#i do still recommend you read this book

[elitehoe]

I procrastinated finishing the Bucks book for two weeks now and decided today was the best day to do it. It was not I am either going to throw myself into a fucking river or cry uncontrollably for next 4 days.

[eerna]

pls recommend me some fantasy romance!

[prolibytherium]

The Song of Achilles is one of the most garbage books I've ever read and I kind of want to talk about it but I'd have to reread The Song of Achilles to do that in a cohesive manner, which is garbage

[letsboldlygomotherfuckers]

If ur not careful I might have to watch torchwood… do u recommend or is it an affliction you would not recommend to others?

hehehehehe >:3c gottem boys

no fr like. you have to look past the fact it's a low budget bbc production at times and embrace the slightly see through lesbian alien with foot long fingers that can read minds. you have to embrace the sex alien that absorbs people through her pussy. crucially, you have to watch it in as few sittings as possible. the only proper way to watch torchwood is to watch the entire thing absolutely nonstop and nothing else in between until your brain falls out through your ears :)

[the-busy-ghost]

Me normally: Let people love what they love

Me, after a Test Match Special commentator expresses their belief that the new All Creatures Great and Small is somehow "better" than the 1978 version: This is pure insanity and TMS can no longer be trusted on anything, how can they even be trusted to know about cricket, do they have no TASTE

[driftingballoons]

Is there any media that's left a lasting impact on you?

So I’m going to give two answers, one the obvious, and another bonus answer for variety’s sake :3

Pmd explorers has possibly had the greatest lasting impact on me that any piece of media ever has. As my introduction to pokemon, I felt like I was playing partly as Hero would’ve experienced it—with absolutely no idea what to expect, and no background knowledge of anything. But the way it quickly changed from “heehee creature adventure :3” to “what does it truly mean to live and how can you shine as brightly as you can, even in the face of oblivion?” caught me quite off guard. It really made me start to think about how I could try to make the most of my life, how people’s actions can be hugely shaped by their situations, and how you really can’t take even the most simple of things for granted. I played this at 12 y/o during an otherwise very disruptive/isolated time in my life, so I’m not sure if that’s partly why my brain latched onto this as much as it did, but I genuinely felt like it helped me get through it. Whenever I felt weak or powerless back then, I found inspiration from how strong hero, partner, and grovyle had to be to get through everything, and it felt like it made coping just a bit easier. Fast forward to a much better time in my life, and it’s helped me find a wonderful, incredibly talented online community and friends, and I have an absolute blast being able to interact with you guys and see your takes on the series!

The other piece of media that had a lasting impact was Allie Brosh’s book Hyperbole and a Half. I hadn’t known before reading it, but she actually had a blog of the same name around the early 2010s, where she’d post her funny comics and stories. The part that had the most impact on me was actually her iconic ‘poorly drawn’ MS paint kind of style. It made me realize that you don’t necessarily have to make professional quality art to make something worth seeing. This inspired me not only to start posting my own doodles and stuff online, but also changed my approach when dealing with a lot of daunting things. Whenever I feel like I’m not good enough/skilled enough to try something, I remember how popular her stuff was, despite looking ‘low quality,’ and it reminds me that doing something low quality is better than not doing it at all! 

[swaglet]

considering the state of US education in recent years, and the fact that a considerable amount of this site's userbase is like 20 or younger fresh oit of the system, it's completely understandable that almost everyone on here is a fucking moron who has developed no critical thinking skills whatsoever & probably doesn't even know how to use context clues. bomb the country NOW what are they doing to our youth

[volfoss]

lestat being a trans ally is actually the most mind boggling part of this book so far

[lovers-instead]

Sapphic YA Book Rec: Good Moon Rising by Nancy Garden

1996 follow-up to Annie on My Mind, this time featuring 2 girls who compete for the lead role in their high school theater department.

Links to download:

Internet Archive (to borrow)

Anna's Archive

Singlelogin.re

LibGen

[rocksalt-and-pie]

anyway im looking for a book recommendation.

Genre: horror / dark fantasy

Specifically: there should be a Creature OR witchcraft OR at least a very convincing threat that looks like one of those things (but isn't) and that makes the characters question their sanity. Bonus points if it isn't your average vampire or werewolf but something more unique like a changeling or smth like that, something that you wouldn't necessarily expect or something entirely new

Vibe: scary as fuck, like actually horrifying. Not necessarily shocking or with a lot of gore and murder because that doesn't really bother me but like Dark Themes instead. (Example: Pet Sematary terrified me because of the portrayal of grief and how far you're willing to go to deal with it. I also loved the dragged out portrayal of guilt and dealing with the emotional consequences of your own actions in The Secret History)

Nitpicky stuff:

- I would prefer it to be set in the US (southern gothic vibes, urban decay, dark americana)

- should be set after at the earliest 1970ish (no historical fiction)

- would be great if it included themes of grief / generational and-or inherited trauma / incest / guilt / self-fulfilling prophecies / substance abuse / religion or religious trauma

- female protagonist is preferred but anything else wouldn’t be a deal breaker

- you know I like lgbt representation so that would be great but I take what I can get

- I do enjoy a well written plot twist it has to be said

- doesn't have to have a happy ending (just a good one) but I don't really like open endings

[autism-disco]

spending the time (it is time to type out the full weezer discography into a spreadsheet)

[dontwanderoff]

im considering making percy jackson the next class novel in my class but like, do i think the kids will actually enjoy it and that they're definitely the right age for it OR am i just wanting to do it because i want to read it???

[poisonedfate]

lavender, void and burgundy 💞🪷

love you always<3

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

one of the most wonderful things in my life recently is my return to the books I loved in jr/high school.

I've been reading a lot less ever since starting uni, which sucks because I love books but I just couldn't get into any. I was complaining about not reading like I used to be able to, and then I realized (as much as tiktok encourages getting new books constantly) I can reread things.

specifically, I can reread books from high school. because I was reading more then for a lot of reasons, but also because I was reading things I liked, rather than what I thought I was "supposed to".

so anyway, here's some of the books I've been rereading (and absolutely tore through, this worked)

will saying you read these make people go "wow you're so dark/light academia"? no. but I read them instead of paying four months of library fines only to have them sit on my desk unopened the whole time. so I call it a win.

[the-busy-ghost]

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

[thatsgonnaleaveamark]

it's so wild to me to see cameron monaghan in all those really cool roles bc all i see, and the first thing i knew him as, is bob andrews from the three investigators movies in '07 and '09 that i was obsessed with at age 11. i distinctively remember him being super awkward and wearing a huge backpack that was so heavy he fell over trying to put it on lmao