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Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House

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man call me crazy or whatever but i'm not very thrilled with the fact that the takeaway that all of y'all are getting from the titanic submarine crisis happening right now is

"People able to spend exorbitantly for some tourist trip thing deserve to die a horrific and torturous death via suffocation after spending 96 hours in mounting dread and awareness of that oncoming reality, all inside a 20 foot long windowless iron casket lost at sea"

and how it isn't

"There is no way in fucking hell that it should be legal to take people into such high-risk environments with zero regulations and shoddy work which almost certainly factored if not is the cause of this crisis to begin with, and the problem isn't that people will spend lots of money on dumb shit, it's that there are companies allowed to prey on that with no oversight"

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libby app guide

aka how to support libraries and get books and audiobooks for free without pirating them.

disclaimer: this is so easy. it is also really fun.

one: download the libby app. you'll open it and it'll ask you to add a library.

two: get a library card. don't have one? good news, it's really easy and i am saying this as the laziest person on earth. it varies what you need to have to get a card library to library but almost all libraries will let you get one online. i have a card for my home town and for the town i moved to. sometimes you only need an email address, sometimes you need an area code. to get mine it took me about 5 minutes of lying on the couch aimlessly tapping on my phone. follow your heart. you can get cards for places you don't currently live. i will leave the ethics of that up to you but it's probably better than pirating and either way you're creating traffic for libraries which is what they need to exist.

three: add your card. you can add multiple cards for multiple libraries. you need the number. i have never had libby fail to recognize a valid account.

four: search for your book! some will be ready to borrow right away. others have an estimated delivery time. libby will always pick the one that's the fastest from the options available at all the libraries you have cards at. you can borrow audiobooks and ebooks. libby will send you a notification when you're book is ready to borrow. in my experience it's a lot faster than the estimate. if you aren't ready to read it, you can ask to be skipped over in line so you keep your place at the front but let someone else read it first.

five: read it!!! kindle is the most common way to do this. you can go to your loan and click read with kindle. it'll download it to all your devices where you have kindle. as long as you have the loan, it'll act like your book. when the loan ends, if the device is connected to the internet, it'll automatically be returned. it will save all your notes and highlights. (if you disconnect your device from the internet, it won't return the book. weewoo.)

anyway in case anyone else has been wondering about it, i really love it. is a nice surprise to see what i'm going to get and it's cut my reading costs down big time! it's also neat because i get to synch my books between devices unlike downloading books through cough cough other means. good luck!

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Same same same - you're not alone

me, after every social interaction:

was i too loud or too quiet? did i overshare? was i weird? did i make a fool of myself? did i say or do something wrong? how did i look like? does anyone think bad of me now? was i a burden?

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I just finished this book and loved it sooooo much

Advertisement for followers to please read The Locked Tomb

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Climate crisis is coming for all of us. We need to vote for people who are not insulated from reality via donor bribes.

We need a robust EPA. The current Supreme Court wants to end the EPA and Federal power to regulate our air and water. Never forget.

Get involved. Vote.

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reblog to give warm bread to your mutuals

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I know it feels like an understatement but you sometimes make more progress by pointing out that conservatives are fucking rude. going out of your way to call someone the wrong name because you don't like them? rude. childish. this isn't fucking kindergarten, Carl. she said her name is Jennifer. Everybody knows her as Jennifer. You are the one making things confusing. Grow up.

"misgendering is violence": invites discourse over the TraNs DeBatE, puts people on the defensive, opens you up to accusations of liberal snowflakery, comes off as a hypothetical thought exercise

"Who the fuck is Jason? I don't know a Jason. Oh her? You mean Jen? You mean fucking Jen? That's Jen, dipshit." : crystal clear. you're making shit more difficult for everyone because you're a rude manchild.

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~Lost In Translation~

ok 'bring him home' is my third favourite song, but we all know how it really went down...

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If you’re a Non-Muslim and you see a Muslim praying in public, could you please not pass in front of them?

Go behind them, but not in front. 👍

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A lot of stories about learning magic hide the cost of magic: they tell a story that you can have magic through your own individual efforts, i.e. that magic comes by studying hard, learning something, and you just have it! You get this magic, and it’s yours.

Our own society encourages us to pretend that magic is free in similar ways. “I worked hard, I got paid, and I bought this iPhone. It’s magic! And it’s mine!” But we know, we all know deep down, that much of the actual costs are being paid by other people somewhere else, or will be paid by you in the future and in your children’s future.

Magic isn’t free. Whenever there is real magic, someone pays for it. And trying to claw apart the story to get to that truth, to expose and show that truth on a visceral level, is part of what I’m trying to do.

— Author Spotlight: Naomi Novik

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Can I watch a great film knowing the actresses in it were terrorized and mistreated the entire time? Can I watch a football game knowing that the players are getting brain injuries right before my eyes? Can I listen to my favorite albums anymore knowing that the singers were all beating their wives in between studio sessions? Can I eat at the new fancy taco place knowing when the building that used to be there got bulldozed eight families got kicked out of their homes so they could be replaced with condos and a chain restaurant? Can I wear the affordable clothes I bought downtown that were probably assembled in a sweatshop with child labor? Can I eat quinoa? Can I eat this burger? Can I drink this bottled water? Can I buy a car and drive to work because I’m sick of taking an hour each way on the subway? Whose bones do I stand on? Whose bones am I standing on right now? 

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I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

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ALT

don’t forget during the WGA strike that animation is not covered under the WGA deals and as a result animation has gotten the shortest possible end of the stick in under-staffing, under-paying, and generally turning the field into gig employment.

please sign the petition here for Disney to recognize animation production workers as a union and reblog this post!

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Behold. My new favorite reaction image.