#or a book on statistics

[headless-horsegirl]

my boyfriend, who has never watched a tv show in his life (he likes to touch grass and "do productive things"), watched season 1 of the bear all by himself without knowing anything about it and the first thing he asked me after was when carmy and syd are gonna get together

[podddcasttt]

Friendly reminder that if you talk about how representation is important and how there's not enough diverse media, I implore you to seek out the media that already exists. And if you live in an area with a public library, go to see if they're available at your public library. And then go check them out.

As a librarian, it is demoralizing to see how low the circulation statistics are on lgbt+ books and books by BIPOC authors. I include them in displays and readers advisory, but people still don't check them out as much. Libraries only have a finite amount of resources, including space. We don't get a book then keep it forever. If not enough people check it out, we have to get rid of it to make room for more books. And when James Patterson Book #69 gets checked out 30 times in one year and cool, subversive Sci fi novel with a Black trans woman main character has never been checked out once, the librarian (me) has to make a hard decision.

If you're looking for something tangible and easy to do this pride month, look for lgbt+ books (there are millions of lists online that you can find. It's easier than it's ever been to find diverse books) and check them out from your library.

No time to read? Look for a short story or poetry anthology and just read as much as you have time for. Or just check out a book cus it looks interesting and read as much as you can. We have movies too.

As cool as it would be for me to just keep the books I want and get rid of the ones I don't, I have to listen to the community on matters of collection development. And the community tells me what books they want by checking them out and leaving the ones they don't want on the shelf.

If you think this doesn't apply to you because you live in a progressive area and obviously the books are being checked out, you're wrong. I once worked in a community with a large lgbt population. Those books were not getting checked out. If you want to tell me you live in a conservative area and your library doesn't have any diverse books, you are legally obligated to check the catalog before replying to this post. I currently work in a conservative community and we have lgbt+ and bipoc books. And if you still cannot find any, you are legally obligated to see if your library has a collection request form that patrons can fill out before replying to this post.

[winterprince601]

unfortunately for jon snow, the role of "dead girl haunting the narrative" is already occupied by his mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, grandmother and step mother x2 so he's going to have to be forcibly resurrected :/

[freyadragonlord]

Finished Heavenly Tyrant and my first comment is.........

......... Qin Zheng was WAY too funny for how much he sucked. Made me feel so conflicted.

Anyways, Heavenly Tyrant is an amazing book, highly reccomend!!!

Power to the people ✊️

[thorinds]

The "BBC" Book List Challenge

[marioposssa]

Because I've been curious about usage of pet names for some time now and I finally have the books in non-audio format, some statistics from 'His Majesty's Dragon'.

Laurence starts calling Temeraire 'my dear' first in chapter 3, directly after Daye's attempt at harnessing.

He then proceeds to use that pet name a whooping 23! times across the book. Every chapter at least once, with the notable exception of chapter 7 - the Victoriatus rescue where the narrative is centered on the action.

His usage of 'my dear' is so consistent, if not a bit iconic throughout the series, that the single use of 'dear one', also in chapter three, was all the more heartwarming to me.

This is all early Temeraire & Laurence and I feel the narrative, and Laurence as our restricted point of view, centers the emotional moments between these two much more explicitly than in some of the later books.

(That is not to say that I think these moments don't happen anymore in the later series, just that they are often more implied or less explicitly mentioned in favor of other story beats)

Other notable usages of dear:

Laurence's mother calls him 'my dear' two times during his visit.

Harcourt uses the pet name 'dearest' to address Lily, when the dragons go swimming.

Laurence also says 'Oh dear' twice when having to explain or deal with 'uncomfortable' concepts. Though I feel that Granby in later books much more embodies this saying.

[peachesanmemes]

DON'T FORGET!!!

50 is a rough page estimate. The accurate length is 15,883 words.

If you want to visualize and compare it, I've graphed the length of each entry and given some other entry stats in another post linked here.

Google says it takes approximately 5 minutes to read 1000 words, so plan accordingly!

[eightglass]

Made a graph

Pretty self-explanatory. These web serials are long...

[coolnonsenseworld]

(to know more about the story and the calendar on pre-order check out previous posts! LESS THAN 2 WEEKS LEFT)

In September they don't feel like going anywhere or doing any bucket lists - no getting out of the comfort zone this time around. All they need is a little comfort of one another - they take breaks for a movie night when they wouldn't, buy extra cakes they haven't tried previously, go on date-walks and take bubble baths with new scents.

Enjoying simple things in life and appreciating your own presence here feels like it should be a basic part of any bucket list.

How is your September going? Do you have any plans or achievements this month?

[butch-nergigante]

one of my degrees is in statistics, so here's some fun numbers for you, all pulled from AO3

total number of twilight fanfics: 18790

date of oldest posted twilight fanfic: 19 July 2008

mean number of twilight fanfics posted per year to date: 1105

total number of twilight fanfics tagged Canon Rewrite: 104

date of oldest posted Canon Rewrite twilight fanfic: 22 September 2013

mean number of Canon Rewrite twilight fanfics posted per year to date: 8.7

years for a Canon Rewrite twilight fanfic to appear: ~5

percentage of Canon Rewrite twilight fanfic in total numbers: 0.5%

percentage of Canon Rewrite twilight fanfic in yearly average: 0.8%

total number of ACOTAR fanfics: 13304

date of oldest posted ACOTAR fanfic: 14 July 2015

mean number of ACOTAR fanfics posted per year to date: 1330

total number of ACOTAR fanfics tagged Canon Rewrite: 53

date of oldest posted Canon Rewrite ACOTAR fanfic: 14 August 2017

mean number of Canon Rewrite ACOTAR fanfics posted per year to date: 6.6

years for a Canon Rewrite ACOTAR fanfic to appear: ~2

percentage of Canon Rewrite ACOTAR fanfic in total numbers: 0.3%

percentage of Canon Rewrite ACOTAR fanfic in yearly average: 0.5%

total number of lightlark fanfics: 47

date of oldest posted lightlark fanfic: 4 October 2022

mean number of lightlark fanfics posted per year to date: 15.7

total number of lightlark fanfics tagged Canon Rewrite: 5

date of oldest posted Canon Rewrite lightlark fanfic: 25 June 2023

mean number of Canon Rewrite lightlark fanfics posted per year to date: 2.5

years for a Canon Rewrite lightlark fanfic to appear: <1

percentage of Canon Rewrite lightlark fanfic in total numbers: 10.6%

percentage of Canon Rewrite lightlark fanfic in yearly average: 16%

a pretty firm measure of a media property's success is how much its fans engage with it - not just buying the books but thinking about the characters and the setting, and engaging in transformative art using the piece of media as a canvas. by this measure, compared to one of its forerunners and one of its closer contemporaries, lightlark is an abject, objective failure. practically no one is writing lightlark fanfic, and the few people who are seem to be more engaged by trying to rewrite it than by playing around in canon. even Powerless, released closer to Lightlark than ACOTAR, has 41 fanfictions with ZERO works tagged as Canon Rewrite and only three that appear if one searches "rewrite" outside of the tags - and only one of those is a rewrite of the entire story, and not just an expansion of a specific scene.

look, if you like lightlark, i... question your taste and judgment, but ultimately i can't do anything about it. but i'd encourage you to question why you like lightlark. what is it about the series that grabs you? do you think about it after you put the book down, or does it slide from your mind as soon as you close the last page? and if it's the latter, does that really mean you like it?

wouldn't you rather have something that makes you think rather than something that lets you turn your brain off?

[nedlittle]

it's that time of the year again! i read a whopping 135 books in 2024 and have collected the worst of the worst for your entertainment ft. homophobia, taylor swift, girlboss baba yaga, and mary shelley's nipples. i hope you enjoy these reviews to make up for the suffering i endured to write them.

a lethal lady by nekesa afia ⭐

A Lethal Lady exists in a series of nondescript beige rooms because there is no effort put into making them anything else. Your reader should not have to imagine scenery themselves because you cannot be bothered to craft any description apart from vague adjectives, which do nothing if they exist without context!

the good women of fudi by liu hong ⭐

It's like Liu Hong sat down and Googled "gay books" and read the first one that came up, then Googled "lesbian books" and did the exact same thing. And then she thought, What if I did that but worse?

the witch and the tsar by oleysa salnikova gilmore ⭐

We can't even have hags anymore. Because of woke. At least Marya Morevna is bisexual.

mary and the birth of frankenstein by anne eekhout (tr. laura watkinson) ⭐

If I were sent back to 1816, I could identify Mary Shelley by her nipples alone. I could pick her nipples out of a police lineup. Her nipples are going to haunt me for the rest of my life. Her nipples are more myself than my own.

a fatal crossing by tom hindle ⭐.25

The timeline spans five days but feels like five years. The chapters are relatively short, but the action is so repetitive that it becomes cyclical, dragging on like Hector's corpse around the walls of Troy.

five wives by joan thomas ⭐.25

The Governor General's Award is not a serious award, lmao. We have approximately five recognizable Canadian writers, so much of our publishing is just slop, so we have to reward everyone who can string two sentences together.

dear sylvia, love jane by erin hall ⭐.5

It's like oh wow queer found family! community! a spunky underdog protagonist! And then a woman is murdered off-page by her husband who is then iced on-page by the mob. And then we go back to found family.

late bloomer by mazey eddings ⭐.75

You could scroll gay Twitter for 30 minutes and have the same experience as reading this book.

the formidable miss cassidy by meihan boey ⭐⭐

The characters and dialogue were too twee for my tastes, and Miss Cassidy herself is Mary Poppins if she were a whimsigoth Tumblr witch.

maude horton's glorious revenge by lizzie pook ⭐⭐

The whole book lends itself to being read with only half of one's brain engaged; neither engaging nor forgettable, it's the sort of thing that vanishes entirely from your psyche the moment after you mark it as read.

[kafkasapartment]

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“Just 1 in 10 American high school seniors have read at least 6 books beginning to end, an article titled, "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books," cites.

[kmesons]

a series of unfortunate events 🤝 the hatchetfield series (repeatedly putting the same characters through situations of varying degrees of misfortune)

[smandraws]

reading is good support your local library

[a-typical]

Profits earned by the state, after paying winners and ticket merchants, serve as a major source of revenue that often funnels into social programs, especially kindergarten through high school education, creating a moral dilemma to vote against this form of legalized gambling in your state.

That got me thinking. Is probability and statistics even taught in US public schools? Recent surveys show that the answer is mostly not. In the few places that do teach it, classes are taught as a novel elective or as part of an advanced placement college course.

If instead, probability and statistics were a fundamental part of the K-12 curriculum, taught to every student, across multiple grades, and if state lottery revenue were allocated to make that happen, then the lottery might just put itself out of business by inoculating its own citizens against the lottery itself.

— Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization - Neil deGrasse Tyson (2022)

[koukouture]

I saw someone somewhere say that not all the Aphrodite kids are “conventionally” attractive AND I WILL STAND BY THAT!!!!

Because yes!!! They’re not all white and skinny there’s gotta be some variety. They’re the children of the goddess of love and beauty, self love is a given. Confidence makes the most beautiful people.

Like even if some of them have braces or acne or whatever, I know they’re all beautiful and charming like it’s the vibes you know? People try so hard to make braces seem awkward but some of the prettiest girls I know have braces and they LOVE to laugh and show them off.

I also just know the Aphrodite boys are ACTUALLY CLEAN. They all actually wear chapstick, put on deodorant, brush their teeth and T A K E B A T H S. Nothing is more attractive than a man that actually washes his ass let me tell you.

What makes all the Aphrodite kids beautiful is that they’re all confident, there’s no way all of them have pretty baby blues or the metabolism of fucking cheetahs. And I just know they’re supportive like come on. Hot bitches don’t gate keep