send me a made-up fic title and i'll tell you what i would write to go with it

Ficbinding: Salvage by @muffinlance (typeset by @no-name-publishing)

I've recently been getting back into AtLA fic as my kids are watching the series. I was already thinking about binding Salvage when I realized that @no-name-publishing had already typeset it; thank you for letting me use your work!

The marbled paper on the cover is a piece I made myself a few months ago, but unfortunately I only had one letter-sized sheet and couldn't do a standard paper w/leather spine cover. But restriction breeds creativity as the saying goes, so I cut the paper on the diagonal, and built the rest of the cover around that.

I decided that a wave pattern would look cool to fill the remaining space, so I cut a stencil with my Silhouette and painted the design with Angelus leather paint, which I used for the first time here and can't recommend enough for applying titles/designs on leather covers. The endpapers were done with the foil quill attachment; both designs are from this artist.

I have told my eldest that she can read this if she's very careful with it :D

This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep.

Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.

So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.

Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.

Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.

Don’t be fooled. Wool is a sustainable material, one we should make more and better use of.

Any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

This is very important.

And you need to wash acrylic wool garment more often than natural wool. They get stinky way more easily.

In my almost-decade of owning sheep, there have been exactly two(2) bad shearers try to start up in the area. Know what happened? The first farm they went to called every other shepherd in the area and said “This guy cut one of my sheep and didn’t think it was a big deal, don’t hire him.” And neither of them ever did business in the area again.

Some farmers are less conscientious than they should be about taking care of their stock, and the occasional tiny nick will happen, but no one is going to hire a shearer who is a) incompetent enough and b) uncaring enough to actually injure the animals to the point of bleeding, let alone the kind of horrors the internet claims.

Also, most breeds of sheep will literally die if they go too long without being sheared. PETA (and let’s face it, most of this anti-wool stuff can be traced back to deliberate misinformation from PETA) doesn’t care if sheep die, they have openly stated that they would prefer every domestic species that can no longer survive without humans go extinct rather than live in “"slavery.”“

Humans and sheep have lived together for over ten thousand years, they’ve been domesticated longer than dogs! Their lives consist of doing whatever the heck they want (for the most part they only want to walk, eat, sleep, play, and make lambs) while being fed and cared for, for the low price of having their hair cut once a year. Why would anyone boycott this natural, biodegradable fiber humans have been using for so long to the benefit of both species, in favor of plastics that are killing the planet??

Also loving the “the sheep will be snuggly warm tonight” like… You shear sheep in the spring, when the weather warms up and they no longer need it, and they grow it back for next winter.

Also, you literaly NEED to shear sheep multible times a Year or they fucking Overheat and die in their own wool

Twee, deliberate mislabelling which appeals to kind-hearted people who know nothing about how the real thing is produced.

On the funnier side, ignorance about anything closer to nature than a supermarket shelf can result in gems like this one:

Regular yogurt for me.  Thanks.

(As for ignorance, this post is epic and getting more so every time I see it.)

*****

Back on topic.

Shearing’s not skinning and it’s not painful, unless some guy getting busy with a manscaping clipper means he’s flaying himself alive.

Shearing is an all-over haircut, call it sheepscaping if need be though expect some odd looks, and good shearers - as @ruusverd​ said, bad shearers earn a bad rep and soon earn no more money - will leave less nicks on an entire sheep than I might inflict on my face if I forget to change my razor-blade. 

That’s pretty impressive when dealing with a notoriously dimwit animal that doesn’t understand “now just sit still for a minute” and finds “see that open gate, go through it” a difficult concept. (Going through an unexpected hole in the hedge, however, is something sheep do with great ease and willingness, especially if there’s a soon-to-be-ex herb garden on the far side…)

“All warm and snuggly in their woolly jumpers…” Oh puh-leeze. A jumper is a garment which can be taken off and put on as required. A sheep’s fleece is nothing of the sort. Ireland’s just had a heatwave, so which of these two would have been more comfortable the other day when it was 30°C / 90°F in the shade?

*****

But look at the blood! goes the outcry about sheep with red stains. Here’s what that “blood” is. Unless the outcriers believe the front half is royal and bleeds blue, it’s just dye.

Why dye? There are various reasons: to show who owns which sheep in a mixed flock of the same breed, or to indicate if one has been dosed with something, or to mark if a ewe has mated with a ram.

The ram wears a harness - AFAIK not black leather with chrome studs, at least not on any farm near here - which holds a dye-pad on his chest. After he’s done his business, the hopefully-preggers ewe will have a patch of that dye on her rump as in the photo.

Different colours let the farmer know which ram’s been busy if there’s more than one, or with one ram, on what day the mating occurred so they can calculate when to expect lambs. That kit suggests rams get one day a week off…

*****

Besides shearing sheep to stop them overheating, if the weather is rainy rather than sunny they’ll still need sheared to stop them getting waterlogged.

A waterlogged sheep is a top-heavy sheep, and since rainy weather will have made the ground slippery, a top-heavy sheep can all too easily become a sheep on its back - a broad, flat back that won’t roll - unable to get upright.

Sheep internal organs aren’t meant to be upside down and inversion will eventually kill them, if they’re not gutted by a fox first. Crows will have had their eyes long before then.

Forget deceitful propaganda about fake wool, here’s some REAL advice about how to do a sheep a (literal) good turn.

I’ve done it myself, and though she’d already lost one eye - hoodie crows don’t miss a chance - that ewe survived and next spring produced what I was told were two fine lambs. I felt pretty good about that.

I still do.

*****

This is what shearing really looks like, and that’s not the behaviour of an animal in distress or pain. Baffled, maybe, but any human whose haircut started with a judo throw would be baffled too..

The end result is a 12lb / 5.5kg load of insulation which the sheep no longer has to carry about. How’d you like being stuck inside that lot on a hot day?

The “shearing is cruel” fruitloops rely on deliberate lies, gullibility and lack of knowledge. Be aware.

 Or maybe…

I will add that rare and vanishing breeds of sheep are often only saved from extinction because shepherds are able to sell their wool. The Livestock Conservancy has a whole program to conserve rare sheep breeds with the slogan “Shave ‘Em To Save ‘Em.”

And fun fact—actual fun fact, not my usual grotesque fun facts!—Beatrix Potter the children’s author was deeply dedicated to preserving an old breed of sheep called the Herdwick, and left four thousand acres to the National Trust on the condition that they continue to be used to graze Herdwicks in perpetuity.

Saving these tags because I want to be friends with these lesbians.

random thoughts

Klaus has always been the one most suspicious of Lila. And now they're clearly having a showdown. He is accusing her of something. I love it. I don't think Allison is that surprised, nor is Ben. Are they in cahoots? Allison mirrors Lila's posture and Ben is turned towards her.

That brings me to the outfists. Someone already commented on them, it's interesting that they all use dark/blue tones except for Lila. and that Lila and Diego are the two ends of the gradient spectrum, and that Allison and Viktor also wear light tones.

Another thing is that Cha Cha's mask complements Lila's outfit, but of course all the agents always wore suits. I'm looking at you founder 👀, although the agents' suits are dark blue and Five's is black. mmh

anyway, I think all those objects on the pavement are timeline-glitch-relics (maybe they belong to Five, Gene and Jean's rookie partner?? now a detective???🕵️‍♂️ A slightly more cunning detective than Diego? no way lol), but the family (Klaus) mistakenly believes that those things, including the mask, belong to Lila. If they were hidden in the van, maybe they belong to Lila AND Diego. Maybe they weren't even hidden. lol. Maybe they are not even talking about that.

(Btw diego is the star of this, him and Wanda ✨)

And where are the children? Where is Claire, damn it? Do they come together to rescue the children??? From bad old Reggie? 😨 I just thought about this. Maybe the ones who have a beef are the mothers and Klaus is just trying to de-escalate the tension.

Lastly, you don't know how much I LOVE having snow on the ground. I always thought it was a fantastic (although not always consistent) motif for family. last jump of five before ending in the apocalypse was a snowy day, Ben's funeral, the end of s2 and the collapse of the commission; I like to think that the snow is a bad omen for them. (I so hope they use ‘Violet Hill’ for the sountrack, it fits).

I might edit this later (to add things, don't expect my english to improve 🫂)

TUA Mermay Challenge @tuamermay Day 16 : Deep

#kind of a milf reblog

I won't apologize

How the hell could I possibly explain this post to somebody not on tumblr

Author Interview

(This was originally a tag meme that Mod Ragna was tagged in ages ago, so feel free to tag others if you answer it!)

He’s helping

(via)

more books from the renegade exchange! this one was actually meant to just be for the typesetting exchange, but i wanted to make myself a copy too, and ended up doing an extra just in case the author wanted one as well >w< it's something smart to do, on ao3 here

this was actually the first typeset i started working on for the exchange, so it's a little rougher formatting-wise than the others, but i learned a TON from it!! so its fine lol

I might just be extremely in my thirties now but I simply cannot take any sort of fandom discourse anymore. I barely could before but I am at maximum capacity. just... just watch the thing and enjoy it or whatever, be nice to each other, isn't life hard enough

It's still kinda wild how Phineas and Ferb managed to completely hijack an idiom. Now whenever someone hears a sentence leading with "If I had a nickel for everytime [...]", odds are their brain auto fills with "I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice," rather than "I'd be rich," or "I could [action that requires purchasing something requiring an obscene amount of money]". Y'know, what the idiom originally was

new tag game: people who don’t have anime profile pics, if you had to pick one rn what would it be