#so now he owns and operates a book bindery | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shiftermod · 1 year

Text

State of play and AUs

Prime timeline: blogcanon

Queen Twilight is on the throne. Queen Chrysalis and her colleagues have been defeated and petrified. And then there was much rejoicing.

Metamorphosis (AFAB He/Him) has been grandfathered into a Pony/Changeling peace treaty and has migrated to Ponyville and has gently manipulated Twilight and local officials into accidentally allowing him to effectively build a fortified magic-negating wizard tower at the edge of town disguised as a fully functional book bindery called Dusty Books Binding And Restoration. As part of the negotiations, he was forced to relinquish his claim to the changeling throne, leaving King Thorax in charge. The Nightguard provide Morph and his family monthly boxes of rations: single-serving bottles of simple syrup infused with magically-produced love energy using a variant of Princess Cadance’s signature spell-that-we-only-ever-see-her-use-twice.

Morph owns and operates the book bindery as his business and is trying to be a pillar of the community with some degree of success. His building is enchanted with so many changeling enchantments and is built so securely that it is now the safest place in Ponyville should a cataclysm strike. He still generally wears the guise of Dust Jacket because it’s comfortable and makes for better snuggles.

Morph’s fiancé Dream Catcher (AMAB He/Him) spends off days and some weekends with Dust/Morph, sleeping in the living quarters above the shop when applicable in The World’s Comfiest Bed. Eventually Morph and DC will wed and later have a daughter named Lobelia (AFAB She/Her).

The lore for this universe is the end result of the blogcanon stuff I’ve been developing since 2013. Morph and his home being over-the-top ineradicable forces and/or safe places are a direct result of the sheer amount of violent anti-changeling sentiment I observed in 2012, back when the Ask A Shapeshifter blog started out as grimdark.

Geddoffmalon AU: NOT canon

Prince-Regent Metamorphosis rules the mountainous Kingdom of Geddoffmalon with an iron hoof, having wed Prince-Consort Dream Catcher sometime before, and has established trade relations between the Changelings and the Ponies. Unfortunately Metamorphosis is not merely The Ruler of the Northern Hive but also its Gyne, and thus must repeatedly and regularly lay large clutches of eggs—up to 500 at a time—over the course of every single day in order to stave off the perpetual threat of immobility. Morph has difficulty getting around without DC’s physical assistance. There is a Royal Do Not Disturb Sign. There is a Royal Wheelbarrow or Wagon which has seen use multiple times. There are a lot of snuggles and a lot of married flirting noises, tummy rubs, and massive amounts of innuendo with an emphasis on “massive.”

Season 7 made it clear that this sort of scenario was not remotely canon and that changelings do not appear to have a specific reproductive caste, and honestly it’s a relief; Chrysalis doesn’t seem like the kind to have kids anyway, but seeing her standing alone in an egg chamber in mid-Season 6 (2016) made me question if she was the origin of the changeling species and forced me to consider throwing out much of the blogcanon I had been working towards up to that point.

Cat AU:

Everybody is cats! There are cuddles for all! All the cuddles, all the time! DC is a cloud Maine Coon or something similar, super fluffy big boy; Dust is either a Savannah or a really big Bengal. They cuddle. Sometimes they get up to go eat food or play or have adventures. And then they cuddle. They are well cared-for so I assume they live in a house with some kind of people.

Bad End AU:

Pending. This would be “What if blogcanon led to events that ruined all the things?” I’ll need to mull it over, but the short version is some terrible fate would befall everyone. Maybe the war reignites. Maybe someone harms Morph’s and DC’s daughter and Morph finally loses his temper. Who knows. Destruction, chaos, badly hurt feelings, who knows.

#prime timeline is safe space for me and my friendos #everyone is safe #everything is great #geddoffmalon is self-indulgent shippy ridiculousness but I realized I cannot name that many kids #cat au is just all the characters are cats and they are asleep #mod post

1 note · View note

sbooksbowm · 4 years

Text

The ‘Does this make sense?’ check: Chapter 1, history of fannish media

Some people in the Renegade Bindery asked if I was going to post about my research (like what I’m actually writing, not just narrating that I am writing–a subtle yet important distinction), so here we are: my research.

This is a semi-abbreviated version of my first and shortest chapter, the History of Fanfiction Media

Chapter 1: The History of Fanfiction Media

To kick things off, we need a little background on the history of fanfiction media. Why? Because what we read and benefit from now (i.e. Archive of Our Own) is the product of some 50 years of fannish history that prefaced our neat, no-content restraints, copyright protected, searchable, and safeguarded-against-people-randomly-abandoning-an-archive-and-losing-everything-we’ve-ever-loved website that holds most of our fanfiction. Versaphile wrote an excellent abbreviated history of fandom media, and I echo many of their points here.

Even though most of us don’t think about fic loss every time we log into AO3, the site is a direct response to the pitfalls of early- and mid-2000s fanfiction depots. Fanfiction media has always been characterized by instability, and Usenet and mailing lists of the 1990s aside, this instability was even more pronounced in the early interweb days. Fandom-specific sites of the 2000s often lacked robust serach functions, were individually maintained on home servers, and were susceptible to overload, threats of copyright infringement, or abandonment. Of course, the early-2000s threat of cease-and-desist letters from media companies irrationally concerned about 14-year-old Ellie from Akron, OH, making money off of her Wolverine fic led to the shutdown of sites without notice. The merging, abandoning, or unilateral shut down of sites left a trail of broken links and data loss in their wake.

We harp on about media conglomerates as the root of fic loss, but we forget that the sites themselves did not always operate in fans’ favor. LiveJournal had its moment, but even it proved susceptible to its own developer’s short-sightedness on how LJ users took advantage of the site’s features. Maciej Ceglowski delivered a fascinating lecture on how fans adapt sites’ tools (case in point: Tumblr users flatly rejecting Tumblr updates). He points to an instance in which LJ elimated an icon feature that fans used to indicate silent commentary on fic. LJ limited available icons to 20-30 per person, destroying a lot of data about fannish communication and reader response. So even when sites aren’t just unilaterally deleting fic (LJ’s strikethrough&boldthrough, FFN’s 2002/2012 NC-17 purges), users are still susceptible to developer’s tomfoolery. This means that the developer-as-fic-distributor role is incredibly powerful in how fans receive and access their fic!

The aggregate experiences of fanfiction instability, uncertainty, and loss seeded the desire for an archive like AO3: one that was well organized, well maintained, easily searchable, without content constraints, with a succession of maintainers to prevent from shutdowns, and safeguarded from threats of retaliation due to non-existent copyright infringement. Contending with copyright infringement claims is an articulated goal of the Organization of Transformative Works, a product of the tumultuous decade wherein fanfiction became all the more visible due to the internet, thus all the more vulnerable.

Why does this fannish history matter? Two reasons, for the purposes of my dissertation:

1. The media of fanfiction changes the standard roles of traditional book production: the writer occupies an author-publisher role and the web developer occupies a publisher-distributor role. This combined publisher-distributor role places a lot of power in the hands of people who may not actually know or understand how fic readers want to engage with the works on their sites (again, definitely read the transcript of Ceglowski’s lecture. He gets it). Similarly, the infrastructure of a website conflates the role of author-publisher: AO3, for example, forces fic writers to learn a little bit of HTML to format their works before posting. These media (read: these websites) mediate the relationships between fic writer and reader, and that impacts where and how fic readers are able to access works.

2. The history of digital loss and fanfiction impermanence shapes communal and individual attitudes/realities towards fanfiction. These experiences catalyzed the need for what is now the biggest archive of fanfiction: AO3, which, at writing this at 8:52 pm on 20 Aug, 2020, is home to 6,428,000 works across 38,800 fandoms (that’s 10 more fandoms than on 18 Aug, when I last checked). We are the direct beneficiaries of the resilience borne from thousands upon thousands of lost works. Moreover, fic loss shapes, to different degrees, how writers, readers, and fans respond to fic. In my last chapter, I write about our Friendly Neighborhood Bookbinders, some of whom are deeply compelled by the history and ongoing threat of fic loss to preserve it in print form. Communal and individual experience with fic loss is an important context for all fanfiction writers and readers.

#does this make sense check #research #chapter breakdowns #history of fanfiction media #fic loss #AO3 #fanfiction communication circuit #community as context #chapter 1 #dissertation

118 notes · View notes

hub-pub-bub · 7 years

Link

WEST SPRINGFIELD — For more than 60 years, W.G. Fry was an independent company making paper products in western Massachusetts. But on Sept. 25, all of that changed.

Except, instead of moving from its current location in West Springfield to another state or another country, the W.G. Fry Corporation is relocating its operation north to Leeds, in a move triggered by its purchase by Chartpak, a Leeds-based manufacturer and distributor of art, hobby, craft and office supplies.

“It’s two success stories,” said Saul Kuhr, the former owner of W.G. Fry, who now works for Chartpak as a consultant.

Kuhr, 63, who lives in Northampton and is a graduate of Hampshire College who earned his Master of Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, bought W.G. Fry in 1990, when its operations were based in Holyoke.

Kuhr did so after becoming dissatisfied with his career in finance, and being advised by a career counselor that he would be happiest working for himself and owning a small manufacturing company.

Prior to making the purchase, Kuhr worked on the factory floor running machines and getting a sense of the business. A bachelor at the time, Kuhr said that the company became like a family to him, although he is now married to his wife Karen, with whom he has two children, Jordan, 18, and David, 19.

A rich history

W.G. Fry manufactures a number of different notebooks and paper products, including the reporters notebooks used by The Daily Hampshire Gazette. Indeed, the Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer are the only two newspapers to which W.G. Fry sells reporters notebooks directly, as the vast majority are sold through distributors that W.G. Fry makes the books for.

“That’s because they would not leave us,” said Kuhr, on why he still sells directly to the Gazette and the Inquirer.

W.G. Fry products have appeared in a number of different movies and television shows, including “Law and Order” and Tim Burton’s “Batman,” and Kuhr noted seeing one of his company’s notebooks when he saw “20th Century Women” at Amherst Cinema with his wife.

Kuhr said that W.G. Fry continued to grow through the 1990s and 2000s, with the company relocating from Holyoke to West Springfield in 2001. At the same time, Kuhr noted that many other small-scale paper converters have gone out of business, as changes in technology have reduced the demand for paper products.

W.G. Fry has stayed ahead of the curve in part thanks to a decision Kuhr made 15 to 20 years ago. That’s when he determined that the fine arts presented a stable market for the company, as artists like to draw on and work with nice paper. As such, he began orienting the company to meet this demand.

Another way that W.G. Fry has been able to compete is its use of semi-automatic production lines. These lines have a number of different components that can be arranged to do jobs of different sizes, as opposed to automatic production lines that are set in place and cannot be converted. As such, W.G. Fry can do smaller jobs that larger companies are not able to take. At the same time, when given larger jobs, Kuhr said the company can arrange its semi-automatic lines to handle them.

“Saul’s manufacturing capabilities are very unique and very nimble,” said Steven Roth, the owner of Chartpak.

Business partnership

Kuhr said that he’s known Roth for years, but until recently Chartpak had never been a customer.

“We always just agreed on everything,” said Roth, who noted that he and Kuhr were always on the same page when it came to business.

In 2016, Chartpak contracted W.G. Fry to manufacture an extensive line of notebooks it had designed. Some of the notebooks have pages that can be taken out and then placed back into their wire bindings. Roth refers to this as “dome lock technology,” a feature unique to Chartpak.

“It’s like a Rolodex card,” said Kuhr.

Indeed, many of the notebooks that W.G. Fry produced for Chartpak have papers in them that were selected to work best with different Chartpak products, such as Koh-I-Noor pencils and Grumbacher paints, and are marketed as such.

These products were a major hit at this year’s International Art Materials Association convention in Salt Lake City.

“Immediately, the buying started,” said Kuhr, who noted that one of the buyers was Hobby Lobby.

It was also at the convention that Roth began seriously discussing acquiring W.G. Fry from Kuhr.

Prior to the sale, W.G. Fry employed 30 full-time employees and six temporary employees. All W.G. Fry employees were offered jobs at Chartpak’s Leeds facility — the company also has a plant in Florence — at their same pay or higher. Some would be employed on a nominally temporary basis until it was demonstrated that the new facility could support their jobs. Ultimately, 20 of the full-time employees decided to make the transition, along with several temps.

Between its Florence and Leeds facilities, Roth estimated that Chartpak had 100 employees prior to the W.G. Fry acquisition. W.G. Fry is currently in the process of moving to Leeds, while still fulfilling orders in West Springfield, and Kuhr estimated that the move would be complete in November, with folks reporting to work in Leeds no later than Thanksgiving.

Kuhr said that he expects that W.G. Fry will continue to grow, and he predicted that it would have more employees than it had before it was sold by this time next year.

Kuhr declined to disclose the purchase price of the sale, which was finalized on Sept. 25. That was also the last day of work for those who chose not to move up to Leeds.

Longtime employees

W.G. Fry has employees that have been with the company for decades, the longest-serving of which is Adrian Roberts, 68, of Belchertown, who began working at the company in 1969.

“I like it fine,” said Roberts, who runs an auto punch.

Roberts, who will be working in Leeds, says he plans to stay at W.G. Fry at least until he is 70.

“I guess my raises,” he said, when asked what his best memory with the company is.

Lucy Rubino, meanwhile, has been with the company since 1995. The 57-year-old machine operator acknowledged being excited about the move, while also praising her longtime boss.

“I love working for Saul,” she said. “He’s the best.”

One element of working at W.G. Fry that Kuhr noted is that he allows most of his employees to take unlimited overtime, which makes it so he doesn’t have to hire a second shift. Kuhr said he does this both as a benefit to his employees, and because he trusts their skills, noting that W.G. Fry works with expensive materials, which can make mistakes costly.

While Roth said he expects W.G. Fry will be bringing on a second shift, he also said that he had no intentions of interfering with the overtime policy.

As a consultant for Chartpak, Kuhr said that he would be continuing to run and grow W.G. Fry, doing much of the same work he did when he owned the company, while also spending more time on marketing and developing new products.

Roth said that having W.G. Fry at the Leeds facility will aid in the development of new products for Chartpak.

“It empowers us to come out with any product that we want to come out with in paper,” said Roth.

He also noted the creative effect it will have on the company. “Magic happens,” Roth said. “We can constantly play a lot.”

This acquisition will greatly expand Chartpak’s paper business, which prior to working with W.G. Fry was mostly centered around its Clearprint brand of art and engineering paper, the management of which W.G. Fry will be taking over.

Kuhr said that he expects W.G. Fry to move towards more automatic production lines in Leeds, although he said that the semi-automatic capability to take smaller orders would still be retained.

Under Roth, Chartpak has purchased a number of other companies, including the art materials company Grumbacher and the drawing products company Koh-I-Noor. Roth noted that while Chartpak does import products and have distribution deals with companies overseas, his preference is to create jobs in the United States and to move production to the Northampton facilities.

“We want to keep creating jobs for that community,” said Roth.

“My first preference is to manufacture in the United States,” he said, later on. “We want to save the U.S. manufacturing base.”

Kuhr expressed a similar passion for manufacturing in America, and said that he felt that not enough has been done for it on a national policy level.

While W.G. Fry’s bindery service business for commercial printing companies is going to be discontinued, it will still make products for both Chartpak and for other customers as a private label manufacturer. It will also continue to supply reporters notebooks to the Gazette, just a little closer to home.

#paper #paper products #newspapers #gazette #philadelphia international #wg fry #chartpak #acquisition

0 notes