Posts made by surreality

@Auspice I have killed two of those! (In fairness, one had a 2 year predicted lifespan and mine made it almost five, which totally made it worth it, but the second didn't even last two months.) Love those things. Superautos are

People are like 'get a Keurig!' and I'm like... AWWWHELLNAW. Not only does the Keurig end up being more expensive in the long run, what comes out of it is complete garbage compared to the superautos.

If ever I have $500 to blow (hahahahahahahahahahahahaha) I'm seriously going to pick up the new model of the old one I had. The long-lived one was even super cute, it looked like a little droid! We mourned coffeebot's passing in this house in a big way, even though my husband doesn't even drink coffee. (My folks would find excuses to visit and always seemed to bring a thermal cup, hmmmmmmmm... )

In fairness, the ninja is surprisingly good and some day I'll pick up the iced coffee pitcher thing for it. For that function alone it's worth having. (Me: 'So what if half my desk is monitors and the other half is coffeemakers, THAT IS HOW I ROLL.')

ETA: This was the old one. HOW CUTE! Wee coffeebot.

@Auspice Double to add: it sounds like you have my coffeemaker luck with sewing machines.

As an example, at one point, the one upstairs in my workroom died. That was OK! I had the old one downstairs still! I walked into the room where it had been sitting unused for two years just in time to watch the glass carafe explode (probably from ancient thermal shock, though I am not discounting the possibility of actual gremlins) over a dozen feet away.

Even the cats looked at me like, 'Lady, you are cursed.'

@Auspice I wish they still made the ones like the one I had, I really do. It's an Elna Diva (the name is hilarious in itself) and it was a workhorse like whoa. It was made right at the time before stuff got SUPER COMPLEX to set up and thread, so it threaded up simply and then it would just POWER through stuff -- though not at the demon racing speed of industrial machines. (Gods, do I ever hate those, they are not made for people with t-rex arms and boobs in the way. We had to use them in college and every teacher was like 'oh, honey, this is... ergonomic comedy of errors at best with you'.)

Sad thing is, those machines from the 90s were so hit and miss. I had a Singer that LOOKED great (and was a 10th the price of the Elna) but it was finicky hellspawn to the extent that when we went to go look for a replacement, the guy actually winced and apologized to us when we said what it was we had.

Whenever we gut the storage area on the porch, I may retrieve it, though; the same guy still runs the local sewing place, and said he'd hunt us down a replacement pedal, or have one of the techs kitbash something for us that'd work, since apparently even by today's standards it's a good workhorse machine he wishes was still an option for folks. (This is the one reason we don't feel as bad as we could going to that particular fabric store, even if it's dangerous to the budget.)

@Auspice I have a wonderful sewing machine. They stopped making them ages ago. (I got it for college, since I needed a seriously amazing one for fashion/costume design program.) This thing will do (eta: it's good to finish sentences!) its small catalog of little embroidery stitches through BELT LEATHER, ffs, I love that beast.

We... lost the foot pedal, somehow, when changing over rooms/moving furniture.

This means we now have a $1800in1992$s dust collector on the porch under a tarp with my mother's antique four-harness loom somewhere (her epic dust collector lives in MY house, augh), and I have to run next door to use my mom's ancient cruddy Singer that hates me so much the fact that I went into fashion/costume design ever at all is a testament to my absurd levels of stubbornness while she watches Hallmark movies in the background to intensify the pain and prevent me from colonizing it like I did in high school. You can probably imagine how often this happens. (Mayyyyyyyybe once every five years.)

@Auspice I have technically been Not Allowed to Buy Fabric since about 2000, but I came back from Paris with two suitcases full anyway that same year, which is about how that prohibition went until around 2005. Rooms in this house get perpetually repurposed based on the current work project pile, and that was the years of heavy duty doll clothes making. Most was dress fabrics, though.

I have a startling dearth of cottons, other than the little bits like that I see and just have to have 'for something'. There's a slow-growing bag (that I should really transition to a storage box, augh) of the Japanese prints that I want to make into knitting needle storage/sleeves/etc. for the various sets of things. I found a few gorgeous standing file boxes in metal that go nicely, and am going to try to do something like 'hanging files' with the fabric to organize them all. The butterfly print in the pic likely will land in there for 'augh, sorting has to occur here!', but not get used for that, since all the rest are black/gold/red and mix and match nicely.

Meanwhile, I keep randomly pining for some of this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DE58CGQ/ (My mother is terrible; I sent her that link and she bought some in the red: https://www.amazon.com/FreeSpirit-Fabrics-Free-Spirit-0410773/dp/B00XND26TE/ to tinker with herself. Evil woman!) Those seem like they'd be neat to embroider over. Picking a colorway is HARD though.

@Auspice The lines are doubtless super frickin' helpful to get it on there straight is why I'm like 'THAT IS GENIUS!' -- they should make that stuff for this, truly.

^ Notice how none of these actually work (mayyyyybe the olive one?) but this is why I'm not allowed to go to fabric stores unsupervised, there's a lot of 'but it's a small cheap piece and it's SO PRETTY!' (In fairness, the Japanese pieces are to go with a different project pile I've been assembling over the years when I find nice bits.)

Irony: I got the batiks to test this design in a much more open pattern over something so the design would show through... and forgot the stabilizer I need to mark over the top of it. Another trip to the fabric store looms in the future. (Sadly, that would have to go on a frame, grump grump grump.)

@Auspice I focused on the stripey weird stitch pattern for a bit while Gothsbane is wandering the wilds. Black aida and brights and a white cat? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... nope. She barely sheds, which amazes me, but it's still barely, and barely is enough.

Michaels also has their version of qsnaps pretty affordably, fwiw. I have a nightmare of a time getting those clips off, though, damn.

I figure, at least at the end of this I'll have a nice strip of something I can use to make a crochet hook roll or maybe the world's biggest needle scroll or somesuch. Shouldn't be hard to find some nice batik or something to bind/edge it with. I am being BAD re: seam edges, though. It's... real close to the edges, but since I know I'm going to bind them by hand later I'm not stressing it.

Also, omg I need to know where you found the marked tape, because working with white artist tape is a pain in the ass. What I wouldn't give for a serger...

@Auspice I keep getting nothing done since I have armrest cat now. Armrest cat: best deterrent to posting on MSB, even!

In my dream world, I'd have someone who knows how to wood build one that can not just tilt up/down, but angle, since I angle a whole lot. I always did with drawing/painting, too, so it's just... nnngh.

The test piece of the eye gradient is not huge, but not small, and it's too big to work with on a qsnap in my workspace really with all the cat interruptions. (Read: I knock shit over all the time when I have to quickly put it aside, and sometimes that shit is coffee or a lit clove, eeeee.) The full size eye... nnnnngh. I'm grateful I have to dye stuff for it. Maybe I'll win the lottery before all the materials are assembled and I can have someone build a nice floor stand. (ETA: I just checked... the one where I accidentally missed adding in two of the colors for the repeats would be a little over 24 inches wide, and is 42 inches tall... so probably 48-50 tall once they're in. AUGH.)

Most places take things down if someone contacts them or objects. It happened on BITN at one point, when someone used pics of a cosplayer. TR did so re: someone whose pics were nabbed off of facebook.

@Auspice There's a slightly more expensive one at Michaels that has a built-in scroll frame, but that one is likely a better bet, and is honestly cheaper and looks more versatile. The other one is PRETTIER, I think, but... meh.

I am a not-hoop-or-frame-using asshole (as in, I am an asshole for not using one) in most cases, but if I was going to go there, I would proooooobably save up for one of these: https://www.embroidery.com/ez-stitch-oak-lap-stand.ec?efid=3064

It's worth checking out that product line, though no handy coupons unfortunately.
https://www.embroidery.com/Easy-Ez-Scroll-Frames.ec

As my poor cat well knows, I have no lap to speak of since I'm short and made of boobs, but that one angles all manner of ways and can be set up on a desktop. There's also a shit-ton of different size bars and side rods you can order. It just only works with its own pieces and parts, though. My office is also like 'hahahahahaha girrrrrrrrl like you have space for that!' so it's not a priority.

I have an old one living in storage out on the porch from Lacis, but it was a heavy nightmare, required basting, and isn't very flexible. It's lovely but like... it's the sort of lovely that I think I'd just use to put something in to display some day and call it done. (I think that one was mostly for tambour work, which I love in theory but never really got into beyond dabbling/enough to justify this thing standing in the middle of the floor all the time.)

The bad person part of my brain is like: 'Come on, girl, how hard would it be to build one... ' and I need to tell that part of my brain to STFU, since if I don't have space for the stand, I certainly don't have space to build a stand.

@Auspice Michaels has a stand thing. There's one with a frame built in, and one that clips to an existing frame. Would need to sit next to the desk, but those 40% off coupons are kinda handy for such things.

https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Edmunds-Universal-Craft-6111/dp/B000YZ7M0W/ <-- Michaels has this one.

...or you're dumb and believed some dumb thing some other dumb person told you.

Considering this makes up probably at least half of all human experience, uh.

Seconding Grayson; that's definitely a good starter project!

@insomniac7809 said in Separating Art From Artist:

@surreality said in Separating Art From Artist:

I do not support harassment, full stop. I believe what the Klan does is harassment. I do not believe that justifies promoting harassment of them in return. 'They do harm' does not justify harming people in the periphery of them, and it never will.

Taken to its conclusion, this sort of assertion prevents anyone from suffering any consequences for anything ever. No one is an island, after all; there is no such thing as a punishment that can avoid causing harm to the perpetrator's friends and loved ones.

...no? Am employer seeing the image and firing the employee (or even seeing the information) is not engaging in harassment. Friends abandoning the person are not engaging in harassment. And so on.

Taking the classic MSB dogpile, ramping it up by a factor of 100x or more the population, and sending off a fired up mob to do whatever they want with someone's personal information? That is harassment.

You know where this tactic has most commonly been used over the past twenty years or so, until quite recently, right? To publish the identities of people who worked at places that provided women's health, birth control, and abortion services. This has even extended to patients at times. To say 'that did not go well for the people whose identities were published' would be an understatement.

I'm going to -- gods help me -- share a personal story here. About 20 years ago now, I thought I had an ectopic pregnancy. I had to get a blood test to determine if this was the case before moving on to further testing, because that was the cheapest option when you didn't have insurance. The totally secular lab I went to for this had an employee who noticed that she was doing a pregnancy test from the forms she was sent, and went on and on about how thrilled I must be to have a baby on the way. I told her that wasn't the case, and they were concerned I had an ectopic pregnancy, so if I was pregnant, this story was unlikely to have any sort of happy ending. This medical professional chose to lecture me that I should still keep the pregnancy if that was the case, despite the fact that nobody survives if they do that.

And that would be bad enough, if things like 'murderer' didn't start getting scrawled on my car window in lipstick. If flyers weren't tacked to my door for over a year after that. If calls didn't come in from a number of pro-life activists and 'crisis counseling centers' for several months. It was very clear my name, address, and telephone number had been shared with these groups and there was very little doubt about who was responsible.

Spoiler alert: a cyst had burst, I was never pregnant. That didn't matter. The circumstances had I been pregnant didn't matter. (This wouldn't even be acceptable if I had been normally pregnant and had an abortion, either, obviously.)

This is where this shit goes. Stop pretending it's harmless make-believe 'just on the internet'. That is absolutely harassment, and people have only gotten a lot more ugly about it with the rise of social media and with a much larger population on the internet since that time.

@Kestrel I think adult children are a different animal than young dependents. Big names with money are also pretty different from a blue collar family that's feeling alienated and shoved out of society and responds the wrong way (with hate). Someone else mentioned offering support and showing that the people they're hating are not different from them in the gross ways the dogma they're embracing says, and that's a much healthier approach in those cases than harassment campaigns.

I'm going to take a break from rubbing my temples to make the headache go away to say this, and for the time being, only this:

Don't justify the public release of information about people without understanding that the primary purpose of this act is to cause direct harm to the targeted individual. This harm can come in the form of harassment online or off. Threats of various kinds -- again, online or off -- are part of the intention here.

Whether employment is a factor or not, the harassment extends to someone's family as well, as do the threats and shaming.

It is called 'targeting' for a reason.

I do not support harassment, full stop. I believe what the Klan does is harassment. I do not believe that justifies promoting harassment of them in return. 'They do harm' does not justify harming people in the periphery of them, and it never will.

In precisely the same manner, I'm horrified by accounts of people harassing/threatening/shaming the kids of people who came here illegally, who had no volition in that choice. It happens. It's not OK.

'Sins of the father' is a problem not to be ignored. Handwave it off as 'but look at the harm he's doing!', GreenFlashlight, is exactly the sort of thing you were previously claiming people were doing re: enjoying any of Lovecraft's work: deflecting somehow from an admission that there's a real problem here.

@GreenFlashlight Let's maybe not use Kestrel as an example in that analogy, since she's not advocating this and it seems like something that could be misconstrued later in the thread if someone skims and thinks she has done so somewhere.

@Kestrel said in Separating Art From Artist:

Although this sucks, wouldn't the child in question be happier, in the long run?

Potentially! I am (genuinely) glad it worked out for you this way, and the previous work environment sounds awful and inappropriate in a zillion ways I'm (also genuinely) sad to hear you had to put up with.

Thing is... it isn't always that easy. The job market is pretty harsh in many parts of the world in ways that mean that if you want to eat and keep a roof over your head, you may be stuck in that shitty job and shitty circumstances without any good alternatives. Some folks don't have a ton of marketable skills, either, or means (which are usually financial) of acquiring them to get out of that hole. Sometimes it may involve relocating, which people may not be able to do for any number of reasons.

@bored said in Separating Art From Artist:

So my bigger scale answer is 'I would prefer there be some good laws about this stuff,' but as someone pointed out earlier (not sure if in this thread), our lawmakers have a tendency of treating online shit like it's make-believe, which is problematic.

^ This bears repeating, so there it is.

Part of what is so absurd to me is that no one would think positive promotion -- advertising, a social media campaign to promote a work of some kind -- is make-believe, and yet, the reverse is not recognized as also being real.

@insomniac7809 I don't disagree re: the doxxing and death threats. I have zero tolerance for that.

It is the same dynamic: the acts of an online mob. If you don't see the trendline there? Uhm. It's there. I may also loathe the people I've seen 'my side' say should be <list of exactly the same kinds of horrible things the 4chan mobs suggest>-ed, but that doesn't make it OK.