#not a book

[transbookoftheday]

The Silt Verses

Carpenter and Faulkner, two worshippers of an outlawed god, travel up the length of their deity’s great black river, searching for holy revelations amongst the reeds and the wetlands.

As their pilgrimage lengthens and the river’s mysteries deepen, the two acolytes find themselves under threat from a police manhunt, but also come into conflict with the weirder gods that have flourished in these forgotten rural territories.

This is a world where divine intervention takes place through prayer-markings scratched into stumping-posts, and offerings are left squirming to die in the flats of the delta.

This is a world of ritual, and hidden language, and sacrifice.

This is folk horror, and fantasy, and a dark road trip into the depths of unusual faith.

[thebookofthefilm]

Murder, She Wrote (CBS, 1984 - 1996) spawned a variety of merchandise besides TV tie-ins; Recipe for Murder was the third of four mystery jigsaw puzzle games produced by Paul Lamond Games (c. 1984)

[the-interuniversal-geometer]

SCREAMS LOUDLY

[thedisabilitybookarchive]

The website fees are officially paid!

Here's to another year of the archive!

[bookishlyvintage]

I like cozy gaming and I know it 🎶

(aka my current stack of To Be Played cozy games)

[toggerton]

She often had compared me

To the tragic character in her favorite series

The warrior

The unwanted

The aviators

Brawn over brains

The character that devotes herself to the just as tragic lead. The chosen one that she fancied herself as.

Why was it such a surprise when she took what she wanted, and mourned me as if I was gone already.

Desperately clinging to some twisted image of me, or who she thought I was.

It was her all along who made me into this character in her life. A companion to be romanced and left on base to go on and romance the next.

Unlike her books, there will not be a time when we are together as one again. Two flesh two ends for these lovers.

I no longer wear aviators.

[verityreadsbooks]

Not a Book: Freddie Mercury

Oh boy. I’m not even sure I can explain how excited I was about seeing the Freddie Mercury auction exhibition at Sothebys. Honestly. It was the one thing my sister and I wanted to do together this summer and it absolutely was everything we were hoping it would be. I may have mentioned before that I am a big Queen fan, and I’m also too young (or not old enough?) to remember them when they were…

[explode-this]

What To Do If You Accidentally Took a Sip of Alcohol or Ate a Boozy Cookie When You’ve Had Problems with Substances, But You’ve Also Been Convinced You Have a Disease and Subsequently Are More Afraid of Yourself Than a Purse Dog is Afraid of Being Out of the Purse: A Holiday Guide

1. If it was accidental, it’s not your fault.

2. Even if it wasn’t accidental, it is not the end of the world. If you have been convinced of some form of black and white thinking, like “one drink might as well be 1,000,” know that this is a built-in “failure guarantee.” It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that ultimately gives you permission to binge by way of Doomerism. Do you want that kind of negativity in your life? Say no way, man! to anyone who has cast an edict of weakness upon your entire “constitution” with silly ideas like that.

3. With that in mind, this kind of notion can really imprison you psychologically, so the panic you might feel is real. Find something calming to do until you’ve come down from it. Phone a friend that doesn’t believe in the disease hypothesis and can talk you down from irrationality. Play a game. Go for a walk. Do a jigsaw puzzle. Color in a coloring book. Get a Where’s Waldo book and look for the weirdest shit in the pictures. Try a new podcast! Listen to audiobooks! I don’t know, what do you like to do that’s been deemed off limits by a religious mentor/sponsor? What have you been convinced is stupid and childish but doesn’t hurt anyone else and actually brings you great joy? Do that thing. You’re allowed to do things that make you happy, you know.

4. For doorknob’s sake, resist going to a “meeting” upon a “failure.” You might find some measure of sympathy and reassurance in “the rooms,” but you’ll also be surrounded by people who think the sky is falling if they pass someone smoking a joint on the street, freaking out about “contact highs” and whatnot, and that mindset is infectious. You need people in your life who have not been thoroughly indoctrinated and can see through—and thoroughly reject—the premise of the program. You certainly don’t need to hand in any “chips” and start over. Consider the contradiction of a phrase like “progress, not perfection” being in the same place as “you fucked up, now hand in your medallions and start over from step 1 because our goal of abstinence from substances actually constitutes a goal of perfection.” We are human beings. We fuck up. Fucking up once after months of not fucking up does not take those months away from you.

5. If you’re still thoroughly convinced that a meeting, calling a sponsor, or reading the “Big Book” are the answers, I’d like you to seriously consider this: read Chapter 8: To Wives, and then this analysis. Among other things, Bill Wilson was a craven butthole who wanted to control every step of the narrative—he was too dishonest to let his wife, an actual wife, write the fucking chapter! If a book was published today with portions addressing a given demographic as a member of that demographic that turned out to be written by someone decidedly not in that demographic, there would be an uproar and it would throw the entire publication into question—yet somehow this chapter is yet to be removed from the Sacred Text. If one portion of a book is just made up fuckshit with no research involved, written in the voice of someone the author is definitely not, then that is fiction. This might imply the rest of the book is fiction. Approach things with a critical eye, especially if you’re been told not to look at it too deeply or look into anything other than official backstory. If you’ve been advised that outside opinions will put you and/or your “recovery” in jeopardy, that’s an indicator of coercive control. A spiritual practice requires a measure of skepticism and should be checked against people who don’t believe in it once in a while for perspective. If your practice still seems reasonable when you do that, carry on! But if your intuition says otherwise and is tugging at the hem of your mental sweater like a snot-nosed little kid asking if they can play on your phone, maybe listen to it.

6. This is basic advice for pretty much anyone, but don’t take yourself so fucking seriously!

7. To that end: get a Party City-ass blonde bob wig like this one. Remember He-Man? He… had… the POWERRRRRRR! So do you. So put the wig on, prance around your living room to this video, and channel that shit. Keep the wig around for any occasion upon which you need to remind yourself to not be such a dour bitch about this silly thing called life.

7a) This is not power over everything and all things. This is power over yourself, your situation, and your decisions using rationality. You can absolutely believe in some kind of deity or “power greater than yourself” and still have enough respect for your own autonomy that you take responsibility for yourself by claiming and owning your own power to do or not do things.

8. You are better than not believing in yourself or your ability to just get on with life. We’re all vulnerable creatures, but one group with a specific behavioral/compulsion problem is not inherently more cursed with difficulty than another. Loads of people grow out of serious problems simply because they stop needing certain coping mechanisms, or they get bored with them, but when you put that label on yourself for life—like calling yourself an alcoholic even if you haven’t had a drink in a decade or more—you’re dragging yourself down and inhibiting your own growth. I might sound unsympathetic, but believe me, I’m not. I was a pretty serious bulimic Back in The Day, and it took a lot of work and learning how to love and believe in myself to get past the compulsive need to medicate with food, but I think if I’d clung to that identity as a marker of self I’d still be freaking out over eating the “wrong” things and throwing up every day. I’d probably be dead, quite frankly. Part of recovering (not being in perpetual recovery, but recovering) from an eating disorder meant giving up judging myself and others for body stuff, eating habits, etc., etc. I also had to stop hanging around with just the women in my therapy group. If you limit your social circle to other people “in recovery” you might throw away perfectly good people who could lend valuable perspective when you need it most, or who will love you regardless of your status in program or “in recovery,” because they aren’t adhering to a set of weird social rules you have come to accept as regular. In my case I needed people who didn’t freak out about calories, judge what other people ate, and talk about food all the fuckin’ time. It was good for a little while to talk with people who shared my problem, but the longer that went on, the harder it was to stop being bulimic.

All of this to say: you are fine. You are better than fine. You’re amazing. Life is something that kind of happens to us—our parents may have chosen to have us, but none of us decided to exist. We do the best with what we’ve got. Sometimes we’re raised by people who handed down shitty coping skills or caused us to find brand new ones. That doesn’t mean you have to be that thing forever. Like, did you ever have an aunt or uncle you only saw once in a while, so they treated you at 17 like you were the same person as you were when you were 6? Remember how limiting and weird that felt? You’re allowed to grow, change, and reject labels that keep you down. If abstaining from a substance or a certain kind of food helps you feel safe then I’m not coming down on that. But it doesn’t have to be your whole self. You are not your “sobriety.” You might feel fragile sometimes but I promise you, you are strong as fuck. And anyone who encourages you to stay in a fragile mindset of powerlessness over an inert substance is not your friend.

Now let’s put on our blonde fuckass bob wigs and scream at the top of our lungs: WHAT’S GOING ONNNNNN?! HEYYY YEAH YEAH YE-HEAHHHH!

[e-b-reads]

my bike is all ready for the upcoming spring/summer (camp) season!

[nstaaf-book]

Slight delay in service due to lack of book mentions in the last few episodes I’ve gone through.

Would it be helpful to also catalogue the non-book eps?  Am I losing my mind?  Will ponder both.

[red-dead-sakharine]

I'm still traumatized by this series

[transbookoftheday]

Hello From The Hallowoods

Darker than your dreams, and farther North than you remember, there is a forest where life and death meet…

Come walk between the black pines!

In this award-winning queer horror podcast, a cosmic narrator follows the increasingly connected residents of the forest at the end of the world.

It’s a bittersweet story that explores queer identity, horror genre tropes, and finding hope in humanity’s last moments.

[thedisabilitybookarchive]

Hi there!

I recently saw a post about the way screen readers pick up on text, like the fact that they don't have any way of emphasising words that are in bold and how it might work best to place the word in bold in its own sentence to indicate some level of emphasis (sorry, I can't remember if it was an ask on your blog or another blog I follow).

It got me wondering whether books should have a screen-reader friendly edition – do you think that's something that would make a difference to those who use screen readers? I know that a lot of people would point to audiobooks as the solution, but a lot of books don't have audiobook versions, and even then the audiobook may not be released at the same time. Would a version of the book that has been edited specifically with screen readers in mind be worthwhile, and is this something that already exists in some capacity?

Thank you! :)

Admittedly I don't know too much about screen readers, but I think it would certainly be beneficial to look into.

I'll try and do a bit more research and come back to this, but in the mean time I invite anyone who uses/has more knowledge on screen readers to comment their thoughts. Also there's a cool post here by @mightyoctopus about screen reader function and accessibility.

[bookishlyvintage]

Owlcrate Feb Day 3: Oven Mitt & Baking

I'm a sucker for some baked goods, and usually have a good selection in my home. Gotta have a fun reading snack!

[phantom-shell]

Big fan of Dipper "if I ever see you again outside of my nightmares, there is no force in the universe that will stop me from putting you in the ground" Pines