just rewatched space sweepers (2021) on netflix and realized something which i don't think is ever actually addressed in text & am not sure if it was supposed to be obvious (bc it didn't even occur to me until now) but - spoilers ahead! -
are james sullivan's occasional body horror episodes a result of a nanobot treatment gone wrong/gone right? like it may be what's keeping him alive well beyond typical human life expectancy, but it's also putting him through excruciating pain. bc we see the veins on his face receding as the hydrogen bomb goes off, and we know that the heat output from an h-bomb explosion is the only thing that can kill nanobots (except the langrangian ones apparently), so.....?? is the reason why sullivan showed up out of nowhere at the last minute bc he was already supposed to be there, trying to get away from the bomb as well?
anyway. the film's been out over a year but i don't remember seeing anything about this particular aspect before. would be pretty interesting if it's actually canon!
also. i hate sullivan's backstory and the bizarre anti-semitic implications; it puts a v significant dampener on an otherwise good film (aside from tiger park's dreads jfc). my proposal for an alternate backstory (developed with my sib) goes:
push back the timeline. make it the 2100s or 2200s. doesn't really matter
following this, sullivan would have been born some time in the first half of the 2000s
instead of a war orphan who turns to eugenics (bruh???), he's instead born into privilege and his dad is basically elon musk. uts corp starts out as basically spacex
keep the nanobots bit! they're injected into him at some point - to cure a sickness, just for the hell of it, whatever. whether or not his dad has a hand in it depends on how heavy-handedly we want to draw the parallels with kot-nim and *her* dad. in any case, seeing how kot-nim's nanobots protect and help her, unlike his, will fuck sullivan up and contribute to why he so badly wants to destroy her after he's done exploiting her
this sullivan is a man obsessed with legacies (and not the "purity" of the human soul holy shit). he struggles at first to uphold his father's legacy. when he surpasses it by building eden, it's a slippery slope. now he wants to leave *his* own mark as flashily as possible, collecting orphans (including tae-ho and captain jang) & "raising" them in his own twisted version of parenthood to be "geniuses"
i think captain jang should have been more sullivan's protégé than tae-ho, which could also explain why she's more reluctant to "parent" kot-nim bc she doesn't know what a healthy parent-child relationship is supposed to look like. would have also given more weight to the revelation that she's tried to kill him multiple times. i like to think tae-ho had a mentor he was close to in the space guard - the closest thing he had to a parent, maybe the one who actually found him first before sullivan literally carried him in his arms to uts. maybe they died just before the mission where he found su-ni, and that's partly why he decided to save her
this film has everything - anti-capitalism, the juxtaposition of blood ties with found family, breaking cycles of abuse, nanobots!
this is A Lot of backstory though - which is why i wish space sweepers had been a tv series instead, so we could also have gotten more on everyone else. in any case, it's still a p good film with a lot of heart and great rewatch value! two hours just fly by!
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my mom is suicidal, help me get her to a therapist
i won't go into details, but she's had severe depression since i was a little kid and it's been getting worse every year. our material circumstances not being great ever since covid finally got to her and she really, really needs help. she's the kindest, most talented, wise and wonderful person i know and i don't want to lose her to mental illness. i've been begging a lot these past two years but this time we need it the most. the appointments in my country cost only around 20$ so even the smallest donations would help immensely.
i obviously have commissions open ranging from 30 to 150$ with examples below but if you want to donate,
i'll set a goal just so i can see progress. this will cover 5 appointments:
0/100$
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Any tips on learning to make buttonholes? I've been putting it off for.... *checks notes* like three years.... but better late than never and all that. I don't have any fancy machines so I gotta do it by hand but that seems right up your alley.
Thanks!
It IS up my alley, yes, I do most of my buttonholes by hand!
I'm actually part way through filming an 18th century buttonhole tutorial, but I expect it'll be a few more weeks before I finish that and put it on the youtubes, so in the meantime here's the very very short version. (The long version is looking like it'll probably be about 40 minutes maybe, judging by how much script I've written compared to my last video?)
Mark your line, a bit longer than your button is wide. I usually use a graphite mechanical pencil on light fabrics, and a light coloured pencil crayon on dark ones. (I have fabric pencils too, but they're much softer and leave a thicker line.)
You may want to baste the layers together around all the marked buttonholes if you're working on something big and the layers are shifty and slippery. I'm not basting here because this is just a pants placket.
Do a little running stitch (or perhaps a running backstitch) in fine thread around the line at the width you want the finished buttonhole to be. This holds the layers of fabric together and acts as a nice little guide for when you do the buttonhole stitches.
Cut along the marked line using a buttonhole cutter, or a woodworking chisel. Glossy magazines are the best surface to put underneath your work as you push down, and you can give it a little tap with a rubber mallet if it's not going through all the way.
I'm aware that there are some people who cut their buttonholes open using seam rippers, and if any of them are reading this please know that that is abhorrent behaviour and I need you to stop it immediately. Stop it.
Go get a buttonhole cutter for 10 bucks and your life will be better for it. Or go to the nearest hardware store and get a little woodworking chisel. This includes machine buttonholes, use the buttonhole cutter on them too. If you continue to cut open buttonholes with a seam ripper after reading this you are personally responsible for at least 3 of the grey hairs on my head.
Do a whipstitch around the cut edges, to help prevent fraying while you work and to keep all those threads out of the way. (For my everyday shirts I usually do a machine buttonhole instead of this step, and then just hand stitch over it, because it's a bit faster and a lot sturdier on the thin fabrics.)
I like to mark out my button locations at this point, because I can mark them through the holes without the buttonhole stitches getting in the way.
For the actual buttonhole stitches it's really nice if you have silk buttonhole twist, but I usually use those little balls of DMC cotton pearl/perle because it's cheap and a good weight. NOT stranded embroidery floss, no separate strands! It's got to be one smooth twisted thing!
Here's a comparison pic between silk buttonhole twist (left) and cotton pearl (right). Both can make nice looking buttonholes, but the silk is a bit nicer to work with and the knots line up more smoothly.
I've actually only used the silk for one garment ever, but am going to try to do it more often on my nicer things. I find the cotton holds up well enough to daily wear though, despite being not ideal. The buttonholes are never the first part of my garments to wear out.
I cut a piece of about one arm's length more or less, depending on the size of buttonhole. For any hole longer than about 4cm I use 2 threads, one to do each side, because the end gets very frayed and scruffy by the time you've put it through the fabric that many times.
I wax about 2cm of the tip (Not the entire thread. I wax the outlining/overcasting thread but not the buttonhole thread itself.) to make it stick in the fabric better when I start off the thread.
I don't tend to tie it, I just do a couple of stabstitches or backstitches and it holds well. (I'm generally very thorough with tying off my threads when it comes to hand sewing, but a buttonhole is basically a long row of knots, so it's pretty sturdy.)
Put the needle through underneath, with the tip coming up right along that little outline you sewed earlier. And I personally like to take the ends that are already in my hand and wrap them around the tip of the needle like so, but a lot of people loop the other end up around the other way, so here's a link to a buttonhole video with that method. Try both and see which one you prefer, the resulting knot is the same either way.
Sometimes I can pull the thread from the end near the needle and have the stitch look nice, but often I grab it closer to the base and give it a little wiggle to nestle it into place. This is more necessary with the cotton than it is with the silk.
The knot should be on top of the cut edge of the fabric, not in front of it.
You can put your stitches further apart than I do if you want, they'll still work if they've got little gaps in between them.
Keep going up that edge and when you get to the end you can either flip immediately to the other side and start back down again, or you can do a bar tack. (You can also fan out the stitches around the end if you want, but I don't like to anymore because I think the rectangular ends look nicer.)
Here's a bar tack vs. no bar tack sample. They just make it look more sharp, and they reinforce the ends.
For a bar tack do a few long stitches across the entire end.
And then do buttonhole stitches on top of those long stitches. I also like to snag a tiny bit of the fabric underneath.
Then stick the needle down into the fabric right where you ended that last stitch on the corner of the bar tack, so you don't pull that corner out of shape, and then just go back to making buttonhole stitches down the other side.
Then do the second bar tack once you get back to the end.
To finish off my thread I make it sticky with a bit more beeswax, waxing it as close to the fabric as I can get, and then bring it through to the back and pull it underneath the stitches down one side and trim it off.
In my experience it stays put perfectly well this way without tying it off.
Voila! An beautiful buttonholes!
If you want keyhole ones you can clip or punch a little rounded bit at one end of the cut and fan your stitches out around that and only do the bar tack at one end, like I did on my 1830's dressing gown.
(I won't do that style in my video though, because they're not 18th century.)
Do samples before doing them on a garment! Do as many practice ones as you need to, it takes a while for them to get good! Mine did not look this nice 10 years ago.
Your first one will probably look pretty bad, but your hundredth will be much better!
Edit: Video finished!
And here's the blog post, which is mostly a slightly longer version of this post.
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