#still books are objectively better but

[aleclightofmylifewoodbane]

thinking ab the last neg comment i got on my books are better post ab tsc. when i literally am so excited about kat dom and matt working together on something again. yall assume i dont enjoy the show or the actors 😭😭 its cringe and objectively bad but it was EVERYTHING to me too fr. yall hate me and i dont hate you 😭

[s1lv3rp4w3dc4t]

shout out object shows with canon queer ships. I'm talking on screen kiss or even just verbal confirmation. all things considered it's a bit strange you don't really see them that much when you think about how gay everyone here is. I love you ii but c2bc did what you didn't and I think that's actually really nice.

[hoofpeet]

I'd probably have to read the printed version and web version back to back at some point to note all the differences but... ough

[not-poignant]

For t/f: I assume you’re a huge advocate for physical books over ebooks??

False!

~

Ebooks are hugely accessible, and as someone with massive RSI issues in my wrists (partly from writing), holding heavy books and the repetition of turning pages can be literally agonising, and can even lead to me needing surgery one day for tendon release.

I do love physical books, and I have a large collection that I'm very proud of, and weed on a yearly basis. But I absolutely am not an advocate for them over ebooks, let alone a huge one. Ebooks have been such a game-changer for anyone with accessibility issues.

Readers no longer have to rely on publishers being grudgingly generous enough to offer books in large fonts if they have visual processing issues. They can change the font (most of the time) on an e-reader. Readers no longer have to lug around extremely heavy nonfiction books, and can save their backs and wrists. Readers who live in very small or cramped spaces because of poverty or other reasons no longer have to deal with 'where do I keep all these books' because some of them (or all of them) can be ebooks. Also, almost always - with mostly the exception of some university texts - they're cheaper. What a win!

On an accessibility level, ebooks win every time, especially now that we have so many lighting options so that people don't have to put up with backlight etc. anymore. They highlight just how previously ableist the publishing industry has been around visual accessibility and joint strain accessibility.

So I'm mostly a hardcore advocate of people reading how they want to read. A hybrid mix. Only audio. Only ebook. Only paperbacks. Only hardbacks. Some combination of the four.

I love the smell of books, but I don't love the dust. I love having them organised in my library, but I don't love the eternal problem of never really having enough room. I love my ebook collection, but I sometimes forget to check into it. I love that I can get very large nonfiction tomes in ebook form, but sometimes I find them harder to highlight etc. because there's something visceral to me about dragging a highlighter or pencil across a page. Everything has its pros and cons.

But ebooks beat out literally everything else except audio for accessibility (though I can't do audio ironically because of accessibility, lmao, my auditory processing for language isn't great).

[cogentranting]

It's not exactly what he's saying, but the idea that something is not literature or not by what it is but by the way it's engaged way, opening up the idea we give it worth by treating it as worthy, that a thing is not loveable until it is loved, that when I read a book that may not have the esteem around it that others do but I take the time to care and read carefully for the good the true and the beautiful it is elevated beyond what it might be in another's hands. (But that taken in tension with Lewis's earlier point that good reading is receiving rather than using-- that you take the text as it is with its own art and ideas rather than trying to read yourself and your ideas into the text) so that there is a listening and a receiving but also a pouring back into it our own effort and care.

So a book does not simply exist as literature, it is made literature by caring being given to it. And just because a book has not yet been read that way does not mean it cannot be.

[britneyshakespeare]

I have to be so honest and vulnerable with you for a second. I keep thinking of getting another complete works of Shakespeare

[nexus-nebulae]

just realised that the first media we consumed that made us REALLY sympathetic for the monster was that fucking point and click Mystery Case Files Ravenhearst game. bc that entire game i was legitimately fucking TERRIFIED of the ghost lady in that game but the second i found out her husband was abusive i doubled down on trying to help her escape. and the ending of that game Did make me cry out of fear but hey at least i did in fact help her escape

[quietwingsinthesky]

but like speaking seriously. i genuinely, truly wish this was still the age of terrible shovelware games and not. whatever the fuck is happening now between the mobile gaming market, microtransactions, and. the everything of it. it’s not that shovelware is good, it’s that it’s interesting! it’s not any less corporate in its goals, but it’s less… evil? you know? you pay for shovelware game, you still get a game, as terrible as it might be. it won’t have ads in it, it won’t ask you to pay more money once you’ve bought it, it’ll just be almost innocently terrible on its disc in its entirety, entertaining to shit on with friends and an enigma as to what went into its creation. i have a genuine little place in my heart for awful tie-in games, especially when you can tell that for however bad they are, there was one person on that team that you can tell gave a shit. (and sometimes there wasn’t. but that’s still fun. the game still had to be made, someone still had to make choices about it’s creation, and those choices can be fascinating!)

[doctor-wombat]

.

[wiltking]

50% through Painter Knight. read over 100 pages today so theres still something here that im enjoying obviously, just difficult not to compare it to stone prince which was so extremely Me coded. as interesting as the story and characters are this time around i still crave the emotional depth present in Demnor's no good nightmare hellish adventure of a sad life. but thats just me :(

[g0dtier]

im getting the english translation of de materia medica for my birthday and i am SO excited because its so fucking hard to find

[crescentmp3]

LOOK!! ^^

[ image desc: a taken picture of a physical copy of the book Herkes İçin Yapısal Yolla İtalyanca (Structured Italian for Everyone) by Asım Tanış. // end id ]

[goodmorning-hello]

Just modified the page layout for my journal/planner to make for next year, excited to try to bust it out before the year is almost half gone again (lol oops) and to actually use it for the whole year before just totally falling off the wagon altogether. Again. (lol OOPS).

Further modifications to be made include building a page marker that is also a sort of birds'-eye view of the weekly and monthly goals, bc if they're not in front of my eyeballs. They don't exist. Which was a big flaw of the first version bc i would just deadass forget about goals that extended farther than like a week, bc i have Future Does Not Exist, Only Now Is Relevant brain malfunction.

Also the first one where i tried to fit most of the year with full spreads for daily entries was mmmmm Unwieldy, so I'm debating whether to maybe pare it down to multiple books of Chunks of the year (quarters seems too small to bother, thirds seems awkward as a measurement of time, halves seems reasonable but maybe moving back into too big????) And the (theoretical) advantage of having the whole year in one book, was being able to flip forward to mark down appointments in the Distant Future so i don't forget them, so i would need to find a way to tailor that functionality (in a way i wont ALSO forget to follow through on)

Many musings for fun diy challenges, but i have no time and less money to follow through so i just sit here and sulk

[pynkhues]

I'm that last anon and I'm all for the long answer :3 love to read your ramblings so don't feel afraid to go overboard. it's very welcomed 💖

Ah, great! I might get to it this afternoon, but we'll see how long I'm in the office for today.

[ravencromwell]

I have to add Archivist Wasp and its sequel Latchkey by Nicole Kornher-Stace. (Both those links lead to Weightless Books, an arm of the incomparable Small Beer Press that sells drm-free versions of numerous small presses' books for ease of reading and to avoid the amazon monster; to tout the awesome of Small Beer and Mythic Delirium, both primarily responsbiel for publishing Kornher-Stace would be a post of its own, but look them up if you're unfamiliar because they've provided some of the most envelope-pushing, queer-heavy scifi of the last decade.) Archivist Wasp is in the "destroyed earth" rather than the space category of scifi and...well, Amal El Mohtar can sell it better than I ever could:

An Archivist has two jobs. The first is to hunt and catch ghosts in order to learn about the precataclysm past from them; the second is to defend her life and position against “upstarts” — the other girls marked by the goddess Catchkeep’s claw-shaped scars at birth — once a year. Wasp has been Archivist for three years, and wants nothing more than to escape a dismal life of killing her sisters and obeying the Catchkeep-priest — so when an unusually powerful ghost asks her to help find his former partner in the underworld, she agrees. But, as is so often the case with the underworld, she finds both more and less than she bargained for. More than anything else, this book is sharp. You could cut yourself on the prose — Wasp’s world is one of thorns, knives, edges of thick, broken glass, a constant background-hum of pain that sometimes swells into a shout. Wasp’s perspective absolutely thrums with tension and violence, but also aches with a fierce, hollow loneliness to break the heart. The longing and gratitude for the smallest beginnings of true friendship make the betrayals more vicious, and the stakes just keep rising. I burned through this book in about three hours, desperately rooting for her. It’s also a brilliantly constructed narrative and world. The gods are cruel and absent. The underworld is a maze in layers, a twisting, turning palimpsest, one that allows Wasp to descend almost archaeologically through time by literally experiencing her ghost-partner’s memories. The pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds reflect each other in shards and fragments, all the more powerful for being subtle, for their resistance to being spelled out. It was also keenly refreshing — especially in something that’s ostensibly YA, where the Love Triangle of Doom is so annoyingly pervasive — to find a book in which all of the strongest, primary relationships are friendships; where friendship has the narrative, motive force usually reserved for sexualized romance. I very much wanted to see the A in QUILTBAG represented in this column, and this is a fine example: while the connection between the ghost and his (female) partner is intense and loving, it is never represented as sexual, and sex is in fact completely irrelevant.

Sci-fi books where a queer woman has the ghost of an annoying dead guy in her head

*Misery is nonbinary (she/they) and who’s in her head is not dead or a guy but I’m counting it, okay

[midmith]

I feel like the only motherfucker on this planet who thinks Fire & Blood is a good book AND House of the Dragon is a good show.