Astraeus Sweater!! Pattern By Bad Wolf Girl Studios. Knitted Up With Malabrigo Arroyo, My Absolute Favorite

Something that really hit my like a punch about SOTR is how Suzanne Collins decided to write Haymitch's relationship with the women in his life because (in a clear contrast with Snow) even in his times of doubt over them, even when he's talking about Drusilla (fuck her btw), he still has a level of respect Snow didn't show for any of the women in his life in TBOSAS.

He sees Maysilee and Louella as sisters and each of them have strengths he admires deeply — in contrast with Snow thinking of Tigris (his actual cousin) as someone whose appearance "invited abuse."

Even Lenore Dove's most worrisome characteristics come for Haymitch from a place of care and love for her, from a desire to keep her safe, not to control her. Haymitch loved Lenore Dove for who she was, regardless of her rebelliousness maybe causing trouble for him. I don't even have to mention the contrast to Snow, right?

Even Effie, whose alienation certainly annoyed him, is talked about in a way thay shows and extensive highlights her empathy beneath her propagandized opinions. Haymitch never disrespects Effie or thinks of her disrespectfully despite the fact that is hinted that she has some behaviors that annoyed him. Snow, however, thinks of his female classmates with a irritated tone that visibly undermines them and their good traits.

Even the contrast between Drusilla and Gaul. Right, Drusilla is not as powerful as Gaul when they're presented to the reader, and Haymitch and Snow come from very different places, but Drusilla is the closes thing Haymitch will get to a powerful ally from the Capitol. Yet, he rejects her (in a quieter way than Maysilee does but still does it) almost right away because of her obvious cruelty. It doesn't appeal to him is the slightest like it does to Snow.

Also, the contrast between how Snow and Haymitch see the sacrifices the women in their lives make with the former disgusted at Tigris and the later showing how much he loves his mom (also) because of all the sacrifices she made to keep him and Sid alive and well, even if it devastates him (like the fact that they don't have a cake in the birthdays in fairness to him not getting a cake or the loss of the shirt his mother had so carefully sewn together for him).

Suzanne Collins didn't just made her mission to say a big fuck you to people who were romanticizing Snow, she showed us what we all should expect from a man (again btw) and you gotta respect her for it.

favouritism.

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extremely interesting last sentence

I'm glad that people are still having fun on tumblr even after we found out about the frightening ghoul that reblogs posts but doesn't say anything

one (1) gerard

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

Haymitch tried so very hard to break the arena and make the Capitol look stupid, only for 95% of his efforts to get edited out. But Katniss sees the bit with the axe and concludes that Haymitch was punished for messing with the arena in a way he wasn't meant to.

Yes, it's hideous how Haymitch tried to send a message over and over again only for it to get erased. But the Capitol couldn't get all of it. There was still a little in there that they couldn't erase.

THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017) dir. Guillermo del Toro

I first started writing this story for a friend way back in 2014, at which point it was just a couple thousand words long (and not very good, in all honesty, but I forgive myself). After a dozen revisions and rewrites down the years I finally finished working on it in late 2022. Somewhere along the way it grew to be about 220k words, and it remains to date the largest piece of fiction I've ever completed.

It was always my dearest ambition to try and bind it by hand as a gift, but, you know, time passes. Unfortunately my friend and I fell out of touch around COVID but the characters (a mixture of hers and my own) are still very dear to me and I wanted to make a physical copy to commentate the special place they will always occupy in my heart.

I was aiming for a look similar to Everyman's Library / the style of some 19th century half bindings and I'm pretty happy with the result. Used rather a lot of open source woodcut illustrations for the chapter headers and the title page, and the whole thing is bound in red leather and some 19th century reproduction marble papers.

731 pages and typeset in 10.5pt Crimson Roman