Today's High Schoolers Romanticizing 2016 As If There Weren't The Clown Incidents

Everybody's talking about how they want the Switch 2 to have Ultra HD Super Special 60FPS Graphics or whatever but what I REALLY want for the Switch 2 is for them to bring back fucking customisation and PERSONALITY.

The fun stuff like Face Raiders or Badge Arcade. The little jingles that played when you selected a game on the Wii. The way that the 3DS built on that jingle idea by including 3D dioramas with the game's title on the top screen that spun around when you blew into the microphone.

The backgrounds you could buy that played music in the 3DS's home menu. The way the activity log on the 3DS was a little book.

And the E-Shop music! And when you downloaded a game from the 3DS E-Shop you could check your progress by watching the little cubes be dropped into the game's home screen icon. The way when the game finished downloading, it was wrapped in a present that you had to unwrap in the home screen.

And the Miis. Miis were awesome.

The Switch was so lifeless in comparison, I want it all to come back. :(

Update: LMAO someone on Reddit called me an "ungrateful little shit" for *checks notes* expressing disappointment that the Switch 2 only comes in monochrome black. Wow.

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Been talking about this with friends so I present to you, the cursed spectrum of media literacy

Fanbinding(ish): Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

Leather on bookboard, with hot foil stamping on the spine. The endpapers are a Japanese wave design, partially as a reference to Canaan House being on the water, and is also a reference to the fact that this book was a birthday present for @eebeesee, who is a giant weeb. (Fun fact: I bought that paper in 2012 and have been waiting uh, 11 years, to find the perfect project for it.)

Process under the cut.

Remember two months ago when I said I wasn't wild about doing another paperback-to-hardback conversion? Well. More fool me. (I did try and find a sewn hardback to take apart, but apparently this book was not sold as a sturdy hardback. Cue rant.)

I've tried debossing with leather before, so obviously, for embossing, I decided I'd just pick the most complicated design possible. I had to modify the skull a bit--taking out the IX, which did NOT cut well, and I had to make the lines around the glasses thicker.

After several hours of cricut cutting and experimentation, here is the cover pre-leather. (I also had to floss the skull's teeth with an awl to get some fuzz out, which I found very funny.)

Then, leather:

As you can see, I lose a lot of details in the teeth there, so I went around the edges with a heated brass stylus.

I bought a special skull stamp for the spine: it definitely wasn't made for heat, because while it did serve the purpose, it also came with a metal handle which made handling it awkward. (Oven mitts did not give me the necessary amount of dexterity. I ended up sort of wrapping a paper towel around the handle. My cousin has since informed me that we do own fire resistant gloves, but I did not remember this at the time.)

The stamp was also a pain to get even: it had to be at juuuuust the right temperature and pressure, or you'd either get too much or too little, as shown. It was also pretty picky about foil, but the brass color matched the endband cloth and insides best anyway, so that worked out. (White was a definite no.)

The other fun bit of this was doing the edges: I did them with black foil, but as we established in my earlier foiling experiments, that's not the most reliable. I think I got the best results so far on the top, but kept getting flakes on the others. I ended up painting the outside edge with ink, and then foiling on top of that. The bleed onto the pages ended up looking pretty neat, but since I hadn't done it on the top, I didn't do it on the bottom so that it wouldn't look weird on the inside. I'm not sure the foil added as much gloss as I was hoping for so next time I might just do the ink.

It did mean that I had to separate all the pages twice; I ended up bringing this to my girlfriend's haircut appointment and working on it in the corner. I hope it was the most strangely specific thing the stylist had seen someone doing when they tagged along.