#probably one of the best i've read

[libraryleopard]

Collection of adult fantasy, horror, paranormal, and science fiction short stories and novellas

Draws on mythology and folklore (especially Filipino folklore)

Several stories with central LGBTQ+ characters

Rich & atmospheric

Favorites: “A Spell for Foolish Hearts,” "Good Girls," "How to Swallow the Moon," and "A Canticle for Lost Girls"

[veerbles]

"He doesn't say goodbye. He just lets go."

goodbye at dawn.

[thelassoway]

Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso Seasons 1-3 » T-shirts

[lunapegasus]

Nearly a year ago today I made this blog and posted my art online for the first time. So here's a redraw of it to celebrate :) Also sketch under the cut because it actually looks very different than the lineart but I really like it (+ the lineart for comparison)

[papa-evershed]

🎄 MERRY CHRISMAS 🎄

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

“Sweetheart, if you knew the things I could do with you, you’d have run away a long time ago,” said the young man standing below the arch of the city gate.  If you looked at him full-on he seemed normal enough, but catch him in your peripheries and he seemed Wrong somehow.  Like he had too many sides to him, or like his limbs were just out of proportion, or like he moved with a grace that wasn’t quite human.  He reached out to run a finger along a stray lock of hair escaped from the pigtails of the young woman he was talking to.     

She groaned loudly.  “Don’t. We’ve known each other far too long for this bullshit.” 

The man grinned.  It was an unexpected grin, usually men like this are expected to smirk, or leer, or smile slyly, or even quirk an eyebrow if it came to it.  But the grin was real, open and glad, briefly washing away the aura of inhumanity and leaving merely a boy who very much liked talking to this girl. 

“But it’s funny.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“But it’s really funny.”

Let’s back up a bit.  Everyone knows that history repeats itself and certain outcomes always arise.  Violence is condoned through complacency.  Tyranny lasts for a while then tends to burn itself out.  Empires always end up toppled in the end.  These are our stories, at least, which crop up again and again.  The principle is true in other lands as well, they just happen to view different things as histories. 

Fulfaran was particularly high in story density as cities went.  It seemed you couldn’t turn a corner without running into a run-away princess, or a charming scoundrel, or a crone (crones were particularly bad – it was a 50/50 chance as to whether they’d try to destroy your life or give you genuinely good advice).  The markets were teeming with exotic goods, the castle at the top of the hill flew its banners brightly in the breeze, and there were established parts of town you went to only if you wanted to a. meet an orphan, b. meet a thief or c. fall down a hole.  Rather a good place for Reynard and Connie, who tended to be plagued by stories. 

Constance was a baker’s daughter who had been taken as a teenager to live in a tower by a witch in exchange for her impoverished family receiving enough gold to live on.  She never fully understood that witch’s motivations but that’s just how it went.  She had immediately proceeded with a number of escape attempts, most of which failed until Reynard had ridden below her window and she had bargained with him until he snuck a rope inside with her food deliveries.  He had claimed to be a prince, but wasn’t.  Connie knew he wasn’t quite human either, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it and she didn’t want to pry. 

She had wanted to go home, but she knew the witch would try to exact vengeance.  So, she said her goodbyes for a second time and started out in the opposite direction, which happened to be where Rey was headed as well (or so he claimed, in truth he had no direction or purpose.  But he liked Connie, she was sensible and she made him laugh). 

Unfortunately, it seemed the two of them were not fated to have an easy path.  For one, events kept transpiring which forced Rey into situations where he was expected to betray Connie.  Said events seemed rather upset every time he simply told her everything and they worked out a solution together.  Connie, on the other hand, was continuously being offered chances to fight royalty and claim a kingdom.  It wasn’t that she wouldn’t like a kingdom, she commented once as the two of them wandered through the woods, but she didn’t think she had the training to run one.  She was, after all, a baker’s daughter.  She could make excellent bread but she didn’t care for administration. 

They also stubbornly refused to fall in love with each other, which seemed to make the stories very distressed indeed.  This was not helped by how within a few hours of meeting they had become firm friends – Connie rather thought they had been expected to be unlikely allies who hated each other at first.  But it wasn’t in either of their natures to hate very hard and she liked Rey – he was clever and cutting, but never cruel.

Eventually the events all became too much, which is why they had come to where they were, the main gate of Fulfaran.  The storied city.  Surely someone here must know how they could get out of this. 

Connie felt herself smiling back despite herself.  “Fine, it’s a little funny but I honestly don’t know how you can say stuff like that in public without wanting to curl up into a ball and die,” she said starting to walk again, under the gate into the crowds.  Rey fell into step beside her. 

“I have no shame,” he shrugged, “besides, I don’t know any of these people. No one’s paying attention and even if they were, they’d think it’s normal.  I’m pretty sure I saw at least three pairs of ‘people who definitely hate each other’ coming in after us."

Connie was going to reply, but she was cut off by a harsh voice that had snuck into their path. 

“Child! I see greatness in you—”

“Oh not today, thank you!” said Rey, doffing his cap to the aged woman in the dark cloak swaying before them.  Connie summoned up her best customer service smile, the one with just enough of a hint of rage in it that it tended to shut people up without them knowing why, and slipped past the figure. 

“Wait!” the crone cried, “there is a prophecy—”

“Probably not me,” said Connie cheerily over her shoulder.  “Try that girl with midnight-blue eyes over there, that’ll do the trick.”  She rolled her eyes at Rey who grimaced. 

“When we get to the inn we’re taking the most boring room imaginable,” he said emphatically.  “Nothing on the top floor, nothing with secret passages, just four walls and a bed.”  The two of them had long since given up on multiple rooms, or even multiple beds.  No matter how hard they searched every inn was always just a little too full. 

“We better do it quick, I want to sleep before dinner.  Who did you say this place was recommended by again?”

“Basically everyone I know who’s been here,” said Rey, scanning the buildings as they passed.  “They say it’s lovely, really quaint and unique. We should be there right around this corner—”

He halted.  Connie almost hit his shoulder but she hardly noticed, too focused on the inn they had found.  It was small and smoky, almost crumbling beneath the weight of the sky.  Hooded figures passed in and out, glimmers of gemstones sometimes flashing out from beneath their clothing.  The sign was covered in enough grime that it couldn’t be read and there was a large board on the front with dozens of papers stuck to it advertising quests, monster-hunts, missing people, missing dogs, various balls, festivals, and competitions, and the best shops to find weapons in the area.  Connie’s heart sank and Rey’s expression told her he was feeling the same thing. 

“I saw a TreacleTavern down the road,” he said under his breath.  TreacleTaverns were in every city and they were all huge and identical.  Connie nodded vigorously.

“Let’s go, let’s go.”  She all but shoved him back down the way they had come. 

As they left she shot one last look over her shoulder.  A young man was staring at them.  He had chestnut brown hair and an intense expression, as though he had seen them before.  He seemed oddly familiar to Connie, though she didn’t know how she might have met him. 

It was probably something very important that she would have lingered on had the circumstances been different.  Unfortunately for the stories, however, she was still extremely invested, come hell or high water, in getting her pre-supper nap.   

[rmbunnie]

Red Hood Characterization

This is really long so I'm putting a cut here, I've been thinking about Jason Todd's character motivations and the question of whether or not his actions are based in a Moral Code (I don't think so, not to say he's without any morality) and I talk about that in more depth here.

I saw someone say on here that Titans: Beast World: Gotham City was some of the best Jason Todd internal writing they'd seen in a while, and I've been a Red Hood fan for 8 years or so now? pretty much since I read comics for the first time, so I went and checked out and I thought it was good! The way the person I saw talking about it as if it was rare and unusual made me wonder though, because as well-written as i thought his stances on crime were, there wasn't really anything in it that went against the way I conceptualize Jason?

This kinda plays into a larger question I've been thinking about for a while with Jason though, which is that, do people think that the killing is part of a fundamental worldview that motivates him a la batman, and that worldview is the reason he does the things he does?? Because 8 years ago i was a middle schooler engaging with fiction on the level that a middle schooler does, so I simply did not put much thought into it beyond "poor guy :(" but ever since I actually started trying to understand consistent characterization, I don't really see Jason as someone who's motivated by a moral code in his actions the way batman or superman is!

tbh my personal read is that he's a very socially-motivated guy, his actions from resurrection to his Joker-Batman ultimatum in utrh always seemed to me like every choice made leading up to his identity reveal was either a. to give him the leverage and skill necessary to pull off his identity reveal successfully, or b. to twist the knife that little bit more when he does let Bruce find out who he is. Like iirc there's a Judd Winick tweet like "yeah tldr he chose Red Hood as his identity because it's the lowest blow he could think of." And I think that's awesome, I think character motivations rooted so deeply in character's relationships and emotions are really fun to read! I also think it's where the stagnation/flatness of his character comes from in certain comics, because if his main motivation is one event in one relationship that passes, and he is not particularly attached to anything in his life or the world by the time that comes to pass, it's a little harder to come up with a direction to go with the character after that, because there isn't much of a direction that aligns with something the character would reasonably want? But I do think solving this by saying "all of the morally-off emotionally driven cruelty he did on his way to spite Batman was actually reflective of his own version of Batman's stance that's exactly the same except he thinks it's GOOD to kill people" isn't ideal. To be fully honest, it seems to me like he never particularly cared one way or the other about killing people to "clean Gotham of crime," he just did everything he could to get the power necessary to pull off his personal plans, and took out any particularly heinous people he encountered along the way (like in Lost Days.) Not to say I think the fact he killed people keeps him up at night anymore than everything else in his life events, I just never really thought he was out there wholeheartedly kneecapping some dude selling weed or random guy robbing a tv store for justice.

Looping wayyy back to my question, Is this (^) contradictory to the way he's written/the overall average perception of the character? Because like I enjoyed his writing in Beast World i have zero significant issue with anything there, I just didn't believe it would be a hot take, like yeah, that is Jason. It's been a while since I've read utrh and lost days, but I don't think my takeaway directly contradicts either of those too bad iirc. Idk all this to say I think Jason killing and being alright with killing is an obvious and objective fact, but i guess i've always seen it as more of a practical tactic than a moral belief, and I think taking the actions made during the lowest points of a character's life where he is obsessively focused on this ONEEEE thing and trying to apply it as a Motivating Stance to everything he's done after that, doesn't really follow logically for me.

[writeouswriter]

Reading a fic that's so well written I wish I could close my eyes and just let the descriptions and atmosphere wash over me, but the dilemma with closing my eyes is, well, I then would not be able to continue reading this fic, now would I.

[androgynous-bhajipav]

I've been on ao3 for like 4 years now and am extremely selective about the fics I bookmark. Kudos and comments? I leave those on most stuff I read but bookmarks are only for the darling ones which I'm sure I'll reread and cherish until the end of time.

Now until May this year I only had like 14 fics bookmarked. But the number has tripled literally within a month.

All this to say, dear DBD fic writers, I love you guys and I love your brains and I love your work so so sooo much. Y'all as well, fanartists and analysts.

[diedbydeth]

rant about proshipping because it's 1 am and i can't sleep and i can't find a good fucking fanfiction website and i'm just so fucking sick of everything.

just to preface this i'm not an "anti". just anti-leaning. i'm shipcourse unaligned because i find this type of discourse really pointless and anger inducing. like why the fuck do i have to tell grown ass adults (i'm literally not joking there are people in their fucking forties believing this shit) that shipping a child and their dad is not ok. like what.

ok preface done. now the rant.

i find all of proshitters' takes on stuff really weird. like what do you mean fiction doesn't affect reality? if fiction doesn't affect really, then how the fuck did the january 6 riots happen? i can assure you that the reason they were there was not because there was actual election fraud. if fiction doesn't affect reality, then queer and racial representation in fiction doesn't matter. like people realize that, right? or am i just out of my mind? clearly you can understand how pedophilia and incest in fiction can affect people if you can understand how representation of minorities in fiction can affect people. there can't possibly be people that dense, right? even aside from children and minors reading that shit, pedophiles reading it can make them consider not getting help for their paraphilia and just jacking off to the porn you oh-so-graciously have given them. like does that not make you uncomfortable beyond words?

or their other argument saying that people shouldn't care what others ship? like am i overreacting to be incredibly uncomfortable around people who actively ship minors and adults? why do people even do that in the first place? don't give me that coping mechanism crap, there are *much* more better and efficient coping mechanisms than writing about pedophilia, like writing about the feelings you felt or talking about it with someone. i went through something very similar, but i didn't have to write pedophilic shit and post it on ao3, so why would you have to?

like you are harming people with this crap. you are giving predators something to hide behind. you are giving people who draw problematic things, not even related to weird ships (like people who draw racist and other bigoted things), something to hide behind. you are giving creeps a platform and ultimately helping them in getting their behavior normalized. do you not see the problem with this?

do i, a teenager, need to tell an adult, a person in their mid-forties, that condoning pedophilia and incest, even fictional, is problematic?

rant over. feel free to send death threats or try to tell me to support creeps in the replies or even my askbox. or don't. your choice.

[sskk-manifesto]

Proof that bsd would be a lot better if they just let it pass the Bechdel test more often

[syncast-err0r]

during the whole post s2 montage or whatever, it's revealed that gabriel and beelzebub actually live in a cottage in North Downs, being their resident cryptids and functioning in worse ways than crowley and aziraphale could ever manage, and that's just them not trying

their entire house has rooms that are either completely empty or fully thrashed. these two idiots didn't even bother with trying to seem human. the house just spawned out of nowhere and they don't even bother with humans' memories they literally do not give a fuck. there's no bathroom, no bedroom. however there is a dungeon. neither of them ever sleep so they're just walking around at night for funsies. they're awful. their neighbors at least are grateful because flies refuse to enter anywhere else aside from the bureaucracy house (house is a strong word) just bc beelzebub is nearby. fuck it. they have several floors which can only be accessed from the inside, meaning it looks like it only has one floor from the outside. they have a garden and for some reason it's full of the worst smelling plants to attract flies but also they don't smell at all because gabriel was like nah n beelzebub was like fair enough

do u guys see my vision. do u

[moondrop39-dovewing70]

A Woven Song (Cover Fanart)

IT'S FINALLY FINISHED!!! ALL OF THE SWEAT, TEARS, AND ABSOLUTE FRUSTRATION IS FINALLY OVER AND I AM HAPPY TO SAY I FINISHED THIS BEFORE MIDNIGHT WHERE I LIVE!!!

Here ya go @stellawolfe30 aka @monkiebois

My first out of many MANY Several Fanarts pieces for the amazing "A Woven Song" Fanfic (I've linked it so many times before but I'll link it once again so that you may all read it BECAUSE IT'S SOO GOOD!)

Here's the speedpaint that I lightly mentioned before:

Here's the link to the amazing fanfic:

And have the kitten of bleps because it is now my signature:

[moonlit-tulip]

What's your favorite ebook-compatible reading software? Firefox EPUBReader isn't great, but I'm not what, if anything, works better.

Very short answer: for EPUBs, on Windows I use and recommend the Calibre reader, and on iOS I use Marvin but it's dying and no longer downloadable so my fallback recommendation is the native Apple Books app; for PDFs, on Windows I use Sumatra, and on iOS I use GoodReader; for CBZs, I use CDisplayEx on Windows and YACReader on iOS; and I don't use other platforms very often, so I can't speak as authoritatively about those, although Calibre's reader is cross-platform for Windows/Mac/Linux, and YACReader for Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android, so they can serve as at least a minimum baseline of quality against which alternatives can be compared for those platforms.

Longer answer:

First off, I will say: yeah, Firefox EPUBReader isn't great. Neither, really, are most ebook readers. I have yet to find a single one that I'm fully satisfied with. I have an in-progress project to make one that I'm fully satisfied with, but it's been slow, probably isn't going to hit 1.0.0 release before next year at current rates, and isn't going to be actually definitively the best reader on the market for probably months or years post-release even assuming I succeed in my plans to keep up its development. So, for now, selection-of-ebook-readers tends to be very much a matter of choosing the best among a variety of imperfect options.

Formats-wise, there are a lot of ebook formats, but I'm going to collapse my answers down to focusing on just three, for simplicity. Namely: EPUB, PDF, and CBZ.

EPUB is the best representative of the general "reflowable-text ebook designed to display well on a wide variety of screens" genre. Other formats of similar nature exist—Kindle's MOBI and AZW3 formats, for instance (the latter of which is, in essence, just an EPUB in a proprietary Amazon wrapper)—but conversion between formats-in-this-broad-genre is generally pretty easy and not excessively lossy, so you're generally safe to convert to EPUB as needed if you've got different formats-in-this-genre and a reader that doesn't support those formats directly. (And it's rare for a program made by anyone other than Amazon to work for non-EPUB formats-in-this-genre and not for EPUBs.)

PDF is a pretty unique / distinctive format without any widely-used alternatives I'm aware of, unless you count AZW4 (which is a PDF in a proprietary Amazon wrapper). It's the best format I'm aware of for representations of books with rigid non-reflowable text-formatting, as with e.g. TTRPG rulebooks which do complicated things with their art-inserts and sidebars.

And CBZ serves here as a stand-in for the general category of "bunch of images in an archive file of some sort, ordered by filename", which is a common format for comics. CBZ is zip-based, CBR is RAR-based, CB7 is 7-zip-based, et cetera; but they're easy to convert between one another just by extracting one and then re-archiving it in one's preferred format, and CBZ is the most commonly distributed and the most commonly supported by readers, so it's the one I'm going to focus on.

With those prefaces out of the way, here are my comprehensive answers by (platform, format) pair:

Browser, EPUB

I'm unaware of any good currently-available browser-based readers for any of the big ebook formats. I've tried out EPUBReader for Firefox, as well as some other smaller Firefox-based reader extensions, and none of them have impressed me. I haven't tested any Chrome-based readers particularly extensively, but based on some superficial testing I don't have the sense that options are particularly great there either.

This state of affairs feels intuitively wrong to me. The browser is, in a significant sense, the natural home for EPUB-like reflowable-text ebooks, to a greater degree than it's the natural home for a great many of the other things people manage to warp it into being used for; after all, EPUBs are underlyingly made of HTML-file-trees. My own reader-in-progress will be browser-based. But nonetheless, for now, my advice for browser-based readers boils down to "don't use them unless you really need to".

If you do have to use one, EPUBReader is the best extension-based one I've encountered. I have yet to find a good non-extension-based website-based one, but am currently actively in the market for such a thing for slightly-high-context reasons I'll put in the tags.

Browser, PDF

Firefox and Chrome both have built-in PDF readers which are, like, basically functional and fine, even if not actively notably-good. I'm unaware of any browser-based PDF-reading options better than those two.

Browser, CBZ

If there exist any good options here, I'm not aware of them.

Windows, EPUB

Calibre's reader is, unfortunately, the best on the market right now. It doesn't have a very good scrolled display mode, which is a mark against it by my standards, and it's a bit slow to open books and has a general sense of background-clunkiness to its UI, but in terms of the quality with which it displays its content in paginated mode—including relatively-uncommon sorts of content that most readers get wrong, like vertical text—it's pretty unparalleled, and moreover it's got a generally wider range of features and UI-customization options than most readers offer. So overall it's my top recommendation on most axes, despite my issues with it.

There's also Sigil. I very emphatically don't actually recommend Sigil as a reader for most purposes—it's marketed as an EPUB editor, lacks various features one would want in a reader, and has a much higher-clutter UI than one would generally want in a reader—but its preview pane's display engine is even more powerful than Calibre's for certain purposes—it can successfully handle EPUBs which contain video content, for instance, which Calibre falls down on—so it can be a useful backup to have on hand for cases where Calibre's display-capabilities break down.

Windows, PDF

I use SumatraPDF and think it's pretty good. It's very much built for reading, rather than editing / formfilling / etc.; it's fast-to-launch, fast-to-load-pages, not too hard to configure to look nice on most PDFs, and generally lightweight in its UI.

When I need to do fancier things, I fall back on Adobe Reader, which is much more clunky on pretty much every axis for purposes of reading but which supports form-filling and suchlike pretty comprehensively.

(But I haven't explored this field in huge amounts of depth; plausibly there exist better options that I'm unaware of, particularly on the Adobe-reader-ish side of things. (I'd be a bit more surprised if there were something better than SumatraPDF within its niche, for Windows, and very interested in hearing about any such thing if it does exist.))

Windows, CBZ

My usual CBZ-reader for day-to-day use—which I also use for PDF-based comics, since it has various features which are better than SumatraPDF for the comic-reading use case in particular—is an ancient one called CDisplayEx which, despite its age, still manages to be a solid contender for best in its field; it's reasonably performant, it has most of the features I need (good handling of spreads, a toggle for left-to-right versus right-to-left reading, a good set of options for setting how the pages are fit into the monitor, the ability to force it forward by just one page when it's otherwise in two-page mode, et cetera), and in general it's a solid functional bit of software, at least by the standards of its field.

The reason I describe CDisplayEx as only "a solid contender for" best in its field, though, is: recently I had cause to try out YACReader, a reader I tried years ago on Windows and dismissed at the time, on Linux; and it was actually really good, like basically as good as CDisplayEx is on Windows. I haven't tried the more recent versions of YACReader on Windows directly, yet; but it seems pretty plausible that my issues with the older version are now resolved, that the modern Windows version is comparable to the Linux version, and therefore that it's on basically the same level as CDisplayEx quality-wise.

Mac, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

I don't use Mac often enough to have opinions here beyond "start with whatever cross-platform thing is good elsewhere, as a baseline, and go on from there". Don't settle for any EPUB reader on Mac worse than the Calibre one, since Calibre works on Mac. (I've heard vague good things about Apple's native one; maybe it's actually a viable option?) Don't settle for any CBZ reader on Mac worse than YACReader, since YACReader works on Mac. Et cetera. (For PDFs I don't have any advice on what to use even as baseline, unfortunately; for whatever reason, PDF readers, or at least the better ones, seem to tend not to be natively cross-platform.)

Linux, EPUB

For the most part, my advice is the same as Windows: just go with the Calibre reader (and maybe use Sigil as a backup for edge cases). However, if you, like me, prefer scrolled EPUB-reading over paginated EPUB-reading, I'd also suggest checking out Foliate; while it's less powerful than the Calibre reader overall, with fewer features and more propensity towards breaking in edge cases, it's basically functional for normal books lacking unusual/tricky formatting, and, unlike Calibre, it has an actually-good scrolled display mode.

Linux, PDF

I have yet to find any options I'm fully satisfied with here, for the "fast launch and fast rendering and functional lightweight UI" niche that I use SumatraPDF for on Windows. Among the less-good-but-still-functional options I've tried out: SumatraPDF launched via Wine takes a while to start up, but once launched it has the usual nice SumatraPDF featureset. Zathura with the MuPDF backend is very pleasantly-fast, but has a somewhat-unintuitive keyboard-centric control scheme and is hard to configure. And qpdfview offers a nice general-purpose PDF-reading UI, including being quick to launch, but its rendering backend is slower than either Sumatra's or Zathura's so it's less good for paging quickly through large/heavy PDFs.

Linux, CBZ

YACReader, as mentioned previously in the Windows section, is pretty definitively the best option I've found here, and its Linux version is a solid ~equal to CDisplayEx's Windows version. Like CDisplayEx, it's also better than more traditional PDF readers for reading PDF-based comics.

iOS/iPadOS, EPUB

My current main reading app is Marvin. However, it hasn't been updated in years, and is no longer available on the app store, so I'm currently in the process of getting ready to migrate elsewhere in anticipation of Marvin's likely permanent breakage some time in the next few years. Thus I will omit detailed discussion of Marvin and instead discuss the various other at-least-vaguely-comparably-good options on the market.

For general-purpose reading, including scrolled reading if that's your thing, Apple's first-party Books app turns out to be surprisingly good. It's not the best in terms of customization of display-style, but it's basically solidly functional, moreso than the vast majority of the apps on the market.

For reading of books with vertical text in particular, meanwhile, I use Yomu, which is literally the only reader I've encountered to date on any platform which has what I'd consider to be a sensible and high-quality way of handling scrolled reading of vertical-text-containing books. While I don't recommend it for more general purposes, due to awkward handling of EPUBs' tables of contents (namely, kind of ignoring them and doing its own alternate table-of-contents thing it thinks is better), it is extremely good for that particular niche, as well as being more generally solid-aside-from-the-TOC-thing.

iOS/iPadOS, PDF

I use GoodReader. I don't know if it's the best in the market, but it's very solidly good enough for everything I've tried to do with it thus far. It's fast; its UI is good at getting out of my way, while still packing in all the features I want as options when I go looking for them (most frequently switching between two-page-with-front-cover and two-page-without-front-cover display for a given book); also in theory it has a bunch of fancy PDF-editing features for good measure, although in practice I never use those and can't comment on their quality. But, as a reader, it's very solidly good enough for me, and I wish I could get a reader like it for desktop.

iOS/iPadOS, CBZ

YACReader has an iOS version; following the death of my former favorite comic reader for iOS (ComicRack), it's very solidly the best option I'm aware of on the market. (And honestly would be pretty competitive even if ComicRack were still around.) I recommend it here as I do on Linux.

Android, EPUB/PDF/CBZ

It's been years since I've had an Android device, and accordingly have very little substantial advice here. (I'm expecting to move back to Android for my next phone-and-maybe-also-tablet, out of general preferring-open-hardware-and-software-when-practical feelings, but it'll plausibly be a while, because Apple is much better at long-lasting hardware and software than any Android manufacturers I'm aware of.) For EPUB, I recall Moon+ reader was the best option I could find back circa 2015ish, but that's long enough ago that plausibly things have changed substantially at this point. For CBZ, both YACReader and CDisplayEx have Android versions, although I haven't tried either and so can't comment on their quality. For PDF, you're on your own; I have no memories or insights there.

Conclusion

...and that's it. If there are other major platforms on which ebook-reader software can be chosen, I'm failing to think of them currently, and this is what I've got for all platforms I have managed to think of.

In the future... well, I hope my own reader-in-development (slated for 1.0.0 release as a Firefox extension with only EPUB support, with ambitions of eventually expanding to cover other platforms and other formats) will one day join this recommendation-pile, but it's currently not yet in anything resembling a recommendable form. And I hope that there are lots of good reader-development projects in progress that I currently don't know about; but, if there are, I currently don't know about them.

So, overall, this is all I've got! I hope it's helpful.

[puffpawstries]

I don't know why but I keep having this crazy urge to stream osomatsu-san drawing/working on ososan art that most half of it being hanichi on my part... But I also do have like refs I am working on and I am insane wanting to draw some of the ososan cast of characters but any stream would be on the weekend! Saturday at most and my time zone is Central Daylight Time (edit: I stream on twitch)

check tags for my insane thoughts of chaos!

[evilmagician430]

who up sinning their fest