I would say more like an ivory ornament or a shark-tooth necklace. Sort of creepy if you think about it, but you could just ignore it easily enough. I would say that it is less creepy that a human-hair wig… Unless the tree-mutant harvested the shield from themselves, but who here would dispute the virtue of brandishing one’s own severed limbs against one’s enemies?
And then there is taxidermy…
trees drop limbs though, so I would say, that as long as it wasn’t torn off, it wouldn’t be tooo weird. Sort of like, knitting a rope from hair you shaved off, to climb a cliff. Eh, your a good survivor, not going to judge further than that.
Well, you’d be very hard pressed to make a rope of human hair if you’re using beard shavings, if you meant like growing your hair out and then cutting it to braid a rope, sure. Good on ya’, bit weird but go for it. Secretly, I have a fair bit of background in smithing and fabrication. If you’re going to make a shield, say, a heater shield like Jesus drew it’s generally made out of wooden planks bound together at a slight radius and glued, then both sides are reinforced with linen and some manner of adhesive, likely hide glue if you’re going full historical which creates a strong shield that’s not prone to splintering. It’s made out of the ‘wood,’ of the tree. The flesh, the cured and dried vascular tissue of a felled tree. Similarly most people don’t eat the skin of an animal, we eat the flesh I.E. the vascular tissue. The closest comparison can be drawn between a plant survivor using a wooden shield, and an un-mutated human survivor using a shield made out of cured and dried meat, not leather. Leather is skin, simply put, and not a direct allegory; That would be Bark, the skin of the tree.
TL;DR
The bethought of a tree with a wooden shield is v’ry funny to me and I approveth v’rily.
I think that you could make rope from human hair by tangling it and treating it like wool. It would be difficult to get any length to it, but it should be pretty quick to do and very strong if you don’t mind twisting it around itself a couple of times. It also doesn’t require much quality in the individual strands, so you can probably build rope just by collecting shed hair…
Alas, all those zombie sweaters, shirts, and pants will feel so neglected as we spend our days making the rope of human hair cuz… reasons.
cuz those scrubby zombies dont know how to wash their glorious hair is why
how is that relevant to their clothes? Or do you mean the zoms have gone all European and their unwashed bodies disgust you so much you make clothes from your hair instead?
Well, the thing about it is, Human hair doesn’t behave like wool. I’m not even entirely sure you could make a wool equivalent from human hair, but I could be wrong. Human hair can however be spun into yarn with a spinning wheel decently easily, I’d think. It’d need a decent length to it and a decent amount to have any worthwhile amount of yarn, but even so. Rope is a different story, however; Rope is, and has been a valuable commodity for basically forever. It’s extremely useful, and difficult to make by hand. Our medieval ancestors used what was called a rope walk, a geared machine that spun fibers not dis-similar from yarn into rope in long sections relatively quickly, as making rope by hand, quality rope that could be used as… well… rope that had a higher tensile strength than the sum of it’s parts was very difficult, and very time consuming. In the cataclysm I’d rather just look for several hundred feet of rope than attempt to make it out of hair. But… you could, I guess, if you had the time, provisions, and dedication to sit for many hours painstakingly making… hairy rope.
And if you are so opposed to zombie clothing, or clean dead people clothing sitting in the closet etc… and don’t want to break them up, and then recraft them into rope instead of growing out your hair and then braiding it into rope… Less power to you. Have fun with that.
Well it is easy enough to make rope, by hand, on a small scale, out of cat hair, which is more woollen than human hair but seems more hairy than woolly. The trick is to tangle it up enough that it forms a conglomerate of tangles that can hold a rotational twist, at which point you can start folding it in upon itself to form a stable thread. It is, I expect, weaker than the sum of its parts, but much stronger than any individual parts, and you can keep scaling up its strength by halving its length… Now, yes, sure, you are going to want to find professionally-made rope if you can, you are not exactly going to hand-make many long-chain polymers out of your own skin cells, but if you just want something stronger and longer than any available materials and you possess the means to anchor the end points and mid point then you should be able to make string out of pretty much anything that can be tangled(bark would be difficult) and twisted(spaghetti would typically disintegrate). You just need to apply a consistent rotational force and then fold it in half, the two halves then twist into each other. The first time you have to be gentle because it is a mess of tangles, the second time it is basically string, but it is likely inconsistent(because being gentle lent itself to avoiding dealing with inconsistencies) so you need to watch out for weaknesses, but after that you have something pretty solid that you can halve more times if you want it stronger. I guess some sort of level would be needed to rotate it if you were doing it on a larger scale…
I imagine that you could do the same thing to light clothing and produce a less-efficient rope that would be more consistent than tying the cloths together but easier than teasing them into threads or braiding rags. Just cut them into long strips, bind them together(probably with needle-and-thread at pretty much random locations, but you could tie them together or something, glue might work but it would need to dry first…) twist them around until they hold a consistent counter-force to being twisted, then fold it in half, then repeat the twisting and folding steps until it is strong and consistent enough for your purposes… Of course, you can do the same thing with rope too but being cohesive rope would have a greater ability to slip…
this sounds like something that should have a link. Probably to youtube.
Hmm, interesting idea. A video would be quite excellent, to more clearly demonstrate your point. How I understand what you’re saying is that you can make string from a ton of things, which is true. You can make thin cord and string from just about anything by spinning it or braiding it, depending on what you’re working with. Thin string, not rope. Rope is a mass of what I would call braided cord that is again twisted together and tied off at either end to create a very strong length. Braided cord is a component of rope, but is not rope. String is a component of braided cord, and so on. You can make cordage from all sorts of things, yes. You can spin human hair into a bow-string, or any animal hair really; I’ve seen that once before and know that’s possible. It’s not rope, though, just a strong string. Also, my dreams of spaghetti rope are crushed. Lol. Rope is historically made from stuff like Jute, which was also used to make cordage, thinner material that was used to tie and hold all sorts of things together, and make some simple forms of weapons. I suppose I’m being pedantic because in the cataclysm any amount of cordage is useful, but I wouldn’t expect a hair string or even hair cord to support my weight the same way a rope would. Rope is not easy to make, at least in my experience, because it requires that you first make string, then make cord, then make the rope. You have to spin the cords themselves to keep them tight and spun so they don’t unravel, spin the cords around themselves at a forty five degree angle and keep the section of un-spun rope separate using a special wooden tool that has valleys in it for the rope to ride through, and maintain the twist on the cord so the cord doesn’t unravel as they’re being spun together. If you manage those three things which are nearly impossible to do by hand without the aid of some semi-complex machinery you then have to tie off each end of the rope and stretch it to release the pent up energy from the spinning process otherwise the rope will coil up on itself much like those curly phone cables of doom.
pretty standard string material is animal guts. Apparently tried strung out intestines make really good cords and such for some reason. Its what lutes and such from ye old timé used to use for string, bows too I think.
I’m a new guy to the thread, and I have something to post.
And then I learned to never go scavenging with NPCs.
Yup.
gotta set them to ‘dont bash obstacles’
[quote=“pisskop, post:4135, topic:441”]Yup.
gotta set them to ‘dont bash obstacles’[/quote]
You can tell them to not pick up random stuff, too. One of the first things I do with any new companion.
^ a must. don’t use explosives, don’t attack unless I do/ other don’t charge hulks order, don’t use flamethrowers, and don’t bash things/ take things I don’t give you and tell you to.
More my paint from the talented hands of Razor
careful not to leave that laying around somewhere. You’ll accidentally force some poor kid to have to go through years of therapy and counseling for something he didn’t do XD.
worst part is no one will stop to think how the kid managed to draw so well.
Hiya Guys loved the thread from the beginning even without an account, I have decided to show my drawings I hope you guys will like it!
[spoiler]
He is Wearing:
Glasses “he’s blind without them 
like myself”
Knit Scarf “love having scarfs on characters”
Winter Coat “rolled up exposing shirt underneath”
Long sleeve shirt
Pair of Pants
Steel-toe Boots
Finally his trusty 2 by 4 sword is laying next to him that he can’t hit worth crap with! /spoiler]
