I sometimes feel out of time and space

One of the key things of a bookbinder's toolset are weights that can be used to press a book down. The best of these are cast-iron presses, but they aren't made much nowadays, so most binders use wood-made presses or clamps affixed to boards. But there is one simple alternative: bricks!

Four Keys Book Arts showed it really handily with how he uses bricks in his bookbinding. A couple of weeks back, my parents were disassembling one of my sibling's beds which had used bricks to increase the height of the bed frame. I spotted them, asked "can I have those?" and am now the proud owner of six grey bricks!

Of these, I intend to turn four of them into bookbinding bricks, in two pairs. This is the first pair: wrapped in tough wrapping paper from the local stationary shop and slowly glued and folded over the course of a week.

Despite some quick demonstrations of the effects of gluing innatentively, they both turn out really well! One is only wrapped and only glued in certain places, while the other is fully glued throughout. I used a mixture of PVA glue mixed with water and a drop of liquid soap to coat the bricks first (less flecks of brick dust coming off) before applying a second coat of glue as I wrapped them.

Now I have two colorful weights I can use to press my smaller binds!

Last Saturday, I walked down the stairs to the main living room to find my parents sitting by a giant pile of CDs. When I asked what was going on, they replied that they will be throwing them out.

Thus began what I have been doing for the past two weeks.

Over the past fifty years, my family and I have accumulated a vast collection of disks, from the 1980s till today. They range from from the musicals my dad loved to my mother's religious songs to my siblings' music CDs and my childhood movies, plus everything in-between.

But with all of us moving out and my parents entering their golden years, they have decided to clear out some drawers and shelving space that are cluttered with stuff we all no longer use. And that includes the shelves and drawers filled with half a century of CDs.

I talked to them over breakfast and implored to save at least a few CDs that they consider sentimental or important, while also giving me the chance to archive the rest before they are thrown out. What resulted was an entire morning of sifting through albums, covers, and plastic sleeves, choosing what to keep and what to throw out.

There were some surprising finds made by all of us. Mum discovered several music CDs she thought lost and dad decided to keep his collection of Band of Brothers DVDs, along with several other movies and music albums. In the end, the 'saved' collection was enough to fill half a drawer space.

But the majority of discs were decided to go. And thus I now have three large plastic hampers, full with every sort of disc imaginable. Music, musicals, albums, lectures, animes, VCDs, DVDs, and even a surprising number of plain-white discs that nobody knows contain what.

And ever since, I have been ripping and saving as much music and video as I can into my laptop. After work, I will switch on my laptop and immediately insert a disk, as the ripping process can take up to an hour (more so if the disc is scratched). I have found some surprises too, such as CDs about Spanish folk music or an Australian acapella group with their own signatures on the disc!

Needless to say, these CDs and several more have gone to my own personal collection of 'saved' disks. If a CD looks and sounds distinctive, melodious, or just plain rare and interesting, I'll save them and form my own library. Now, I have CDs ranging from Arabic music to Spanish folk to local artists and even an Aidilfitri/Eid album by Malaysia's highway company!

It's been an experience looking through all these disks, but also a tiring one. There have been CDs that won't launch and instead cause unbearable noises while inside the CD player. There are movies I remembered loving that couldn't be saved, albums that couldn't be ripped, and memories that couldn't be replayed. Sadly, I have no choice but to relegate them to the dust bin.

But it's also worth it, because my music and movie library is now growing ever fuller with the songs and flicks my family has loved. And I think that is worth archiving.

aka. What I have been reading this week.

For the past seven days, I've been reading up on anything interesting that passes my way, usually through article links posted by other people on the Renegade Discord. They were interesting on their own, but when I took a step back there was an overarching theme of "fan conventions and how they contribute to modern fandom as we know it."

So from the first link to the latest, here's what I read through this week:

• The Death of the Artist Alley - an article by Fansplaining about how the artist alley, a staple of fan conventions, have become overpriced, commercialized, and dominated by the largest fandoms. Long gone are the scrappy-lovable days of artist alleys gone by, but what does this mean for fan social culture?

• Manga Ichiba Event Report - from a hyperlink in the Artist Alley article above, this is a description of a fan-run event that exclusively focuses on zines. Far from the commercialized AA's that form most conventions, the zines take center sage here, and many people loved it.

• How the Marber grid was made - Not related to the artist-convention arc, this was posted by a fanbinder who wanted to emulate the Penguin Classics cover design. While I know there was more to it, I did not expect Penguin's classic covers to have such a precise geometric design governing the layout!

• Odes to KL city, underground subcultures, and ‘Tbaka Daghak’ - How Malaysian zine makers are documenting the country - A news article about Malaysian zines and how they have gained a foothold in the country. They are becoming more popular as creators use them to document niche topics like underground music, local culture, and overlooked narratives.

• Baskerville Punch: a revival of Baskerville’s type - A webpage about the Baskerville typeface and how researchers across Europe studied old examples to revive the type in the modern day. Comes with a free download of the font!

If you are interested in fandom, books, or even just curious, I highly recommend picking one of these to read!

Over the past week and a half, both work and personal life have kept me somewhat busier than usual to the point that I didn't think of posting here for the first time in a while. But something happened to me just now that jolted me into recording this entry for the sake of posterity.

I don't know if it's me, but whenever I click on WhatsApp I get anxious.

I was having dinner with my parents when I took a gander at my phone during a conversational lull. Among the accumulated notifications on the screen were several from WhatsApp, which I unthinkingly pressed. Bad idea. One of them were from my workplace, showing a chart that displayed the productivity of several people at work today.

I was near the bottom.

I took the time to explain on the chat about my work for the day and why that might have been misconstrued as "low productivity", but I was also stabbed with anxiousness at the thought of just being on that app. Like somehow the sheer number of group chats make me feel uncomfortably seen, either through my presence or my absence.

Perhaps it's because WhatsApp has become the go-to messaging app for everything in Malaysia. From family members to doctors appointments to work assignments, every single part of life that should be spaced apart is now smushed closely together, clamoring for attention lest you be perceived badly. I have never liked the app, but the explanation I had to type while at dinner really struck at my anxiety. If I don't respond, I would look like a bad employee, but if I do respond, shouldn't I also respond to the multitudes of other messages? Lest I also be a bad cousin? A bad patient? A bad person?

I wondered why I don't feel the same way towards Discord, where I'm also a part of several servers and groups. But then, I'm a part of them because I want to. On Whatsapp, I'm part of a group because I have to. And that's what made all the difference. 

When doing my hobby, I take comfort in that - aside from preserving fanfiction and/or interesting documentation - I am creating something tangible and useful with my own hands. A way of having my own physical work in an era of the digital. I also take heart in the community I have found and the knowledge that I am a continuation of a skill that is valued across the world, bridging peoples and faiths across the winds of time and distance.

And from what I've been hearing, I'm not the only one. A recent Guardian article reported how many people now value traditional 'hands-on' trades such as metalwork and boatbuilding since most office jobs are in danger of being replaced by LLM's. Weaving and crocheting took off during the pandemic, introducing many people to a tactile hobby that is still larger than it has been a decade ago. I myself went to an illustration fair earlier this year where original artists showcased their work to a packed audience.

With the ubiquity of computing, people are taking more attention to crafts, skills and trades that have physicality.

But late last week, I stumbled across an article that asks us to question this return to hands-on labor. Are we doing this out of nostalgia? For a past that is seen through rose-tinted glasses? Are we doing this for self-improvement, or for escapism? If physical skills are valued, are we aware that it can lead to some dark messaging about labor? Of what sort of person to idolise or demonize?

For me, at least, I do bookbinding because it served several things: to help me pass the time; to save and conserve stories from internet deletion; to document histories people prefer to forget; to show my love and appreciation for media that has often been seen as childish, trite, or disgusting. From joining the fanbinding community, I also see myself as continuing a tradition that, for some cultures, errs close to the divine.

I don't see myself as being on a poster with a chiseled jaw and emphasizing masculine labor, but I can also see why some people would like me and others like mine to be that. For our case, a lot of us don't fit that image and would laugh at such an attempt. So my response to that article is this: so long as we take hands-on trades and crafts with an open mind, so long as these repopularisation of labors come with acceptence of the queerness of ourselves, we will never become the people on those masculine posters. And may we be all the better for it.