(no subject)

General rule of thumb for life that I had not realized I even had until last night:

If you receive a mysterious package from Amazon with no sender and no gift receipt and when you open it, it contains what amounts to a choose-your-own-adventure book based around Tarot imagery and Tarot cards, don't read it until you know where it came from and why.

Just seems like a way of getting sucked into a Jumanji-style plot, if you ask me.

(no subject)

If you ever want genuine appreciation of the amount of work that goes into basic stuff you take for granted every day, it'll cost you four or five bucks and several hours of your time.

Go to Joann's, or Michaels, or your local sewing shop or whatever, and buy a seam ripper. Five bucks, tops. Maybe less.
Go home and go through your underwear drawer. Find a pair that's at the end of whatever you consider its useful lifespan. (I know for some people this is 'it got a bit stained', for others it's 'there are several holes in it big enough to put my finger through', and for some it's 'well, technically there are still a number of coherent underwear molecules connecting the various bits of elastic'. That last category might be a bit too worn for this to work, but the others should be fine.)
Take the underwear in question and the seam ripper you just bought and load up a Youtube video on how to use a seam ripper. Watch it once or twice to make sure you know what to do with your new tool.

Okay, now using only the seam ripper, take the underwear apart.

seriously, it takes so much longer than you'd think, and even a super simple ancient pair of women's underpants from Burlington Coat Factory that cost maybe three bucks when you bought them back during the first Obama administration has so much more stitching going on in so many places...

this message brought to you by an ongoing attempt at learning to reverse engineer patterns from existing clothing so that I can make more stuff that fits me the way I like, regardless of whether the stores carry it any more or not