alecjmarsh

[alecjmarsh]

this rules so hard

[alecjmarsh]

a magical sword can only be pulled from its anvil by a maiden of purest heart. a young knight visits the anvil daily to make the attempt, crushed each time he cannot do the deed, yearning for a sign from the universe that he *is* in truth what he yearns to be. for the world to plop the gift of identity into outstretched arms. but of course, it never does. until one day, he has a chance encounter with a nymph of the lake who was once an ordinary squire, and he learns from her that maidenhood will not be given to him, that he must be brave and choose it for himself. and so the knight changes her name and reintroduces herself to the world and employs the greatest miracles of modern science to become the maiden she had always dreamed of being, and this time, when she revists the sword, she only can't pull it because she's kind of an asshole.

[alecjmarsh]

Redditors crashed the website with donations over $25k and 0 wishes left. via /r/MadeMeSmile

Click here and follow to get more daily positivity on your dash!

[alecjmarsh]

following my country music is good, fuck you post going sorta big, I think we need to talk about how the real horseshoe theory, pun intended, is that Toby "bombs guns America" Keith and Willie "peace love and bongs" Nelson recorded exactly one song together and it's about how unfortunately vigilante justice just slaps sometimes

[alecjmarsh]

i have to defend fictional women who aren't good people because if i don't who else will

[alecjmarsh]

Witchcraft, Wisdom, Death...

[alecjmarsh]

[alecjmarsh]

This is s beautiful! Thank you so so much for doing this

Aether Beyond the Binary moodboards 1/17: You're Gonna Get Older by Alec J. Marsh

Aether Beyond the Binary is an anthology by @duckprintspress, featuring stories of characters with genders outside the binary exploring modern-esque worlds changed by magical aether!

[alecjmarsh]

has anyone figured out how much art you need to make to make your mental illness go away

[alecjmarsh]

Martina McBride didn't win Country Music Association Song of the Year for a song about how burning your house down with your abusive husband still inside it is good, noble, and an allegory for the American Revolution for people to act like the genre belongs to bootlicking fucks

[alecjmarsh]

"Some twelve thousand muskets were double-loaded, and half of those more than triple. One rifle even had twenty-three balls in the barrel — which is absurd. These soldiers had been thoroughly drilled by their officers. Muskets, they all knew, were designed to discharge one ball at a time. So what were they doing? Only much later did historians figure it out: loading a gun is the perfect excuse not to shoot it. And if it happened to be loaded already, well, you just loaded it again. And again.

— Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

[alecjmarsh]

Knight and the enemy within

[alecjmarsh]

[alecjmarsh]

I think these special editions are a response to (1) paper being more expensive, and (2) people buying less books. The average reader doesn't want to pay $30 for a book, but they might pay $30 for a special edition. Since the base price of the book doesn't change much at scale, suddenly people are buying again. Small publishers are left to sell ebooks I guess. Idk it's super frustrating because the special editions aren't even made well--they're floppy and poorly bound and don't last. But they're shiny and overpriced and once they've been bought, the printer has their money. I don't have a solution either, I'm just mad to see books also be caught up in the enshittification cycle.

Was in a Barnes & Noble this weekend for the first time in ages, and was a little shocked by how many special editions I saw with sprayed edges, gilded covers, etc., of basically mass market books.

Like, special editions feel a whole lot less special when they're everywhere.

And I know that makes it sound like I hate fun, but on the contrary, it's a major concern for those of us who publish. Those luxury editions are very expensive to produce, and major industry folks can make them affordable for buyers and profitable for their companies because they are printing huge numbers of them.

But when "luxury" features become "standard," smaller publishers really can't...do them. Like, there's absolutely no affordable way for a publisher the size of Duck Prints Press to produce editions like that. The more people expect them and come to think they're not special and luxury, the harder it will be to sell something any less fancy to them.

It's. a very frustrating cycle.

I don't know what I'm accomplishing by writing this or what action I think anyone reading it on Tumblr could possibly take, but I just felt like I had to say it. Please remember that big corporations fuck all of us, including the "small fish" businesses just trying to survive in the same sea.

[alecjmarsh]

"a vague disclaimer is nobody's friend"

4x07 The Initiative

[alecjmarsh]

The answer to "What the h*ck goes on on those islands to the North and West of mainland Scotland?" by Derek Guy @/dieworkwear on twitter [x]