#i have to read this book

[queen-morgana91]

SPOILERS for reckoning of roku

....oh shit

[ered]

Here’s my take on the whole audio books vs. reading:

Oral tradition of storytelling predates written ones by millennias, and honestly, which one you like is just a personal preference.

The actual difference is

when listening, you have no idea how to write characters’ names

when reading, you have no idea how to pronounce characters’ names

hope this helps!

[gynoliberation]

"Pornography is no real alternative to systemic sex-negative morality; rather it is an intrinsic part of it."

Pornography is regularly used in ways that have nothing to do with sexual explicitness. Rather, pornography is commonly understood as a form of propaganda, a representational style linked with defamation and desensitization, if not destruction. Patricia J. Williams, who thinks legally, critically, and gracefully about race, sex, and injustice, calls pornography a "habit of thinking," and one that informs all manner of abusive and exploitative attitudes and relationships. Pornography, as I am using the term, is just that, a worldview, a way of thinking and acting that sexualizes and genders domination and submission, from the bedroom to the war room, making domination masculine (even when a woman plays that role) and submission feminine (even when a man plays that role), and making both the essence of sex. By wedding sexuality to inequality, pornography conditions women and men to have a substantial investment in maintaining the oppressive status quo—again, from interpersonal relationships to international politics.

Pornography kills off, and then substitutes itself for, the erotic—the life force, the earthy and ethereal force of growth, fruitfulness, exuberance, ecstasy, connectedness, and integrity. Pornography severs eroticism from intimacy and empathy and bonds it to voyeurism and objectification (of the self and of another). It incarnates pleasure in acts of hatred. It would have all of us believe, even those of us getting the "fuzzy end of the lollypop" (Sugar/Marilyn Monroe's lament in Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, 1959), that without a certain measure of power and powerlessness, danger, fear, pain, possession, shame, distance, and violence there wouldn't be any "sex" at all. Of course, the simultaneously pornographic, monotonous, and erotophobic culture tends to make that true. Variously damaged, alienated, and desensitized, pornography can become what we need in order to feel at all.

Some applaud pornography because it allows access to sexual imagery and language and easily offends offensive religious morality. Yet pornography is no real alternative to systemic sex-negative morality; rather it is an intrinsic part of it. Pornography and mainstream morality both stem from and continually reinforce a worldview that first makes a complex of body/low/sex/dirty/deviant/female/devil and then severs these from mind/high/spirit/pure/normal/male/god. For both, sex itself is the core taboo. Moralism systematically upholds the taboo and pornography systematically violates it. In the complex that evolves from this absurdity, taboo violation itself becomes erotically charged. Evil becomes seductive and the good mostly boring. Without patriarchal moralism's misogyny, homophobia, demand for sexual ignorance, and sin-sex-shame equation, pornography as we know it would not exist. And, together, the two work to maintain the sex and gender status quo.

—Jane Caputi, "Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture."

[booksinmythorax]

I'm already seeing advice from people in the US to purchase queer books and other banned or "controversial" books on paper as a way to combat the wave of government censorship that is coming. While this is a good idea (it is! absolutely!), it's not accessible to everyone, and truly, we're not going to be able to consumerism our way out of this one.

If you can buy the books, do. Whether you can buy the books or not, borrow them from your library.

Borrow the paper versions. Borrow the ebook or audiobook versions. Request the titles you want that your library doesn't have. The more a title circulates or is requested, the better librarians are going to be able to defend keeping it if and when it's ever challenged.

Use libraries like @queerliblib too. The more members they have, the better they'll be able to fundraise.

Your community resources depend on you using them. Borrow the books before they go away.

InB4: Piracy is not the solution here. We're trying to keep community resources available, not make sure individual people can read individual books. Different problems.

The books are still available. Borrowing them from your library and returning them on time and in good condition will help keep them that way.

[illusioncanthurtme--art]

Physically? I am sitting in my bedroom. Mentally? Spiritually? I AM DEAD ON THE FLOOR!!!!! THESE TWO HAVE KILLED ME!!!!

(Another drawing! This was originally attempt #1 at drawing stan, and then fiddleford just showed up. Kinda feels like them five minutes after the above acting like nothing happened though, so it works sdjkgkjfshj)

[sowlmates]

gotta give it to the percy jackson fans, you really do love your main character. for other franchises, fans usually place the #1 blorbo title on a specific side character. but in percy jackson you really love your percy jackson

[thorinds]

1000 Books You May Have Actually Read

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[cryptocism]

"just as I did, in 1983."

you'd never know my favourite parts of the show are the fucked up insane bits when my first instinct is to draw the cheesiest thing imaginable

[tiptoethewordsgo]

alex hirsch being the #1 billford shipper

[waitineedaname]

I simply don't think that's true eBooks.com but thank you anyway

[larissa-the-scribe]

guys I had this realization the other day that Redwall works really well for reading aloud, and kinda half-remembered something about the author reading to kids? So I looked it up to see if I had made a connection.

And it turns out, yes, actually, because he read aloud to kids at a school for the blind. But all the books they gave him to read were depressing. So he wrote Redwall, a story about heroism and courage and making it through struggles, and filled it with so many sensory, visual details so he could give them something better and I just-- that's so wholesome-- help

[sweatermuppet]

*reasonable restrictions are ones you consider fair for your own safety or wellbeing, especially for things like graphic depictions of violence in relation to your age at the time (i.e. "you can read this when you're older")

not sure if books you read were banned? here is a archive of the top 10 most banned/challenged books from 2001-2022, hosted by the American Library Association

as well as the Wikipedia page for the Most Commonly Challenged Books in the United States

Wikipedia page for Books Banned by the Government, organized by region/country

[ynnu-64]

brave hobbit

[bishy437]

oh, please don’t go!

i’ll eat you up i love you so!

[junotter]

just some designs mainly created because I wanted to draw hakama and then it spiral out from there

bald zuko under the cute