I actually finished this rebind last week, but didn’t want to post two rebinds in a row and then having nothing for a long time LOL
The cover design is sort of a homage to the original cover of the book with the golden bee on a college notebook. The bee is foiled on vellum paper. Gold htv is very soft and a b i t ch to work with thanks I hate it.
I also struggled with ironing the dripping honey and sea of honey onto the case because I glued the cloth to the book case first before I finalized the design TT__TT But all in all I’m very happy with how it turned out
Endpapers are printed marmor papers that I foiled, the illustrations are done by me on Procreate. I have the front and back different illustrations for story reasons.
take some time to notice your vision. see how easily you detect motion. focus on something in your peripheral (without moving your eyes to it). see how it works. look at your hands. pick something up with your fingers. appreciate how ridiculously specialized they are in fine motor skills (even if your personal motor skills are lackluster). think about how you have a body built to be an apex predator through use of tools. think about how the brain of your kind has created a digital hivemind uniting the whole world. now look back at the screen. look at the tab where you are in an argument about cartoons on tumblr. close the tab. open a new tab. google “tribute to anomalocaris”. watch the video that comes up. leave a like. subscribe even though the channel has been inactive for 8 years. you will need it in the coming times
Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol
a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:
NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.
Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off.
Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.
YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.
DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the
responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side
of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.
SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.
As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.
(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)
bring the healthy fun back to fandom!
If ever a time comes when I don’t reblog this when it appears on my dash, assume I’m dead
And also the way Barbie and Ken are role playing heterosexuality without any inherent sexuality of their own, without any understanding of what it means, or even any genitals at all! Just pretty-girl + handsome-guy = obviously a couple. And the way it fucks them both up! Because they’re both stereotypes, neither of them is a specialist version, no brain surgery or pilots license or Nobel prize for either of them. They’re just assigned the roles of Every Man and Every Woman. And Ken ends up doing Way Too Much because he’s hanging his entire self-worth on being important to Barbie. And Barbie just isn’t interested in him, she was assigned a boyfriend she didn’t ask for and doesn’t want and doesn’t know what to do with, just because that’s what society expects of men and women, that they will necessarily couple up and fall in love because… that’s what they do. Regardless of any personal quality of either party.
It’s about heteronormativity and amatonormativity and the unrealistic expectations society sets boys and girls up for from infancy. Barbie and Ken are every pair of toddlers sharing a sandbox while the adults around them call them each other’s little “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” even though neither party understands or is capable of understanding the implied meaning of that. Or wants to.
It’s a literal funhouse mirror of that weird pressure put on kids to perform heterosexuality from an early age. It examines how that leaves us unprepared for the complicated reality of actual relationships even if it turns out that you are heterosexual and do want sex and romance. Boys and girls aren’t really allowed to be just kids on the same team, so they grow up into men and women who generally want very different things from each other and are trained to look for it in everybody because anybody is better than nobody, and try to force it to work.
Barbie and Ken letting each other go in the end was perfect. Barbie the Every Woman realizing that she doesn’t have to be special, she just has to be, and Ken the Every Man realizing he has to seek validation elsewhere and lean on his fellow Kens for emotional support, WHICH THEY GIVE.