Cutoffsignals - No. 1 Goose Barnacle Fan

not to be a guy whose meds are working but i am having a good time and i like my job

today at work i was walking a particularly large specimen from the OR down the hall to the lab and experienced what i can only describe as the exact emotion a dog feels when they’ve found something fucked up by the side of the road and are about to bring it home and drop it on the porch

i am not taking questions at this time

five out of the six lab techs i work with are planning to quit or leave for grad school in the next like eight months so it’s going to be. i am going to have a time

FLESH FLESH FLESH FLESH FLESH FLESH FLESH FLESH MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT

tattoos by @soft.point on instagram

Church of Whale Fall

sometimes i am struck by the fact that there are people i follow on tumblr because we were friends on livejournal TWENTY YEARS AGO

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

The Outsider: a complete archive. Bound in real leather.

What a project! I started this typeset last year and after two practice binds here is, finally, the real deal. This little book includes every line of dialogue spoken by the Outsider in the Dishonored games, all ripped and typeset by yours truly.

I learned a ton since this was my first foray into bookbinding. It was frustrating, it was fun, I'm proud of the result despite the myriad of flaws. Two of these binds are for mutuals, one is for me.

There was a ton of thought that I put into this typeset so I included some info about it under the cut.

I typeset this project in A6 instead of the standard A5 so it wouldn't feel like I was wasting a ton of material if this project had gone wrong - but also to stretch out a comparatively small amount of text into an amount of pages more appropriate of a book. All in all there's under 9000 words in this book but thanks to the small format it's just over 100 pages long. And it meant I could use normal office paper without ending up with the wrong grain direction!

I decided against hyphenation for 99% of the typeset because it felt like adding hyphens made the small amount of text even smaller. Almost every line was edited typographically in some way to make the text feel good to me, adding line breaks and so on, idk I don't know graphic design but I did what felt right to me, so it really did take a long, long time just to typeset it all.

I wanted it to include everything including cut lines, so I included those in red and italics in the appropriate spots hovering over and through the normal text. I was trying to elicit the feeling of a ghostly afterimage or a later correction or amendment of the text. This did mean cutting the cut lines down to just the important parts, e.g. I only included the "to be a dancer" part of the cut version of the "When Billie Lurk was eight" line.

The little stars demarcate scene divisions. Empty stars mark scenes that are exclusive of each other - only one version of each scene is played in a run. The start of each scene subsection is marked with a quest marker from the DH2 journal. The lines that start at these markers connect exclusive possibilities - as with the scenes separated by empty stars above, only one subsection per level of line is played in one run. The stars are admittedly used very inconsistently because I just found they broke up some sections way too much, but the quest markers and lines should be consistently used throughout the work at least haha

The cover has been stamped with 3d-printed stamps and the impressions then painted with gold leather paint in order to give an (easier, cheaper) approximation of gold foil tooled leather. I kept it very minimalistic because the sort of story I originally wanted to tell with it is that since this is obviously a heretical book it would be very subtle in its exterior so as to not draw unwanted attention, only revealing its forbidden nature if you pulled it off the shelf and opened it. After deciding I did want to include the title on the spine that story doesn't quite work anymore, but the somewhat reduced minimalistic design still suits the Outsider, I think.

My kirtland's warbler logo is a public domain illustration by L.A. Messick via the USDA Forest Service.