#reading access

[inkskinned]

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[kyofsonder]

It can be, of course, very hard to read a lot and/or play a lot. Fiction books, nonfiction books, TTRPG rulebooks, and the materials to access them can be hard to get and hard to engage with for many people. I'm personally struggling to read the way I used to, and to play TTRPGs in the capacity I want to play them.

That said, there are almost always workarounds:

> Where books can't be bought, they can be borrowed. Where libraries can't be reached in-person, there's the Libby and Overdrive apps.

> When it's hard to read, audiobooks are a good option -- Libby and Overdrive have these as well, and there are several places like Audible where they can be bought. There are narrative fiction podcasts that are structured similarly to novels, too, like Wolf 359 and The Penumbra Podcast and The Bright Sessions -- as well as podcasts that review books, suggest books, and talk about reading and writing as skills and craft.

> When reading or listening to audiobooks/narrative podcasts by yourself isn't motivating enough for you to finish the stories you start, when you need someone to listen to your observations and theories and feelings about what you read, the traditional book club is just one of several good options to make reading fun for you. You can try to find an existing one at a library or rec center near you, or find communities online. There are Tumblr circles and communities, subreddits, Twitter circles (if you're willing to brave the rest of what that site has and is in order to get to them), Discord groups, pen pal programs, and apps that are specifically focused on the social side of reading -- Goodreads lends well to that, and I found one recently called Fable that has an entire social tab just for book clubs. If you can't find any, online or in person, that suit you then starting your own is also (admittedly, too daunting for me as I am now) a path some people could take to getting satisfaction from their reading.

> If getting a group together for a TTRPG -- especially one that isn't the easily identifiable D&D 5e -- isn't coming together, try solo TTRPGs. They come in many forms; some have you telling a story in a journal and focus heavily on roleplay, others have you build a dungeon room by room and focus almost entirely on combat. I've seen tabletop Stardew Valley simulators and grimdark 80's-style fantasy dungeon crawls, games that use playing cards and games that use tarot decks and games that have you roll 5 types of dice to get through a campaign. I've seen a lot that just give you the bare bones of a game structure, and invite you to hack it and change it to fit how you want to play. It misses the social aspect of the game in many ways, but it's fun to talk with people about what you did in your last game session and it's great for finding out what you like best in your narratives and your game mechanics.

> When getting either group or solo TTRPGs is difficult due to cost, there are plenty of resources that let you play until you have money to support small creators. Pirate from the big companies that don't pay their creators, but for indie games you can usually find free or very cheap versions of their games on itch.io and download them without hurting your own finances. There are also free options for PDF readers if you don't want to or can't buy one, such as LibreOffice and OpenOffice and (though it's not as good as it used to be) Kingsoft. Printing game books out at a library should be fairly inexpensive if you want it in physical form and don't have a printer of your own, too.

> If it's material costs that are the issue, because you have nothing left after deciding you'd rather back a small creator's Kickstarter or go to a chain bookstore or whatever you picked, that can be a little harder to source. But Tabletop Simulator has a one-time fee if your computer can handle it, and there are free playing card and tarot emulating websites and dice emulating apps all over the internet. When none of that is available and no friends or family can help you out, DIY also works -- provided you have the time and energy, which you may need to gather first before you start.

Put in as much or as little effort as you want, especially if writing and/or TTRPG gaming are more casual for you, but remember there are resources and ways to do things so you get the most of your writing and/or your games. You can build a foundation off the stories you read and the games you play, and there are always people looking to make building that foundation a more accessible process. Find your way in, the one that best suits how you read and what you write, how you play and what you design. Taking breaks is fair, and moving on if these aren't that important to you is fair, but if you love what you do and want to have a better foundation for doing it then the way to do that is by surrounding yourself by it as much as possible and making it a part of your life. A part of you, as much as possible. So try not to get discouraged by lack of access or by the things that slow you down. There's usually a way forward, just not necessarily through the first door you try.

Read to be a better writer. Find any path to reading you can, and follow it to where you want/need to be.

Play TTRPGs to be a better TTRPG designer (amd a better GM/DM/player, too). Find any path to playing you can, and follow it to where you want/need to be.

This is how you build skills, and reinforce passion. And it's fun, too, if you let it be.

If you are going to be an author you have GOT to read books.

If you are going to be a TTRPG designer you have GOT to play or at least read the rulebooks for TTRPGs.

[hunxi-after-hours]

"If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today, it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work. Today's compulsion of production perpetuates work and thus eliminates that sacred silence. Life becomes entirely profane, desecrated."

—Han Byung-Chul, The Disappearance of Rituals (trans. Daniel Steuer)

[ihatebrainstorm]

[It's Just a Theory!]

Just a simple theoretical discussion ^v^

Wanted to see what he would sound like with MatPat's voice then got. just a tinyyy bit carried away..........

[luckthebard]

I know I’m being anti-fun and a wet blanket about this but -

While I find “if not friend why friend-shaped” about cute but dangerous animals to be a fun meme, I increasingly react with knee-jerk negativity to “if evil why hot” because while it’s not that serious when applied to fiction there is an extremely worrying real trend of people who think of themselves as progressive and enlightened who equate physical appearance to morality.

[moonsidesong]

don't panic buy games because of the eshop shutdown!!!! the memes are not lying It is genuinely very easy to hack your 3ds!!! please do it!!!!

3ds.hacks.guide

(don't follow video guides they are very often outdated and it's easier to make mistakes that way. this guide is very detailed with step by step instructions and they even have a support server in the event you have any trouble! i understand it might seem intimidating but risks of bricking or banning are very minimal at this point you will be glad you did it)

[housederiva]

Dragon Age put important plot information in your games challenge

[phleb0tomist]

tumblr users will have the most inaccessible, unreadable, low contrast, flashing carrd you can possibly imagine, with a dni full of insider acronyms with no translation and numerous link buttons labelled with cryptic captions, and then go ahead and put “ableists dni and kys!” on that carrd

[valtsv]

grabbing myself by the scruff of the neck and forcing myself to at least skim read a longform post or piece of text that i just scrolled past despite thinking it sounded interesting because it's "too long" i will NOT contribute to my own attention deficiency and limit my general knowledge and critical thinking skills by needing information spoonfed to me in bitesize pieces to be able to digest it i will NOT

[milk-lover]

Sobbing uncontrollably reading through a dissertation about the college experience of students with ADHD. It is like reading a report about my life that just says over and over "My experiences are real. My hardships are real. I am not lazy, I am not dumb. My struggles were not my fault, and they were not a moral failing. The failure was with the system, not with me."

Here's a line that got me in particular:

"Hotez et al.(2022) compared the health, academic, and non-academic capacities of a nationally representative sample of U.S. first-year college students with ADHD and without ADHD. Students with ADHD self-reported lower academic aspirations and more feelings of depression and overwhelm, ranking themselves lower in their general emotional health. The fact that students with ADHD scored in the highest 10th percentile for many non-academic traits, such as artistic ability, computer skills, creativity, public speaking, social confidence, self-understanding and understanding of others, compassion, and risk-tasking, suggests that this population has strengths that are frequently underappreciated in academia."

(the paper is a thesis called "Understanding the Collegiate Experience for Students With ADHD" by Gia Long, 2022)

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[tehriz]

i live in the eternal yet apparently vain hope that people on this webbed site will actually fucking read the details of the internet archive case and the very specific things they were doing that the publishers were objecting to

nobody ever asked to have the entire archive shut down and millions of books on the site were unaffected and always available throughout, the lawsuit was about the scanning and unlimited distribution of recent books in print still under copyright

(and frankly as someone who cares about the very important work the archive does do i was disappointed as hell that they chose to jeopardize that work with this shit that was pretty unambiguously blatant copyright violation any way you sliced it)

but considering the endless facile and self-serving justifications that come up here on the daily for book piracy when the living authors of those books can’t afford health insurance i don’t know why i’m ever surprised

[uncanny-tranny]

I recently had to do a project in one of my psych classes, and man, I knew that CBT was used for every little thing, but seeing over and over, "do CBT! CBT is the best for every mental illness!" was so jarring. I'm absolutely biased because of my own experiences, but I just don't think it's as universal a treatment model as it's touted.

If you didn't benefit from CBT, it's not because you're lazy or didn't try hard enough or lacked intelligence or foresight into your own needs. Frankly, it's a therapy model that (I think) shouldn't be the only readily-accessible model and among the only therapy models covered by insurance. Some of us should not be treated in a CBT model and that's okay. It's not a sign of poor character or unreasonable demands, and if you don't think it's a model that works for you, then it's your right to express that!

[classicslesbianopinions]

the other thing about being disabled in academia is everyone is like "yeah we can't do much about the buildings they're old :/" as if "old" being a synonym for "inaccessible" isn't just a constant reminder that the people who built the school did not imagine that someday someone like me might study there

[incognitopolls]

Anon is visually impaired and listens to a lot of audiobooks, but people have told them that audiobooks don't really count as "real books."

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[magicaltimelady44]

so like. if anyone else, like me, still has the occasional fanfic they follow on fanfiction.net, and hasn't been getting the update emails for the longest time and was wondering if ti meant the site is on its last legs

no

no they've done something stupid as fuck

you have to opt back in to getting the emails/notifications of new chapters every six months, because they automatically assume you don't want to know when the fics you followed for the updates have updated