goals throughout the week. I sealed the backs of the Shrinky Dink pieces, found my red glitter, mixed actually a spot-on colour for the back, and got the whole thing together.

A photo of a snow globe on a stack of beat-up old books. The snow globe is labelled "Sierra Madre Casino" on the base and has a pip boy standing in a pile of coins in front of a big hotel. It looks a lot like the asset from Dead Money. — Also I have, of course, exactly the right vibe books around as props.

You can see from the side that the casino itself is a little warped but that I got everything this flat is a miracle as far as my history with Shrinky Dinks is concerned.

A photo of a snow globe on a stack of beat-up old books, viewed from the side so the metallic red back is visible, as is more of the red glitter. The snow globe is labelled "Sierra Madre Casino" on the base and has a pip boy standing in a pile of coins in front of a big hotel. It looks a lot like the asset from Dead Money. — It’s all under water, which warps things anyway, so!

And, just for you, a bonus view of the back, where I glued the letters on SO GOOD, just upside down.

A photo of a snow globe on a stack of beat-up old books. The "Sierra Madre Casino" letters on the base are upside down. The back of the snow globe is just a deep metallic red-brown. — Bless.

A very satisfying craft! This is my favourite of the DLC, so it felt like the perfect way to celebrate that. I still have the pieces for one more snow globe in the kit, but I’m in no rush to make another. I will wait for inspiration to hit me, though let’s be honest it will probably be Fallout: New Vegas themed as well. Such is life.

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reading recommendations

Sector General: just what the doctor ordered

I find a lot of my favourite new reads from recommendations in newsletters (hey, btw, I always have 2-3 book recs and at least one short story in every one of my newsletters!). If I like what someone is sending weekly or monthly, the odds are that their couple-line summary of a book they’ve read that they like will sell me on trying it.

In June, the 70’s Sci Fi Art newsletter mentioned James White’s Sector General series as part of the greater survey of space hospital illustrations. Curious about the description, “a hospital space station that promotes peace through interstellar emergency services” I opened up Libby and saw that my local library had the first omnibus, Beginning Operations, available.

The cover of Beginning Operations, showing a gorgeous painting of a ring-type spaceship with a red cross on it, a scrubby blue starfield behind. — Beginning Operations, James White. Tor Books, 2001.

Like any big ol’ omnibus, this had a loving long intro that set the stage and sold me on what I’d be reading. And boy, it was exactly sounding like my jam. The Sector General stories were written from 1957–1999, which is a WILD span of time. It’s all the fun of an adventure story, with problems to be solved and just the right guy (doctor) to do it, etc etc. Only instead of war (and I love my future tank war Hammers Slammers series, mind you) it’s medicine. And it’s about giving medicine and health to everyone, even if they are a creature of your nightmares, or super irritating as a person. Because even if someone sucks they deserve basic care!

The ongoing themes are that we can’t know everything, that we can’t expect people to act or think like we do, and that it’s part of the job of living in the world to meet folks where they’re at. It’s refreshing as hell! I grew up reading Alan Dean Foster books, Nor Crystal Tears being my first, and that’s fully from the perspective of basically a giant mantid. The big draw of the Humanx-Commonwealth books was that there was buyable biology behind things. They made enough sense with how animals and plants worked. And “people” could be a million different shapes and thought types.

But even then? The reptile species kind of sucks and is always mean, but not in a “your aunt is just like that” kind of way. I’m of an age where there was a lot of alternate rodent universe stuff–your Fievels and Great Mouse Detectives, etc–and in most of those the rats are Bad. There are Bad Species (shout out to NIMH for keeping it chill). Boring! I got so easily annoyed by seeing that sort of thing, and as an adult with Scientist Friends who study things like bugs I became even more tired of “this animal is cute so it is good and more interesting.”

In Sector General, however, literally who cares. This is a blob, they love playing pranks. This is, I guess a dragonfly? He’s so sweet and gentle and also an amazing liar. Armoured elephant thing? Nerd. Crab? A bitch but we love him. There’s a whole book about a species that basically exists to kill and fight and they’re given grace (and no I don’t mean the book where war does come to Sector General, but yeah the real monster is man, lol). It’s just very nice!

Meanwhile Conway's closest friend is the universally popular Dr. Prilicla, a fragile GLNO e-t who resembles a giant and beautiful dragonfly, carries diplomacy to the point of fibbing since its empathic talent makes it cringe from hostile emotion, and likes to weave its canteen spaghetti into an edible cable to be chomped while hovering in mid-air. — Snippet from the introduction to one of the omnibus.

Also, as a human of today, how gender is handled across species is kind of elegantly done, I think. If you’re talking about your own species, sure, use pronouns. For other species though? Unless you are specifically talking about situations or organs where it is relevant, then you use “it,” because gender isn’t relevant there and also asking people to keep track of everyone’s shit, in a world where folks could have six genders and also they live in steam bath chlorine environments so you only see them in protective gear is a big ask. I got so used to one doctor being “it” that when we got a book from that doctor’s POV, so the pronouns were used I kept getting jumpscared by “he/him” (note: all the humans in the non-human POVs are referred to with “it” so the whole thing is very even, tbh).

Prilicla wasn't sure that he liked being called a gentleman when he wasn't even an Earth-human, but he knew that the term was intended as a courtesy and that friend Braithwaite's feelings of concern for him were strong and sincere. — From Double Contact, James White. Tor Books, 1999.

That’s not to say it’s all a dream. There’s some weird, of the time standard, stuff about what women can and can’t do in the early books (1950s!) and it’s startling, like it always is. The focus on meat being the only “good” thing to eat and salads being gross and “for rabbits” is so of it’s time and place its like comedy. There is growth though, over the course of the stories the hot nurse becomes a head pathologist and by 1998 there’s a cross-species ace happily ever after so!

I have: so many books. I try not to buy books unless I know I will be returning to them, both for re-reads and reference. Unfortunately it looks like I’m going to have to hunt down four big fat omnibus to add to my shelves. They’re kind of hard to find in libraries, but if you are looking for what a friend called “old school good times” they’re a delight. And there’s a gentleness there that is kind of the right medicine.

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Tab cleanout: (early) September 2025

I continue to have eyes bigger than my stomach when it comes to things to read and engage with so another tab cleanout it is.

Make Up A Guy, by Nora Reed. Also there’s a make up a fantasy guy. Literally just a fun silly little character generator.
status: moved to Absolutely random shit because I can’t find if I have a folder for fun generators

Sounds of North American Frogs, from Smithsonian Folk Ways Recordings. It’s what is says on the tin! I found the link via something nice that went into detail about it but I’m just charmed it exists. From the Bandcamp page: “This classic of both biological fieldwork and natural sound recordings, originally released by Folkways in 1958, presents 57 species of frogs and toads on 92 tracks, digitally remastered from the original master tapes. Compiled and narrated by renowned herpetologist Charles M. Bogert, these sounds were recorded in swamps, lakes, woods, creeks, and road-side ditches all over North America.”
status: added to wishlist on Bandcamp

Profanity Adventures at Monkeon. It’s an archive of what happens when you swear in various text adventures on the Spectrum 48k. A fun range of responses from restarting the game to gentle chiding.
status: added to upcoming newsletter links section

Bird divination text found at Hittite settlement over at The History Blog. Just a little info about a cuneiform tablet about interpreting the flights of birds. What is interesting is that it was maybe worn or hung as display and I like thinking about someone who carried a bird flight path cheat sheet around with them.
status: moved to Absolutely random shit

A look at how fan fiction is changing publishing and reading from NPR. A friend sent me this and the transcript wasn’t showing at the time so I set it aside to listen to later, then when I did look at it like two weeks later the transcript was there so I read it, hooray! I like this quote particularly: “What I would say to you, Scott, is, like, allow whimsy into your life, you know? Allow the idea of connecting with people over something niche and exciting.”
status: read

The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey. It’s a database of pre-1865handwritten cookbooks! How cool!!
status: moved to REF: Food & Cooking

And the following links are just a path I followed from a Bluesky post: “In 1994, Italian artist Marco Patrito released a 3D scifi visual novel called Sinkha on Windows 3.1.” There’s some mention of the “gameplay” (just pressing ‘next’ mostly) and some images. A threaded reply also links to the game’s own worldbuilding website. Poking around about it I learned Sinkha was reprinted in Heavy Metal Magazine (see the issue cover here). I’ve always been interested in Heavy Metal’s habit of reprints, even though Sinkha as a whole seemed cool but just too dense for me to care much about beyond skimming information. Luckily, jumping from that, I found some very thorough analysis and read-throughs of Episode 0 and Episode 1 over at Post Rendered. Neat stuff!

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Favourite Watches: Hoopla

Did you know that most library cards come with access to Hoopla? Free movie watching! And comics and music etc etc. But mostly I use it to watch documentaries (and trashy cable sci-fi movies). Here’s some of my go-to docs for both naps and “second screen” watching (also straight watching).

A screenshot of the Hoopla app on desktop. It shows a user's history and lists Snake Eyes, a documentary on Salmon, and Ken Burns: The Brooklyn Bridge.

Some faves:

Ken Burns: The Brooklyn Bridge: This was my first Ken Burns. It broke the seal. I get accused by some people about watching nothing but “bridge documentaries” but I need to clarify I only watch like five over and over. The guy who designed the Brooklyn Bridge (and the father of the guy who built it) was quite a type of guy. This is a cute doc and has some great talk of the history and importance of the bridge and also has a bit where a bunch of kids are building a block version of one of the towers.
American Experience: The Rise and Fall of Penn Station: What a hell of a building and what a wild time of tech. Getting the bends building train tunnels! Building train tunnels because holy shit you have to commute across the river on a ferry and that gets squirrelly during winter. Also some interesting stuff about historic places there at the end.
American Experience: Riding the Rails: No lie, I did watch this a couple extra times to scoop some slang and context for a Fallout: New Vegas fic (read over on AO3). But I did also watch it originally as the dessert to a Ken Burns Prohibition/Dust Bowl double feature. It’s super interesting, the whys of kids riding the rails, and how that changed as the depression went on. Because of when it was made, we get to hear from the (former) kids who travelled around jumping on trains, and it’s just a lovely bit of history and story.
Nature: A Squirrel’s Guide to Success: Squirrels are simple creatures but, like all living things, have some surprising complexity! Just a fun animal doc.
BingePass: French Chef with Julia Child: The thing about watching TV on Hoopla is you have to check each episode out, which can suck. But for some things they have the “Bingepass” which is just several days of all eps available. They’re great especially for archives like these, the earliest Julia Child episodes! Black and white and old TV quality and there’s so much about what the world was at the time (she got so many kitchen tools from the hardware store?) you can pick up in passing. Also: fun food, great host.

If you read my newsletter, then you’ve seen me talk about the two most-repeated docs on Hoopla for me: The Poison Squad (the Pure Food movement and why our food says what’s in it now) and The Poisoner’s Handbook (ostensibly about forensic medicine, but also about denatured alcohol deaths and leaded gas). My history is honestly mostly these over and over. I’m a simple fellow.

Anyway, some starter docs! There’s loads on Hoopla though. If you haven’t given this library resource a go, I seriously recommend it! It’s free and often available with the “e-cards” some libraries offer that you can get for only digital checkout and resources. You get an amount of checkouts a month and they last about three to five days, depending on the title. In this world of streaming mess it’s nice to have a way to watch stuff that’s not only free but ad-free. And yeah, there are normal movies on there as well. If you’re a Hallmark or a Lifetime fan they get a lot of those titles, which is nice. Get a library card and guarantee yourself some comfort watches.

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I’m super normal about Fallout: New Vegas

I’m trying to get back into blogging for real – so I gotta make a post a week. Which is partly to make me not like… make every post precious? Like I used to blog the stupidest shit on LJ. And still do on Tumblr. So, because this is all that is on my mind today*, let me talk about Fallout: New Vegas.

Now, I’m not “a gamer.” There are a handful of games I like and I replay those with light regularity. They include: the LEGO Batmans and Saints Row. We’re a household that buys games used, and the game console is used more for DVDs than anything. So it made sense that I didn’t pick up Fallout: New Vegas (FNV) until 2015. By then, Chase had played it some on PC, and my best friend had played it through and loved it immensely. They are both life-long Fallout players, having first scampered around the isometric early entries into the world.

I wasn’t immune to the draw, however. On our first trip to Southern California, I took a picture of a plant and sent it to my bff captioned something about bannana yucca added to the inventory.

My Twitter is nuked (deleted all the tweets), so I don’t have exactly when I first picked up playing FNV, but I know that a year later, in 2015, during one of the seasonal colds I used to get all the time was when I first played the game.

I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas while sick and here's my happy family.

It immediately crawled under my skin and set up shop. I hadn’t got into game writing yet so it wasn’t like my later experiences with RPGs (particularly from Obsidian), where I was admiring the skills of a good dialogue tree. I bought into the story HARD, I played all four of the DLC, my character died a bunch (I am not good at shooting in games, even on easy). I was in the clutches. Then, not two years later, I picked it up again.

This time around I printed out a list of unmarked quests and went hunting. I think this might have been the only time I took the perk that shows all the locations on your map also. I was determined to stretch this play out as much as possible. It looks like I picked it up in April 2017 and only entered the final bit of the story during the winter holidays. I found my js file of downloaded tweets, so have one:

I continued my accidental habit from Fallout of making my characters dumb and lucky as a shiny rock.”

Getting very close to the end of this play-through, despiste dragging it out as long as possible. Dangit, this game has my heart in so many ways.

This was the playthrough that really locked it in for me. I was cooked.

2016 was when I locked down a lot of things about who I am, an embarrassing number of which I realised via Fallout New Vegas.”

In the intervening time between then and my next playthrough, FNV started weaving into my life more and more. I learned Twine and started building a FNV fan-game with bit Zorro-related energy. I learned about how games were written and how dialogue trees looked in a CSV (and one of my first works on AO3 is just a dialogue table).

I posted a lot about that game in 2018, but we also moved states and life got weird, so it is on a permanent backburner. Here are some related tweets.

On the off-chance any of you have fave rancheros or boleros from like, mid-century, I’m trying to make a Spanish-language Fallout: New Vegas playlist, so: share ’em!”

Anyway, it’s late but some of you are up. What’s the first “oh shit” narrative moment you can think of encountering in a video game play through?”… [one was when] I fast travelled back to Goodsprings on my first play through of Fallout: New Vegas and a glitch had let loose a scorpion that had just killed everyone and then turned to attack me.”

I never ended up playing any other Fallout game other than a little bit of the mobile Fallout: Shelter. It didn’t matter. FNV was all I needed. When I did the Pixeles Writing Portfolio Program, most of the work I did was around that FNV AU Twine game I never finished.

Title of document: Action RPG Cinematic, Montage of 2D Art, Gold For A Tyrant intro. A series of images on the left with voiceover narration on the right. PLATE ONE description: A barren, yellow-skied desert, weathered rock and packed dirt making little room for the scrub that's managed to push its way up. Plate one VOICEOVER: There wasn’t much that grew in the Wastes. Two things did seem to flourish in that poisoned desert: legends and losers. PLATE TWO description: A group of richly-dressed people laughing together as they walk past someone in worn clothes playing an instrument. A poker chip is flipped from the hand of one of the group to the mostly empty instrument case in front of the musician. Plate two VOICEOVER: But that makes sense, a hard place like that breeds nothing but extremes. The rich are very rich, the poor very poor... PLATE THREE description: A group of raiders in intimidating but cobbled-together armor holding up a caravan, weapons drawn. Plate three VOICEOVER: And those who want to enjoy what luxuries are left have to go to increasingly extreme lengths to climb the missing rungs of the ladder. PLATE FOUR description: A group of richly dressed people in the foreground walking down the street, a silhouetted figure holding a rapier ready in the background. Plate four VOICEOVER: Then there are the people who refuse to play the game. The house is rigged and they’re flipping the table. If you’ve been on enough caravans maybe you’ve heard of them.

And so, in 2023, I picked it back up. I have mentioned FNV multiple times in my newsletter, but the relevant bit about this particular playthrough was in my very first one:

At the end of November I started playing Fallout: New Vegas again. It had been six years since I’d played it through last–which means I’ve never played the game in California. The enticement of playing was a carrot I dangled in front of myself for years. Oh finish this novel draft, then you can play. Actually do this other thing now, and you can play. No, you need to [finish/achieve/be better at THIS thing] first…

November went to shit. Like, the back half of the year things had been degrading in ways that are nobody but family’s business, but November is when they peaked. But we got through it! And there, at the end of November, I realised actually I could do something without earning it–and as it was I think I’ve done enough in 2023 (even before November) to justify playing a video game to my brain worms. So I fired up Fallout: New Vegas for the third time.

I’d joked at the time “maybe this playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas will fix me.” And then it did.

https://bzedan.tumblr.com/post/782719449997377536/it-kind-of-did-actually-that-said-guess-what

I played 160 hours of it (far less then the first playthrough, which tbf was extended because FNV is notoriously laggy and buggy and then our XBox died 200 hours into the game). I don’t actually track my hours much, I only know because when I booted it back up in May, I went and looked at my last save.

I, of course, wrote about this playthrough again in my newsletter. I can’t complain, I guess. Fallout: New Vegas is just part of my blood at this point. One of many such cases. Fifteen years on from release and the fandom is still thriving and modding and writing and daydreaming and making incoherent sounds at seeing a glimpse of a particular Securitron in a trailer because of the implications.

https://bzedan.tumblr.com/post/792242458147930112/i-will-do-things-like-think-ah-shame-no-fandom

*The trailer for season 2 came out and I am not well about it

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Tab cleanout: (mid) August 2025

Yeah that’s right another bunch of cool links I’ve come across and need to file or finish reading! I guess these will be living under the so-original tag “tab cleanout.”

The End Times by Benjamin Percy. Man, I missed out on the physical subscription to this, but the digital is still open. I LOVE-love serialised stories and I’m super into what I’ve read about the whys and wherefores of this project (see this interview at Counter Craft). Short novel about a post apocalypse, delivered in a newspaper format monthly? Yes please.
status: subscribed

Curate your own newspaper with RSS from Molly White at Citation Needed. This is just a nice run-down of how to set up RSS feeds for yourself, to make the focus of where you’re getting info somewhere that isn’t centralised social media. I’m currently using Inoreader as my RSS base, which is especially nice as more of my pals get blogs.
status: dropped as a maybe link in September’s newsletter

Company Logo Gallery from VGDensetsu. This is such a rad thing, all sorts of company logos, and crediting the folks who actually designed them! Roger Dean is in there a lot.
status: moved to REF: Assorted

Older LGBT Science Fiction Database, built on Notion by Remnantglow. This is a pretty dope filterable database of “Generally, any novel published before the 21st century that can be called 1. sci-fi, and 2. a queer book in some sense is included.” Very much something I’ll probably pull into a spreadsheet and start marking off what I read at some point.
status: moved to REF/TOOLS: Book Organisation

Linkfest #37 from Clive Thompson. Basically someone doing blogging of links better than me, in newsletter form, though I will admit these posts are partly just for me/soft sharing. I just don’t have it in me to blog to that level! Grateful for others who do it.
status: subscribed to newsletter

A VPS Tutorial For Those Who Want Control from x. This is a pretty rad and comprehensive guide on starting your own server! Probably too complicated for me at the moment, but going into my files for later. I am happy with paying for hosting and servers the same way I (would) pay for an electrician to do some fixes (if I were not a renter).
status: moved to REF: Web & Computer

Peacock feathers can be lasers from Rachel Berkowitz over at Science. It’s what it says on the tin!! Peacock feathers use structural colour (reflecting light to create colour, basically??!!) and apparently that can be laser-fied? It’s neat and it’s neat to think of non-traditional ways to focus lasers.
status: dropped as a maybe link in September’s newsletter

Also now just some links I read and kept open so I could dump ’em here:

“The First Homosexuals” Is a Dazzlingly Overwhelming Chronicle of Queerness in Art at Observer. An article about a show at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, a very nice rundown of the content and intent of the curation.

The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905) A Silent FIlm Review from Movies Silently. A very thorough review of both the silent film in question and the picture postcard world around it. Love it!

A plaintext subject line is all email has ever needed from Buttondown’s Blog. They always have something fun about email history. The whys and wherefores of the email header.

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Fanbind: Take Your Shot

Really, when it comes to fanbinding I clearly love a gimmick. My last go was making a mock Samuel French script and this time I decided to go for my beloved classic mass market paperback, soft paper and all.

I think I did okay for a first try? I was at the end of my glue bottle and pushing beyond my skills for the cover illustration (which is based on Gay Vets Ross Hossannah), but I am pleased with the end result. I’m already re-laying out the text block to incorporate what I’ve learned. I think the next try I am going to break the collection up so I can have two slim volumes that better fit the look of the mid-century era I was trying to evoke. See how thick this is next to the real thing!

A shelf of narrow mass marked paperbacks of the pulp variety. All but one are yellowed and cracked with age, with LCCN stickers on the spines. The one that stands out has a fresh-white cover and is titled "Take Your Shot." — I am making myself be satisfied with this cover stock, because I have a lot of it and it is the right weight, even if it is a modern level of optic-white and not coated.

Anyway here are the deets!

Story: Take Your Shot (series, unfinished) by Inbox.
Paper: Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in Manila for the body, 60lb double-sided Polar Matte from Red River.
Types: Overseer and Body Grotesque (Cover), Bahnschrift SemiBold and Constantia (Interior).
Binding style: Perfect binding.

Okay, pics!

A photo of a mass market-sized paperback on a worktable. The cover is the minimal skill painted style of mid-century pulp novels, showing a man in a lab coat smoking and looking over his shoulder at a man in a red beret and dark glasses taking his shirt off. The page edges are green. The novel is "Take Your Shot" by Inbox. — Even the cover not aligning right actually fits accuracy, tbh.

A photo of a mass market-sized paperback on a worktable, showing the back cover. The edges of the pages are green. The large part of the blurb reads "Arcade Gannon had a certain laissez-faire attitude to pleasurable acts snatched when the opportunity presented itself." — Blessed to be working from a collection with frankly delicious bits to pull from to make the cover text.

I think I did okay for the cover!! This is not my style and I straight up did a version to completion, hated it and tried again. On the rebind I’m going to have to make another cover illustration and I’m D: about it. That sprayed edge though–airbrush bb, thank you Createx Airbrush Colors in Opaque Aqua.

Now have some interiors.

A photo of a paperback book is held open to the title page by a clamp at one corner of a worktable. The paper is the soft yellowed off-white of old mass market paperbacks. The title is "Take Your Shot" by Inbox. — Fun fact: Precipice Press was named by my player character in a years-long D&D game, who ran a bookshop (and eventually an artist books press).

A photo of a paperback book is held open to the first page of the story by a clamp at one corner of a worktable. Opposite the story is a page listing the individual stories on AO3 that the book is compiled from. The paper is the soft yellowed off-white of old mass market paperbacks. — Fonts used (besides Overseer and Body Grotesque on the cover) are Bahnschrift SemiBold and Constantia.

A photo of a hand holding open paperback book to somewhere in the middle. You can see the edges were cut kind of roughly. The paper is the soft yellowed off-white of old mass market paperbacks. The title is "Take Your Shot" by Inbox. — No, I do not have a chisel for my edges, nor a very good press setup. But I’m trying, man.

See, the whole build. All of this madness that consumed me for like two weeks-plus as I hunted paper etc.–this was all for this final thing.

My answer for “how do you bind an unfinished fic?” Like, how does one convey: this is complete but not done? I don’t know how much truly beat to shit paperbacks you’ve handled in your life (or if you’re part of the elite who have several with no covers), but there is a flavour to the texture of pages ripped out of this kind of book. Which is part of why the paper type was so important. I needed the effect to feel right and “nice” book paper isn’t it. Anyway:

A photo of a hand holding open a paperback book is held open to last page. Several pages have been roughly torn out between the last page of the story and the back cover. — Truly doing this build so I can have this effect at the end. The story is unfinished and does a nice emotional fade-to-black in my opinion.

I feel like this story ends on an emotional fade-to-black. Like YES I would like to read more, but the last update was in 2016? We’re almost a decade from that. And part of me is like, “these guys need their privacy for how they ended this,” in a way. So this felt right. And, I have kind of a thing around Books As Objects and that the wear on an object, how it degrades and is used over time, is a huge part of what actually informs the experience of a book. So: I added a bunch of blank pages to the end of the text block, bound this whole thing and then ripped them out.

Entry tags:

Another tab cleanout

This time the tabs weren’t open necessarily so I could organise them into other, better, folders. They were just open because I wasn’t getting around to reading them. But there was some good stuff here, so sharing again!

la la la more link cleaning

On not being a naturalist – but being one anyway over at Scientist Sees Squirrel, a lovely look at what being a naturalist means and how it is more about interest in the natural world than knowing a lot of IDs.
status: finally read

Preserving the USC Optical Sound Effects Library from The Freesound Blog, a very cool dive into vintage optical sound effects and how they worked and were created. Gosh I love archives and people who archive, and the way we learn when we archive.
status: moved to TO-DO: Sounds

The Animal Photo Reference Repository, a very cool site of loads of reference photos, strong anti-generative AI stance. There’s also a gallery of work created from these reference photos! I collect photo reference libraries then never use them, that’s fine.
status: moved to REF: Draing & Pose Reference

Art of The Great Mouse Detective from Art of Animation. This one has been making the rounds but it’s very fun and cool stuff!
status: looked at and admired

The Terror of Blue John Gap from the ACD Society. I’m no Arthur Conan Doyle-head, I think I got to this via reading about some interesting minerals (oh! it was link jumping from something in a recent newsletter from Failbetter Games), but it’s an interesting site layout and an interesting project, plus scans of Doyle’s manuscript!
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

The archive saving home sewing history from the trash over at The Verge, which talks about sewing pattern archives–notably the Commercial Pattern Archive. I found this via a post somewhere about the big four sewing pattern brands getting sold to a liquidator (more info here), which puts everybody in a pickle, because physical patterns are vital not just to sewists but to smaller pattern makers who use the same large-scale tissue paper printing machines.
status: moved to REF: Fibre & Sewing

E-COM: The $40 million USPS project to send email on paper over at the Buttondown blog is a delicious little slice of history that I feel will be haunting my back-brain for a bit for several reasons.
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

New Game Series – Art & System: Games for Expanded Play is some very cool archiving happening by Central Michigan University Press with crowdfunding upcoming.
status: signed up to be notified when they launch

We’re Really Just Going Through With All This, Aren’t We by Luke Plunkett is really such a mood (negative). It’s about how game releases etc. are approached, but my job has me looking at TV and film release cycles and it’s just!! Ugh.
status: haunting me

Which is what makes it incredible to behold that this week we are just carrying on through it all, as though nothing has changed. We’ll all be subjected to too many trailers to remember even a fraction of them. We’ll all create and digest the same console launch coverage we always have, with midnight launches, photos of people rushing home with their Nintendo-branded shopping bags, first impressions, review scores of a machine breathing only its first breath. We’re cosplaying as the 2000s, when these things meant something and were built for the occasion, even though literally everything around us–the economy, the industry, the platforms and ways we learn about and experience games–has changed radically.

A Radioactive Pen in Your Pocket? Sure! over at IEEE Spectrum is a fun quick look at some concept pens from the late 1950s. Love a Concept Object (TM). A cool thing that then led me to Parkercollector.com, which is one of those unchanged gems of the internet.
status: moved to *absolutely random shit

Okay so I guess, I am not going to get better at tab and link usage so I am going to do these more often, hmmmmmm, will think of a naming process next time.

Entry tags:

Finding the perfect paper

I love to make problems for myself. So, when I fell in love with a FNV fic and decided to fanbind it, decided it needed to evoke the pulpy mid-century mass market paperbacks that I myself read and collect. The thing is!! To really get the right tactile umami of these books you have to have the right paper. But who wants to buy the kind of paper mass market paperbacks were made with in bulk? It’s not acid free, it’s toothy but squishy, off-white in a way that is delicious only to the real freaks out there.

Now, at one time the illustrious French Paper company had Dur-O-Tone which was based on “everyday utilitarian newsprint paper” and came in a lovely “Aged Newsprint.” But it is no longer available in text weight! So I set out on a mostly-free sampling (good paper places will at most ask you to pay shipping for a couple slips of paper as you test finishes and colours) of possibles.

First up, a couple colours of Royal Sundancefrom The Paper Mill, because I thought maybe “speckle” would hit something evocative. It did not.

An old mass market paperback lays on top of two sheets of speckled off-white paper. Neither sheet matches the texture or colour. — Brett Halliday’s Die Like A Dog versus Royal Sundance Natural Paper – 8 1/2 x 11 in 70 lb Text Smooth Fiber and Royal Sundance Cream Paper – 8 1/2 x 11 in 70 lb Text Smooth Fiber.

Not the right vibes at all.

Well, that’s fine. How about a selection from the folks who’d made the good stuff? French Paper has white text weight, all of which were 70lb, which I felt would be too “real” and stiff but we’re trying here.

An old mass market paperback lays on top of five different types of off-white paper that range from ivory to cream. All have textures or speckles but none seem to match the paper of the book. — Brett Halliday’s Die Like A Dog versus French Paper samples in: Kraft-Tone Index Off-White, Speckletone Madero Beach, Speckletone Starch White, Speckletone True White, Pop Tone Whip Cream

Like?! I guess the top one here (Kraft Tone in Index Off-White) could do okay (it looked better in person)? I ordered some more samples from French, focusing on their Kraft Tone and Construction lines. Still, I felt like there had to be something better our there. I poked around looking for 50lb text weight and found something that absolutely is not meant for bookbinding: Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in Manila.

I know it’s not acid free, or whatever whatever. But neither are the literal hundreds of my much-loved and read mass markets. And a ream of 500 sheets, delivered to pick up at my local Staples, cost half what a ream of not-quite-it from French would be. I figured, if it sucked for this particular need, I would enjoy having a bunch of drawing paper.

Because I have no chill, I opened the box in the parking lot. Having read many a book in the glaring Southern California sunshine, tiny black letters dancing in afterimage, I could tell right off that this was it.

A photo of a big team of softly textured cream coloured paper, a hand is curling the corner up to show the weight. — Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper in the sunshine.

Once home I ran a test print and under the warm house lights the vibes were even more spot on.

A sheet of paper that has the yellowed mass market paperback look. The printing on it is tags for stories on AO3. — Print test on Pacon Standard Weight Drawing Paper, featuring AO3 tags.

That second round of samples from French Paper are still wending their way toward me and I won’t be sad to have a more full understanding of The Nice Paper. However, every step of this latest fanbinding project has more and more solidly proved that this drawing paper is exactly what I’d been searching for.

Entry tags:

zines

Zines for you, zines for me

Thinking about how, even if stamps were 22 cents and you were maybe using your student status to get cheap or free copies, setting your horror review zine at 50 cents a copy in 1987 is still mostly about the love of the game.

I’m so curious about what era someone slapped the $1 price sticker on this. My copy? I picked it up for $10 and it came in a heavy-weight sheet protector, yet the staple was still in (and un-rusted, somehow?! I immediately removed it). Worth it, honestly.

A scan of a typewriter-written photocopied zine. This page reviews Robocop.

A scan of a typewriter-written photocopied zine. This page continues the Robocop review, has a review of The Lost Boys, and begins a review of Jaws: The Revenge.

I used to have trouble falling asleep as a kid and I spent a lot of those hours staring up at my TMNT poster through through visual snow, doing the math for how many ads I’d need to sell to break even printing a comic book that was X pages long. I am not great at math but the simple building blocks of X pages total minus Y pages of story, leaving ? pages for ads, then break that down, etc., etc., I could do that.

I’ve mentioned I’m getting back into zines, collecting my newsletter as little 16-page black and whites. I haven’t done the math on these until now. I’m printing them at home and my laser printer is basically free tbh, stamps are going to be 78 cents in July. A four-sheet (16 page) zine is little over a penny in paper if I get the cheap stuff. A dollar would put me probably in the same comparative range as what Scareaphanalia was going for in the ’80s.

And I did actually put them up to buy but with another dollar of shipping on top of that dollar. I have learned, from my Itchio, that a dollar is a weird price to ask people to pay, maybe $2 is less weird. Whatever! Chase saw a 20 page laser-printed black and white zine for $40 the other day. Like you do you but also, lol what.

I do want to figure out that true dollar-zine. Like, same format as this horror review one that has my brain churning. Two sheets, stapled at the top corner, easy to fold and put in a normal business envelope, one stamp, one dollar total, just for the love of the game. But I’ve not got a reviewing soul, really. And that format, in its monthly distribution, is so ideal for newsletters and discussion of relevant and recent things.

Another zine that caught me by the throat, at the same book fair, was from Deep Listening. A mixed-media combo focusing on archives and distribution, each riso-printed zine is accompanied a flash drive. The zine has images and page spreads from queer publications, and the USB has pdfs of the originating issues, as well as page layouts for the zine itself. Talking with their creator, Sasha Fuentes, I kept thinking about The Trans Literature Preservation Project from Transfeminine Review. Physical media is a kind of distribution we can own (setting aside obscenity distribution laws) more easily than via the web–especially via any social media.

A picture of From My Archive Vol 2: Transexuals zine, with a USB stick laying above it.

Another recent zine get (before the fateful book fair) was Appalachian Transsexual by Kyrsten Nerys Hodge. You can either get the beautifully pink 40-page (!!!) zine for $5 at her shop or go download the PDF for free, which I adore as an approach. I actually ended up with both of her zines, which is good as I’m trying to learn to love poetry in English and I very enjoyed her poetry in these.

A picture of the Appalachian Transsexual Zine, which is soft pink and has a simple line illustration of a Hitatchi Magic Wand crossed over a sickle.

There’s a great site that archives the covers of various cinema magazines, including Scareaphanalia. Moviemags is, like most archive sites, very fun to browse through. An enjoyable place to start is their classic monster collection.

I scanned my copy, obviously, and sent the cover in to add to their archives. I’ve never put things up on Archive.org before, but there’s one up over there and I will figure out adding mine.

Zines have been on the mind for a while, obviously. I spent like all week before last making a zine of all the campfire crafting recipes in Fallout: New Vegas. It’s up at Itchio and 100% free, with both reading and printing versions. For fun, here’s the nice little embed from Itch:

Something something, archiving and sharing and how the line wavers between the two.

Here’s a meme:

The "Always Has Been" astronaut meme. The astronaut staring at earth says "Wait, it's all about sharing?" and the astronaut pointing a gun at them says "Always has been."

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: by the open window
Current Music: the sound of evening birds

Entry tags:

whimsy

This is just a post to look at format

It's very funny, I was looking at my bff's LJ and mine through Wayback Machine but neither of us much used the various mood/music/etc. Though I was a more thorough tagger than her.

I did remember I'd imported my blog entire over to my *actual* blog, which has been WP for about one million years (I actually just dug into my email and it's been bzedan.com since 2007, before that it was bzedan.us). I'm glad I did. With Twitter I just did the mega-erase, didn't import a thing to Bluesky. What's done is done. But my blog posts? My wretched little written memories from as far back as 2007? Can't tear them away. I'm not sure what happened to posts from 2005-2007, but that's fine, we can't remember it all.

Anyway, point of this is to see what the bells and/or whistles look like.

Entry tags:

Tab cleanout

I do not keep one million tabs open on my browser. I keep simply several dozen across multiple devices. And, since I also do normal, long-ingrained maintenance things like turning off my computer once a week, I can’t just let them fester in there forever. So what I do is make horrible little bookmark folders. It’s a bad habit! This isn’t even looking at inactive tabs in my mobile browsers! So, as I clean my tabs, let’s look at some cool stuff.

Advanced Marionette Making Techniques over at Storm the Castle. It’s a seven string marionette walk through! Very cool stuff. I am still learning marionettes, I had a couple as I grew up but was not good at manipulating them. I’ve made a couple recently but they were more about aesthetics than function. Function next! Hence having this tab open.
status: moved to Ref: Craft (Paper/Costume/Miniatures)

NBOS Character Sheet Designer. A free and very cool way to design character sheets. I encountered this through a tumblr post that is now somewhere deep in my 400+ item queue about blorbos/OCs, and using a character sheet as a template for understanding your story’s main character is genius. NBOS in general slaps.
status: moved to Ref: Assorted, downloaded and installed

Do You Maze. This is a really cool site with printable mazes, but most importantly, guides on drawing mazes. I’ve been adding mazes to my zines as I lay them out, this is where I am learning!
status: moved to Ref: Art Collab & Drawing Tutorials

In that same vein, Super Teacher Worksheets and Discovery Education Puzzlemaker are both incredibly dope ways to make cryptic puzzles and stuff. Also using those in zines (and for fun).
status: in general TO DO folder for easy access

Basic Sprang Moves at Solrhizaarts. I do NOT need to learn or fall in love with new to me fibre arts but dang I am all :eyes: about sprang. I do not have space for this in my heart or day at this moment, I need to close this tab.
status: moved to Ref: Fibre and Sewing

Skink Zine from BlackMudpuppy. Skinks! Zine! Love pics of these little guys, this looks fun.
status: moved to Want: Books

Queer Palestine from Pinko. A zine curating a “small archive of queer Palestinian life”. Obviously relevant to me.
status: moved to Want: Books

Appalachian Transsexual by Kyrsten Nerys Hodge. I actually already bought this (physical copy) I just need to close the tab.

My Tuesday Author Interview over at Night Beats. This was rad! I love Night Beats and Zilla is a joy.
status: linked from TAG Serialised page

Both The Art of Future War and Pulled From the Deep are articles I have open so I can read/finish reading them. Both incredibly topics I am always curious about.

One link, for https://its-behind-you.com, is no longer working since I had it up. It was some really lovely personal site for a Panto actor who had recently passed. I’d set it aside to go through it more later, there were pictures from shows, and history and all the lovely stuff one finds on that sort of thing. I’m guessing the domain is no longer being paid for. A loss!
status: moved to ARCHIVE: Dead links I want back

Okay, I think that’s it. Whew, thank you for coming along as I cleaned things up. I need to do this (blogging and link cleaning) more often. Oh! Speaking of links, I have added a pal’s blog to the Links page! Go check out Groove Pit! You know you love spreadsheets and TTRPGs.

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Last Year’s Flash Fiction: Any Hero

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. With 2025’s up, now it’s time to share some faves from 2024.

A black and white illustration of a sword.

Then who slayed the dragon, exactly?

Well, Neihm landed the killing arrow in the beast’s throat, but it was the work of the group to give her that opportunity.

Okay, and this is the group you were the leader of for the past five years?

Yes, a really great team, I loved ensuring that they felt supported on missions.

And how did you do that?

Well, any real team leader doesn’t lead so much as they support the growth of the team, right? I listened to their needs, helped them identify growth opportunities, managed payroll so that they didn’t have to balance money worries while also fighting monsters, that sort of thing.

Ah.

I think really there’s nothing quite like seeing that the role somebody is in doesn’t fit their needs and working with them to figure out what will. Like our rogue, right? He actually started out as a wizard, but as we worked together, I realized that he had a great memory for spells but showed active curiosity in how locks and traps worked. So, I set up an apprenticeship for him, and that great memory served him very well when it came to traps and locks, plus his wizard background gave him a real edge in perception. Probably one of my most satisfying experiences with that team.

More so than, it looks like, overthrowing a demon lord?

Well, we wouldn’t have been able to do that if he hadn’t become a rogue. And same for the rest of the team, really. As a leader it was really just beautiful to see how much they’d all grown not only in their own skills but in how they worked together.

So, you feel that, as a leader, it’s not that your adventuring party supports you—

But that you support your adventuring party, exactly! And it’s not as though I think they don’t have my back. It can be tough to be ‘the face’ of a party, the hero, whatever. It’s you who has to interface with kings and merchants and whoever is footing the bill. And that can be stressful! But being the buffer between my team and the sometimes not quite reasonable demands of our employers is satisfying. And if things ever got rocky, I know they would be there to back me up.

When running your background check we did find that you had posted some inflammatory broadsides about a local prince?

Yes, I did. On researching his quest query, we discovered some pretty nefarious stuff and after discussion with the team we decided that supporting his opponent would be the best move. They ended up becoming a regular client of ours, actually.

I see. And what are you looking for in your position with us?

Oh, just fresh opportunity. Like I said, I really like supporting a team, and I enjoy the folks I work with but it’s only a small independent adventuring party. Working with a bigger team would be a really fun challenge that I think I’d excel at.

That’s great. And do you have any questions for us?

Yes! Did you know that the average retention rate for an adventure staffing company this size is something like 65%? Which isn’t bad, really, when you think about how volatile the industry is, but what’s really interesting is that if you remove all management above “hero” it drops to 50%? And then, if you also leave out the heroes it drops to 30%? That’s like, spectacularly bad. That indicates a real problem within the very structure of your company.

I don’t—

No, you don’t. But that’s okay! Because your current employees do. And they hired us, well actually we’re working pro-bono, but they hired us to shake up the management structure some and begin union negotiations. And what is really lovely about that is you have this big group of people who maybe 30%, 40% tops were going to finish out their year here, that’s how little they cared for your company, all joining together towards one common goal. So, the possibility of real cohesive and modular teams is there, you’re just not utilizing it. But that’s okay, we’re going to help you out. That’s what I love to do, help folks who need it. That’s what being a hero is.

Entry tags:

Last Year’s Flash Fiction: Darkness Will Endure

A black and white illustration of an orrery, the model worlds and moons rigged to circle around each other.

It is eclipse season once more, my heart. You remember—each year, as the season spins up, one of the planet’s satellites occludes the sun a little longer, a little more frequently. Like all children I’ve done my share of annual observatory visits, memorised the tour and peered at the orrery that explained the phenomenon.

But you know I’ve no head for these things. The orrery is beautiful, and I know each capital city has its own, made by local artisans to reflect the attributes of each place. Our orrery was composed of granite marbles and chrome, visually one with the building itself, the mosaic floor a portfolio of stone patterns and textures, walls and columns dense concrete.

Once, when travelling, I visited the observatory of a small farming town and their orrery was a series of lacquered seeds and fruit pits, combining field and orchard. It was charming and inventive and it saddened me to hear other out of town visitors imply it lacked an appropriate seriousness.

Why should an orrery be serious? Eclipse season peaks as the largest satellite matches the sun for half a day, but the slow blinking of light in the weeks leading up to it is a manic thing, a wild thing. There are dances about it, and traditional cookies. I think you’ve tried those cookies, when you were last here. I made them, even though it was simple-summer and finding the ingredients out of season felt like a quest. How can something that is accompanied by a traditional cookie be so serious it should only be represented in the least fanciful materials?

Anyway, as I was saying, I love an orrery but they speak in a language I cannot learn. I remember when you showed me the little tide table you kept in your wallet, and explained how an ocean worked. That made sense to me, more than a device I could draw from memory. Every year we can pick up something similar from the town centre, a time table of occlusion. It’s a handy thing to have on hand when running errands, or before starting chores. I’ve been caught out in the dark walking home, my arms full of groceries (this is before you got me that little rolling basket) unable to get to the jacket I’d tied around my waist. It gets so cold during an eclipse. I don’t know if it is only in comparison to the moments before, or if there is something else about it. I had to walk home, shivering in the dark. Luckily the streetlights turn on automatically, but you know that the last stretch before my house is shaded by trees, with only one small globe at the crossing from the main road. It was quite an adventure. The tables aren’t perfectly accurate, but they’re good estimates and guides, and it pleases me to keep it in my wallet as you do your tide tables.

I’m writing this now, bundled up, as eclipse season reaches its zenith. Or is it the nadir? According to the time table, it should have ended over an hour ago, but still here I am under my warmest blanket, a lamp on and it not yet noon. Like I said, their accuracy isn’t fully guaranteed and I’m sure there is an expected range of inaccuracy. There is a word for that, isn’t there? If you were here I could just ask you, as I know you’ve said the word before, talking about your work and all those experiments you would check and recheck. Part of me wishes you were here now, so you could tell me what word I was thinking of and so we could sit under my heaviest blanket together. It’s a better warmth, the kind shared with another.

I know it’s for the best you’ve returned to your oceans and tides. You would find eclipse season fascinating. We could go on a tour of small towns and compare everyone’s orreries. Maybe there is one made with flowers, or even one that uses projected light. I think it would be fun to see what is out there, how different places interpret the same thing.

If you were here though, I think you’d worry that the time tables had been so inaccurate this year. You’d say “surely this is greater than any margin of error”. That’s it! That’s the word, or words. I imagined you well enough you answered me. Oh, my heart, maybe someday I will be able to go to you. I would like to see an ocean. Does your world have orreries? If so, what do they make them from?

Your beloved.

Entry tags:

craft,
zines

Everyzine old is new again

I saw an engagement-type post recently that was like “what were you doing in 2008” and I went and looked at my Flickr, which I’ve kept since 2005 and works like a sort of backup memory for me.

In 2008 I’d been out of college for three years, was making a sculpture a day for a bit, went to Wyoming for the first time, tabled at a comics fest for the last time, and we paid $650 for a two bedroom apartment where I had an entire room just for craft and making things. This was also the year I first shaved the sides of my head, realised that less hair was much easier to deal with, and never looked back. I think I’d moved to full time at the job I’d hold until we left Oregon completely (a horrible job but one that cemented my logistics and spreadsheet real-world experience, moulding me into the mix of product management wetworks I am today).

A panoramic photo of a room containing a sewing table, a bunch of clear stacked drawers, and a bunch of various boxes and stacks of craft things. A vacuum stands prominently in the middle. — I didn’t know how good I had it. The amount it would cost for me to have a spare room again is like a comedy number.

The key thing is though, I was still making minicomics and zines. As my life became one that included 20-24 hours of commute a week, I started writing more and reading lots (thank you, Project Gutenberg) and comics didn’t like, fall by the wayside but they faded out like all the little guys in Labyrinth at the end. It’s not like I stopped doing comics but I did stop printing them out or doing anything with them. I still had a long-arm stapler though.

And I did keep buying zines (I’ve even had subscriptions to some!) and have enjoyed watching the push and pull of “zine” changing from “thing I photocopied” to “nice printed and bound thing” while also seeing the return of the good ol’ one page zine.

Eventually, I got (back) into bookbinding, via fanbinding. Specifically, fanbinding fic I’d written with a friend of OCs from our D&D game. Bookbinding is fun as hell but sometimes you want something a little faster, which is where pamphlet binding comes in. Last winter I made my family group pamphlet books of short stories only available online. A pamphlet bind is like a high-end zine, tbh. Sewn instead of staples.

What’s funny is, through all of this, I’ve always laid out my various ebooks, like my flash fiction collections the same way you lay things out to be printed. I could not tell you why, tbh. Then I encountered a post by veronique about the joy of zines and turning ephemeral/digital things like blog posts into zines.

“Well dang, wait,” I thought, “that would be so easy to do.” I did still have that long arm stapler.

And so, here’s the past four years of Flash Fiction February collections, in physical form.

A hand holds a stack of four thick zines with bright covers, all are titled Flash Fiction February, with different years.

It’s wild how much more real this very real amount of work (daily writing, editing, illustrations, laying out the text block) feels in a physical form.

They do feel more like a “chapbook” than a zine though. So I tried laying out the first two essays from my newsletter, along with the pictures and book recommendations. It worked out swimmingly, and I then filled the two blank pages at the end with puzzles.

A hand holds a zine open to a double page spread, a photo of a neighbourhood on the left, and on the right the start of an essay titled "Of Carrots and Worms."

A hand holds open a zine to a double page spread that has a cryptogram, a word search, and a maze shaped like a parrot.

I don’t know what I am going to do with these? LAPL actually has a robust zine collection and maybe I’ll whack out a bunch of the FFF collections and send those in? Maybe I don’t need to do anything with them right now, maybe it’s just the joy of making. I have a bunch more newsletter essays that I can lay out and print out and be delighted by.

Entry tags:

Last Year’s Flash Fiction: Circles of the World

A black and white illustration of a ball of yarn partly unwrapped.

It was Tuesday. It had been Tuesday for, as well as Mel could reckon it, something like five years. This would have been fine, they thought, if it was a solo or limited affect time loop. If it was only Mel, or only Mel and like a dozen people around the world, experiencing Tuesday, that would have felt surmountable.

But the whole world had been experiencing Tuesday for something like five years and had decided, after about a year of panic and then a year of recovery from that panic, that Tuesday was fine, actually.

That first year there had been spates of bank robberies, vengeance killings, strange pranks, horrible suicides by people sacrificing themselves in an attempt to reset the day. A lot of weddings, also. Money stopped meaning anything, what one spent on Tuesday was back in the bank on Tuesday morning. Even Mel had participated in an outrageous indulgence, purchasing a ticket for a first-class international flight. They’d had to buy it a couple of Tuesdays in a row, waiting for everyone else’s choices to line up for there to be pilots who chose to spend their day at work, for the airport to be intact, for the ground crews to also decide to spend their day at work. Mel was fine waiting. The airport was like a mall and it was as good a place to spend Tuesday as any.

All the social sites and forums reset each day as well, but Mel had gleaned enough over the months to know that they wanted to cross the international date line eastbound. Going west would just pop them right back into Tuesday. Going east let them enjoy the view, the food, the very nice accommodations. When they grew tired, they let themselves fall asleep, knowing they’d wake up in their bed, Tuesday morning.

They’d played, cautiously, with what defined “Tuesday.” It was some point of sunrise, the light gaining momentum as it spilled across the hills and they’d blink and they’d be opening their eyes on a fresh morning and another Tuesday.

Despite what was happening in much of the outside world, Mel spent those first two years more or less enjoying Tuesday. It was, in the old parlance, their “Sunday,” and what was a day that once held its own special dread of the work week to come now felt like a kind of haven. They did find it frustrating that any work they did on various craft projects was undone each day, calm hours cross stitching emptied from the aida. Eventually the frustration was filled with a sort of existential peace. It was the action more than the finished work that Mel liked anyway.

One of their mutuals on a fibre artist forum wrote a poem about Penelope and somebody with a better memory than Mel memorized it, adding it to the boards early Tuesday morning. Memorising the poem and sharing it became a ritual for Mel’s friends.

It was somewhere in the third or fourth year of Tuesdays that Mel’s manager called them and asked them to come into work. Mel hesitated, they’d always been very protective of their two days off in a row and the instinct wasn’t broken by years of Tuesdays. Mel’s manager then told them that “even if Tuesday forgets, I won’t,” the threat clear in her voice. Someday Tuesday would end and if Mel wanted to be employed that eventual Wednesday, then they needed to come in. And so, they did.

Mel’s manager wasn’t the only one who tried to claw back a semblance of order, playacting a normal week of days across a string of seven identical Tuesdays. Mel felt bad for her for a while, realizing how empty her Tuesday must be without the self-definition of her job. Mel’s pity lasted for a couple of months and then the habit of going into work carried them another year. They’d always been easily swayed into routine, and the pattern of going into work was a more practiced one than having a day off.

Then, one Tuesday lunch break, Mel read their mutual’s Penelope poem again. Someone had filmed themselves speaking it, over slowed video of a sweater being frogged. They’d done a great job with the sound, the popping rip of the yarn coming undone not overpowered by the words of the poem, but supporting them like a drumbeat. Mel watched the video three times in a row, then walked out of the store, leaving their apron on the hook in the break room. Tuesday morning the apron was back, folded on top of Mel’s dryer. There was also a very long text from their manager that Mel did not read before replying “Sry, day off.”

When Wednesday came, Mel wanted it to be a day shaped by their choices alone.

Entry tags:

Last Year’s Flash Fiction: On We Go

A black and white illustration of a parakeet drawing with a feather quill in its beak.

Seb held up his hand and felt Aurok gently run into it. The small bird nibbled softly at the back of his hand before turning around and patting away. Turning his attention back to the parchment, Seb dipped his pen and continued outlining the flowers framing the verse. Although he liked adding the colours as well, Seb enjoyed this step the most, feeling the sweep of his pen follow twining stems. He was not so entranced by the process to miss the tapping sound of Aurok returning.

With the deftness of practice, Seb caught the bird before it closed in on the parchment. Aurok peeped cheerfully, nodding its head to duck within the warm cage of Seb’s curled fingers. Knowing what came next, the scribe hastily cleaned his pen and set it aside before placing the bird back onto the desk, an arm’s length from his workspace.

Merrily, Aurok strode toward the parchment. Seb caught it up again, the bird giving a high flute of excitement. Back to the scarred wood of the table, the bird’s steps jauntier, eager for the next part of the game. Once more Seb scooped up the bird, adding a small swoop to the path of his hand as he returned Aurok to its starting point. They repeated this cycle several times, until Aurok nipped Seb’s finger in a clear declaration of the end of the game.

Seb returned to his work and Aurok returned to its current project of tearing apart an old rag. Without interruptions, the outlining was done quickly. Seb tidied his workspace to make room for the paints. Seeing Aurok well occupied with its rag, he turned around to fill a dish with water.

The pleasant sound of splashing covered the noise of any crimes, and Seb turned back to the desk to see Aurok halfway across the parchment, the dainty claws of its feet leaving a trail through the not fully dried ink.

There was mercy in heaven, Seb thought, for Aurok’s path had not crossed the careful script of the verse. Quietly, he set the dish of water down and closed the distance to the desk. Aurok, focused on its quest, ignored him as it rummaged between the assorted jars and containers that accumulated on any working surface. Smoothly and swiftly, Seb’s hand darted out and captured the bird. Aurok showed no distress at this, nor in Seb wiping its feet, as it was far too engrossed in prising out the meat of a walnut half. Seb could not remember when he had last eaten walnuts and resolved that in the future he would pick up and wipe under the things on his desk rather than sweeping around them.

Its prize obtained, Aurok expressed no further interest in crossing Seb’s desk. The scribe spent the rest of the daylight incorporating Aurok’s inky steps into the design. The end result, he had to admit, was quite harmonious.

Entry tags:

writingcrap

Flash Fiction February 2025 – Complete

A black and white illustration divided into three columns. The outer columns are circle-spot illustration of things like coffee cups, bridges, books. The text in the centre column reads "Flash Fiction February 2025."

Another year down! This is the fourth year I’ve completed Flash Fiction February and the fourth year I’ve put my favourite pieces into a wee collection and stuck it on Itch. And you can get it right here I’ve always likened the challenge to using a sketchbook, it’s an exercise, more often than not, to learn you can make some words come out at will. “Write 500 words from this prompt” feels very similar to my brain as “look at all these hairstyles and practise drawing them.” But, just like some pages of a sketchbook, sometimes you get something tangible from the practise.

Since writing flash tends to be a more contained practise than a sketchbook page, I am lucky enough to find ten stories every year to bring together, edit, illustrate, and share. My favourite part though, is that once I’ve got a new collection up, I take four favorites (of the ten favorites) from the previous year and share them on my blog. I really just like sharing stuff I’ve made. I like to think people read what I write. And after a year, picking four favourites really does bring the focus in on the most interesting or fun stuff.

Anyway! This year the illustrations were in the vibe of headpieces, with central images. Always a fun challenge to keep it: photocopy black and white AND somehow visually illustrate what isn’t often a visual set of words. In theory I could print any of these out into proper zines. Maybe someday I will.

Until then, here’s the pitch snagged from the collection’s page on Itch, where you can get it for a dollar:

Ten flash fiction pieces collected together with illustrations for each. There’s time loops,

There were probably better ways to spend a time loop than a job interview. Luz had done them. Made a lot of memories. Great stuff.

a smidgen of softness,

The cookbook was one of Cara’s most prized possessions. She’d found it at a junk sale, which seemed to be how it had entered every previous owner’s home. It fell open to the most-used recipes, some pages spice-stained, others clearly the victim of spills… On any of the most-used looking recipes, there was commentary from a half-dozen ghosts scrawled in any empty space.

and also time loops.

Check who is in front of you, is it the same group as every morning? Are they wearing the same clothes as every morning? No! How wonderful! The auntie two people in front of you is wearing a shawl not a sweater today, that’s great! That’s two things different this morning already!

This 7.7k+ word flash fiction collection is available as epub, mobi, and pdf files.

Content warnings: unreality, time loop death.

Entry tags:

daily life

Naturally, I forgot I was writing this halfway through and a week ago.

It’s difficult, to get back into the specific habit of blogging. I mean I do it – I “microblog” on Tumblr and I’m so far sticking well to my goal of weekly updates at Comradery and Patreon. Even my newsletter is kind of bloggy. But beyond that, it was a habit I kind of lost when I left LiveJournal, to a degree. My problem, I think partly, is I always want to cite lots of sources or have a ~reason~ for a post. Which is silly! I like posts that are just little life updates or complaints or stories or whatever whatever. And not just from others, I mean I also like stumbling across the ones I’ve written myself.

Anyway right now I’m in the middle of Flash Fiction February, as held by Storytelling Collective, I guess this is the fourth year I’ve really gone for it, though I’d picked at it previously. In 2022 I got an AlphaSmart and it helped me re-focus how I was going about things. Here’s a little video from then of how it works.

Watch on YouTube

This year though, I’m typing on the computer, specifically in Ellipsus, because they have a very sexy little snippet you can do now and that’s fun. The always wonderful Zilla Novikov (who wrote Query, which you should read) does a “post the first line in your WIP” on Tumblr that I enjoy and don’t partake in enough, and I figured the snippets would be a good way to do that.

In 2023 I made a spreadsheet (of course I did) to track the prompts, word count and genre of what I was writing and to better note what should go in the collection I put together for each year (find them over on Itch, they’ve illustrations and everything). It’s a nice way to see, with these little bits of story that are like working in a sketchbook, what I keep returning too. Here’s a snapshot of where I am for this month, which is generated from daily entries. If the genre-description-type thing doesn’t make sense to you that’s fine, I mean this is more for me.

A screenshot of a spreadsheet. Columns are: Genre, Total, Total Used in Collection, and More Stats. Right now there are 4 "Normal World" stories, 3 "Sci-Fi" stories and an assortment of others. A cell mentions "Format Play," of which there are three.

It is difficult to balance working in a lot of media. While I’m writing I’m also (supposed to be) shooting some stickers to finally get them in the shop, working on some sculptures, finishing a quilt, mending my coat, etc etc etc. But that’s life! I dunno! It’s how its always been. Finding a balance, sticking to the to-do lists that keep me on track without putting me in a rut, building new habits or rebuilding old ones.

Like blog posts without a point, really. Other than saying “I’m here! I’m here please!” Which are good posts to have and to see and to make.