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The time is near! Mark your calendars and set aside some cash for this Summerween, as pre-orders for the GF Hunkles Calendar for 2025/2026 will be going Iive at 6PM EDT on June 22!

This project depends on pre-orders to be funded, so if you want to own a calendar, you must be sure to help us spread the word. Heck, give it a reblog even if you don't intend to buy one. Please?

The pre-order period will last 2 weeks, closing on July 6.

Since this calendar covers 24 months, it will be priced at $30 USD.

To boost the funding for the new calendar, the digital versions of the previous calendars (2022, 2019, and 2017) and the Wayfaring Strangers art book will also be for sale during (and after) the pre-order period. The old digital calendars will be $5, and Wayfaring Strangers will be $10.

Calendars and digital downloads will be listed on my Etsy shop: The Salmon Shack

Remember, all proceeds from the calendar will be donated to A New Way of Life Reentry Project who provide crucial assistance to people rebuilding their lives after incarceration.

Keep your eyes on this blog for all future updates, and most importantly,

Please reblog!

[paulrharvey3]

Just a quick note

To let people know that the discounts from around the Solstice on things at Ebooks Direct are still in force. ...Because I updated the store's software, and the timing settings on the app that handles running discounts and the platform are... having a misunderstanding with each other. (snort) ...Technology, right?

So those of you who're interested in taking advantage of the previous Get Our Whole Store For $44 deal (really, a truly ridiculously deep discount) or the Pride Month Package (also well discounted): click on the link(s) and go get 'em.

And feel free to pass this around if you like. No harm in as many people as want to taking advangage of the opportunity. :)

[paulrharvey3]

Same

easygoing dude

[paulrharvey3]

At Diane Duane's Ebooks Direct store: free books (and the return of the Whole Store For $44 sale) to celebrate our 30,000th customer!

...So yeah, the staff are a little excited. :) We've been in business since 2011, and between now and then have sold a whole lot of fairly low-priced DRM-free fantasy and science fiction ebooks. Which seems to us like a good thing!

So when we noticed the order numbers creeping up through the 29000s, the thought came up: what can we do to celebrate? And in the midst of this, @petermorwood shrugged and said, "Have another cheaper-than-usual sale? And this time, give some away free!"

Frankly, the man's a genius about more than just weapons. So: starting today, that's just what we're doing!

First of all: for 48 hours*, we're reinstating the "Get Our Whole Store For $44 Sale"! That's 35 of DD's ebooks (Peter's are still with another e-publisher, sorry...), all DRM-free and with free replacements included in the price if they're lost or you change platforms. The package on offer includes the 9-book set of Young Wizards New Millennium Editions and the LGBTQ-centered Middle Kingdoms books, along with much more fantasy and SF. Just click here to put the whole-store package in your shopping basket and grab yourself a bargain! (The product page says $55, but if you use that link, the store will apply the $44 price when you've gone through all the checkout steps before payment and the full discount has been applied.)

And there's more! Whoever scores order number 30000 will get their order free (by which we mean we'll refund you immediately). And for the first 100 orders after number 30000, we'll give one out of every ten orders their books free, too! (Also please note: if you use PayPal for your orders, your purchase price can come straight back to you within minutes. Credit card purchases will take a little longer for the purchase price to make its way back to your card... usually about a week.)

So please enjoy this celebration with us, and give us the chance to give you a free book (or a whole lot of them!). And thanks for being our friends and supporters for all these years. We really appreciate it!

If you're not interested in the offer, would you consider reblogging it so that others in your timeline can have a look? Thanks! (And one final note: due to Brexit, unfortunately this offer isn't valid in the UK. Details about the situation are here. Our apologies for the inconvenience.)

*From 14:45 GMT on 18 January, 2023.

[paulrharvey3]

The “Horny Werewolf” Browser Extension Is Real and I Made It

I made it almost six years ago, in fact! But hang on, let’s get the details down in a new post.

In 2008, writer Warren Ellis made a brief blog post about how Valentine’s Day was a bad Christian remix of roman fertility festival Lupercalia

Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

I liked this concept when I learned about it, so I made web browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that traverse the text of every web page you visit, searching for variations of the phrase “Valentine’s Day”, and turns them into “Horny Werewolf Day”. You can install them here:

“Valentines For Werewolves” for Google Chrome

“Valentines For Werewolves” for Firefox

People install it, laugh for a while in February, then forget about it, and then one day in August they see something that makes them go “???!!???” and then “oh yeah lmao” and that’s the best. Whenever someone shows me a screenshot of some benign web site that says “Horny Werewolf Day gifts” or “spoil your special Horny Werewolf with a delicious treat” it brings me more delight than I can fully describe.

Here are some important things to know:

Right now it only works for sure on desktop versions of Chrome and Firefox. I will make a Safari version soon. Apple has a whole process involving Xcode that I need to commit to figuring out.

If you install it and you like it and you feel like thanking me, here’s my Ko-fi . Enough support will probably motivate me to figure out how to get the code working on Android versions of Firefox and Chrome.

It needs access to all of the text on every web page you visit so it can look for text to change, but it does not store or send any of that text anywhere. It is literally 18 lines of Javascript regular expressions and for-loops that never leave your computer.

If you like werewolves you will probably like the digital anthology I edit, Werewolves Versus. There are 10 issues so far, including one thematically linked to this browser extension: Werewolves Versus: Romance.

I always love seeing screenshots of this extension in action so please hit me up!

“Valentines For Werewolves” for Google Chrome

“Valentines For Werewolves” for Firefox

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[paulrharvey3]

Scissor Wizard and Paper Wizard

It’s probably fine to leave them alone together.

[paulrharvey3]

A halloween science cartoon for New Scientist from a while back.

p.s. my new book ‘Revenge of the Librarians’ is out now: tomgauld.com

[paulrharvey3]

It's National Read a Book Day! Legend has it that if you pick up the book closest to you and flip to page 17, the first full sentence will dictate the rest of your day.

Art created by the talented @juanbilly.

[paulrharvey3]

Its Not Porn, Its HBO - Short Film from Accomplice Media on Vimeo.

Directed by Alberto Belli

[paulrharvey3]

🦜

[paulrharvey3]

The Inspirational Source Material Guide, written by Gary Gygax in one page of the 1980 basic rulebook of Dungeons and Dragons, seems to summarize the entirety of the fantasy genre and is a great introduction point to the genre even today, possibly the best list of recommendations ever made for someone, young or old, who likes fantasy fiction and wants to get into it. 

I made a vow years ago to read every single thing on this list, and decades later, I did it. Not a single one here I regret getting. I share this in the hopes it can transform a young person’s life as it transformed mine. 

Nobody’s done a recommended fantasy novel list better, and it fits right in your pocket. There are maybe only a couple additional books I’d add to this one to improve it, honestly (and even there, mostly in the realm of nonfiction). 

[paulrharvey3]

[paulrharvey3]

“The prince just fell in love with Cinderella because of her looks!”

Wrong. Okay, picture this–

So there’s the prince, okay? He’s like, smack dab in the center of the ballroom, and he is like, horrifically aware that this whole ball thing is a result of his dad falling into a panic about the royal lineage or whatever and he’s stuck listening to highborn girl after highborn girl, all lined up, introducing themselves like, “Oh yeah my family’s been a longtime supporter of the crown, and I think you’re cute, *cough* I’ve been told I have child-bearing hips *cough* Who said that? Anyway–” and Princey boy is just smiling through it, he has been the center of attention for entirely too long, he misses his emotional support horse, and is just internally like “Someone please kill me now.” And then… he sees her–This isn’t a love at first sight thing, this is a ‘what the hell is going on over there’ thing, because this girl has not gotten into the Debutante line for a solid 45 minutes. 

She’s just at the hors d’oeuvres table going HAM on the prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, and like, she’s polite about it, she’s happy to move aside for other people grabbing punch and canapes (and she’s really so sweet with the wait staff, it’s kind of cute because they’re like… definitely not used to being acknowledged) but it’s like, “Damn girl, did you not eat today?” and then the prince is kind of stuck with the uncomfortable thought of ‘how many girls starved themselves to fit into a corset for this.’ And then the Prince realizes he’s missed the past 4 Debutante introductions because he’s watching Mystery girl hork down crab rangoons. So he’s like, “Excuse me” and manages to break free from the never-ending parade of girls who will hop on his dick for status.

 And as he’s approaching Mystery Girl, it’s kind of hitting him that something’s not quite natural about her. Not fake, but not quite real. But at the same time this whole evening’s been just a whole circus of people acting fake as hell, so like, someone seeming a little off doesn’t seem bad, necessarily. And he sidles up to her like, “Hi,” and she’s like, “Oh–hey, have you tried the tapenade?” and she points to one of the plates, and at this point, he could hit her with the “You don’t know who I am, do you?” deal or the “Very funny, I see your play” deal, but at this point it occurs to him that, no, he hasn’t had anything to eat throughout this whole damn ball, partially because of being stuck in the debutante parade, partially because of nerves, and there’s something so disarming about the question that he grabs a crostini and she still seems so food-focused that it doesn’t seem possible that this is a play. So they both grab little plates and ditch the party.

She pretty much clears her plate in under two minutes and then has half of his plate, he’s cool with it, mostly he’s just absolutely fascinated listening to her.

See here’s the thing about Cinderella:

1. She doesn’t know he’s the prince. Like yeah, he’s been at the center of the room, but she’s kind of spent half the party eagerly looking around everywhere she’s allowed to go (”Have you seen rose garden? Have you seen the solarium??” further confirmation that she doesn’t know who she’s talking to) and the other half stuffing her face with food. 

2. She assumes she’s never going to see anyone here tonight again, and no one recognizes her, so she has no filter.

So she’s just talking about whatever with this guy. He seems cool. She talks about her friends, who are rats. She makes little outfits for them. Sometimes they bring her little gifts. She is already the coolest person the prince has ever met because of this. She pretty much offhandedly talks about whatever is fucked up about the kingdom that would take his advisors two hours of hemming and hawing and watering down to address. She just says it like it’s nothing, just funky little things she’s observed, and again, she’s not aware that he’s the prince, but it’s still pretty damn bold to bring up at a literal royal ball.

She… seems to have the majority of graces that lots of girls from Respectable Families™ have, but there’s something strange about it, something simultaneously broken and hardened, like the way you can see where ice has thawed and re-frozen. Also the way she talks about her family, and the way she avoids talking about her family– is raising several red flags, not in the “Oh this is another person trying to take advantage of me” sense, but in the “Oh fuck, something’s gone really wrong and you need help” sense and also lowkey a ‘damn is she even getting fed?’ sense. But he can’t say, ‘Hey, that’s not fucking normal for people to say that to you or treat you that way. We need to get you out of there,’ without sounding crazy himself, so for now, he’s just going to chill, make sure she’s comfortable, and keep enjoying the evening. She’s somehow befriended like 4 of the waitstaff so they’re willing to cover for them while they disappear for a little bit, and they get plenty of time to talk, but eventually it hits her that she hasn’t danced yet and she’s like “Come on! I bet we can make the prince jealous!” and he just bursts out laughing at that like “hell yeah, let’s make the prince jealous. He’s a real asshole.” Like clearly she’s having a good time, so who is he to make it weird? So they head back to the ballroom and they dance. And our girl, Mystery Girl, Cinderella, while they’re dancing, becomes acutely aware that everyone is staring. That doesn’t seem quite right. Like, yeah she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, but at least a good third of the party should still be focused on the prince, right? Where is that guy, anyway?

Oh.

Oh wait.

Oh shit.

And Princey Boy actually picks up on her realization and they whisper argue for like 3 minutes. “Why didn’t you tell me?! Now I feel like a goddamn idiot!” “I dunno it was nice being treated like a normal person” “Well me treating you like a normal person makes me a goddamn felon or something did you consider that?!” “Hey–Hey–it’s cool–you’re cool–I think you’re amazing, and if anyone says shit about you, I can shut it down.” “Well I don’t like that! That’s fucked up!” “I agree. It is fucked up, but I believe in you, and I think you should have a chance, and I’m here to back you up. I know power is fucked up right now. I know. But are you cool with working with me to change that?” And our girl Cindy pauses on that for a couple seconds, because.. she’s just spent hours with this guy and like.. she knows he’s a good guy, she knows he means well, so she’s like, “I don’t know how long I can actually work with you.” and the prince is like “Look, I know your home situation is complicated right now, but I really think we can–”

And then the bell starts ringing.

It’s midnight.

And then she takes off in a panic, and our prince just met the coolest person ever, and like, he’s pretty sure whatever situation they’re headed back to is fucked up, and all he’s got going to find her is a shoe. A shoe.