#using the UK cover because that's the copy I have
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emilyofthegreenwood · 7 months ago
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"Not For the Faint of Heart" by Lex Croucher
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Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024 || Read and reviewed in August 2024
Lex Croucher’s “Not For the Faint of Heart” is another book for the short, but growing list of sapphic Robin Hood novels. It’s interesting that this is the first entry where our main queer characters are not Robin and Marian themselves, but original characters who interact and exist within the Robin Hood universe, which makes it somewhat easier to explore the Robin Hood story setting without worrying as much about centuries of lore. The author describes this as a “historical fantasy romcom”, which is exactly how I’d describe it.
This book follows Mariel (Robin Hood’s granddaughter) and a healer named Clem who gets swept along in an adventure with the current iteration of the Merry Men. Robin is retired and gone from Sherwood, and leadership has fallen to his son-in-law who runs the outlaws more like a militia, focused on violently protecting their territory rather than helping the local community. In this confusing era of Sherwood Forest outlaws, Mariel, Clem, and their small company of quick-witted, queer outlaws slowly shifts the mission and priorities back to its roots. And they're all hilarious, too.
For any reader who wants to go on an adventure with a queer found family through Sherwood Forest, cracking (knowingly anachronistic) jokes and counting squirrels, this is the book to read! For sure! I had a great reading experience most of the time, despite some personal issues that I had with it. 
Coming into any Robin Hood book, I come fully equipped and over-informed, along with my deeply personal preconceived ideas. With books like “Not For the Faint of Heart”, I knew that it was important to set as many of those aside as I could and enjoy it for what it is intended to be. In this case, a queer adventure romcom. 
And I did enjoy it! But I have some qualms, too. It won’t affect the reading experience for the majority of people, but I found it disappointing that Marian was given such short shrift, with only a few one-off lines to let readers know that she existed. For a character who has an origin story of cross-dressing, running to the forest, and getting into sword fights, she seems well-suited to be more involved than she was in a sapphic Robin Hood novel.* (See below the “read more” for a spoiler related to this comment.) 
Although I was cruelly deprived of seeing Marian as a grandma, Robin as a grandpa was the sweetest thing, and I have no complaints. My favorite thing about this book is undeniably grandpa Robin, who does have an impact on his granddaughter and is a kind and supportive figure in her young life, and someone that she clearly looks up to and respects. I loved that.
Some fun easter eggs I enjoyed: 
The book opens with Clem making a bycocket for a fox
They use a horn (one time) as the predetermined signal for help, and it’s actually hilarious. “We have purchased a particularly horrible horn. You’ll know it when you hear it.”
I identify as a lesbian, and I’m writing this in my Robin Hood Corner™, so I am the target audience for this book in many ways. I enjoyed reading this! I read a good 60% of it in one sitting. It’s hard to say no to a bunch of queer characters adventuring through Sherwood Forest making Robin Hood puns and jokes. But even though I enjoyed reading this, “Not For the Faint of Heart” is not my perfect sapphic Robin Hood book and it made me consider what I’m really looking for when I search out and read books like this. What is it that I want? Can I actually find that in a sapphic Robin Hood novel? 
Here’s what I landed on: I’m not sure that I can find the perfect sapphic Robin Hood story for me, but! I don’t need to feel personally represented by characters on-page in a Robin Hood story because my personal identity is already so wrapped up in Robin Hood. I’m already there, whether or not my specific sexual and romantic identity is included. Even if this isn’t the perfect fit for me, it's delightful to know that sapphics and other queer folks get to read books like this where they can find a niche for themselves in the wide world of Robin Hood stories. The story of Robin Hood is for everyone.
Robin Hood Shelf: for more Robin Hood book reviews
*Minor spoiler below the cut!
In the distant past of this book, Robin and Marian amicably end their relationship so that Robin and Will Scarlet can get married, with Marian’s complete encouragement and support. With my aforementioned deeply personal preconceived ideas, I feel kind of weird about Robin and Marian being with anyone other than each other. But okay! That’s fine. I can appreciate the heart of this. Unfortunately, rather than allow Marian to stick around as a capable outlaw and a good friend, she dies without explanation and has little to no impact on the Merry Men or her granddaughter. Sigh. Marian has a habit of dying off-page in Robin Hood novels, and I was disappointed to see that continued here. 
In the end, none of that matters to the average reader. I mean, I learned this information in a grand total of four brief lines across the whole book, so it could be very easy for the average reader to skip right over this. It’s just that I have a shelf of Marian books and a Marian spreadsheet, so I care more than most about this.
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oldbutchdanielcraig · 5 months ago
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Thinking about how for about a month my favorite part of going to the movies was seeing the trailer for queer. like yea girl i think you might like that movie a little bit. wait while we’re here i have a question
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gingersnapwolves · 7 months ago
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So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.
This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”
I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”
I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”
I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.
Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 
Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.
I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).
And here’s the key point of this story:
At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.
It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.
The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 
I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.
When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.
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somewhereincairparavel · 7 months ago
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percy had an 'im a big three son' moment when he choked a goddess with her own saliva (controlling a fluid that was INSIDE her body) annabeth was terrified.
nico had an 'im a big three son' moment when he disembodied bryce lawrence (quite literally dissipating and shrinking his LIVING soul into a spirit) and threw him to the underworld, smashing his zombie warriors. reyna was terrified.
yet we were robbed of jason's 'im a big three son' moment where he sucks the air out of someone's lungs and makes them stop breathing, or damaging a person's nervous system with his lightning control, and literally cause internal bleeding, or a damaged/fried skull if he electrocuted hard enough (look up the effects of lightning damage on body y'all will get a whole list, tbh he doesn't even need lightning to do any of this, air control is more than enough since air takes charge of everything going inside the body, but this is just an added effect.) he could give people STROKES if he wanted to. he's the literal definition of burnt out kid who was suppressed from discovering the magnitude of his abilities, because one, his dad's ego wouldn't be able to handle it, two, because he, for some reason, can't be allowed to do anything other than get knocked out :/
also adding on, hardcore pjo fans know that after the ending page of boo, there's this fan story that rick chose to publish in the last few pages of the book where a fan reimagines the ending of hoo, in that work, annabeth collapses from an attack and percy sobs clutching her body. jason calmly asks him to step aside, and kneels before annabeth, jason regulates her breathing using his wind/lightning powers and brings annabeth back fully from her cardiac arrest, causing percy to be relieved. (I wanted to link the pics of the pages here so bad but I didn't have the hard copy of the book with me, and this isn't available anywhere online either, only in the original covers of boo uk and us version, so I edited this post and asked people to reblog this post w the pics if they have the hardcopy, and a kind blogger found the story I'm talking about and reblogged the pictures of the pages, you can check my reblogs of this post for the pictures of the almost all the pages after this scene) considering rick approved and even liked the fan's work well enough to publish it in the official boo book, I'd say rick was aware and never completely ruled out expanding jason's abilities and had them in mind, he simply didn't incorporate it into the books. (also W fan for giving jason the rep he deserves, I will always remember you, you saw the VISION before any of us did, the story was very well written, with great dialogue.)
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moonysbookshelves · 5 months ago
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The Cadence of Part-Time Poets
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The Cadence of Part-Time Poets by @motswolo
Have been working on this 10 volume set for the past few months now, and they are finally complete. My Magnum Opus. I have peaked and probably depleted all of my brain power.
Thank you to @motswolo for writing such a beautiful story. My brain chemistry has been favourably altered. Will forever flinch when I hear Queen, The Beatles or Bob Dylan. Love to you from western Canada (west coast best coast lets gooooo).
I also posted a TikTok Reel of these since posts here are limited and I love the insides as much as the covers, so if you wanna see between the pages, here’s that.
Also thank you @avisbindery for letting me scream and cry in your DMs while I read the fic. May you get some uninterrupted sleep now LOLLL.
Going to write a whole essay below about the ideas and details because uhhh I wanna yap bit!
So for starters, I wanted to make these binds look like magazines because of the epilogue where (spoiler) Tonya sees Remus in a copy of New Musical Express. But of course this fic is long, so I was like, what if I do multiple volumes? This very quickly spiralled into me painstakingly (finding publication-accurate fonts almost sent me to an early grave) recreating 10 different music-focused magazines from the 70s and 80s from scratch (thank you to Photoshop, Affinity, Procreate and Canva). Each volume features a unique cover, along with stylized typesets to match that display the songs for each chapter but in different designs. And then I went a little crazy and made a 45 sleeve and a cassette too, to really set the scene when I took the photos lol
While the covers display the dates pertaining to the contents of that particular volume (Sept 1975 for volume one, for example) I was thinking about what the magazines would say if they were really published when Marauders are traipsing about being spectacular and famous in the future. I sprinkled in details from the fic itself and fanon-ed it a bit, but that was the general inspiration :-) Tried to keep the photos used either faceless/obscured, or to use the fancasts on Mots’ Cadence master post. I also tried to use period-accurate photos but didn’t always succeed, so settled for photos of 4 member bands where I had to :”) But the general intent with the facelessness was that they could be implied to be Marauders. If you squint? lol. Just pretend. Pls.
Volume One: Based upon The Record Song Book. This magazine went on to inspire the typesets, since it publishes lyrics and such. The cover images are of Spacey Jane and David Thewlis.
Volume Two: Based on ZigZag, specifically the issue from July 1978 featuring Siouxie and the Banshees just because I thought it looked sick as fuck. I re-drew the abstract shapes and such in procreate. The cover images are The Clash and a young Gary Oldman. Lord he was foiiine.
Volume Three: Based on Trouser Press, November 1980. The cover images are a young Metallica, and my personal fav fan cast for James, Reiky De Valk. The film negatives are from a Bruce Springsteen tour, 1976.
Volume Four: Based on Gay Times (November 1984), a queer magazine from the UK because this volume contains Wolfstars first kiss hehe. Also hence Somebody To Love plastered all over the covers. The Front cover is Inhaler. The “4A” on this one is of course the boys’ dorm number, but I made the A the lambda symbol as this was a pride symbol in the 70s after Stonewall.
Volume Five: Based on Melody Maker. Front image is Alex Turner. All of the text on this one is pulled directly from the fic. The scene where they all drop acid and James jumps off the roof Almost Famous style had me hootin’ and hollerin’… until Tomny showed up hahaha :”)
Volume Six: Based on IT (International Times, Aug 1971). Front image for this one is Joy Division, and the back features Jane Asher for Lily
Volume Seven: Based on Record Mirror, June 1976. Front image is John Taylor of Duran Duran. Yum.
Volume Eight: Based on Rolling Stone. More vibes than anything for this one, but the quote still makes me laugh.  Front image is of Matt Hitt. Can you tell I photoshopped a cell phone out of this one? IDK. This photo just screamed ‘Remus’ to me so I had to use it. The back image is an old cigarette ad, but the photo is taken in Shepherd’s Bush.
Volume Nine: Based on Fusion magazine. Front image for this one is once again Inhaler. Oops. Back cover is our gals. Images are Jodie Foster as Cherry, Brenda Sykes as Mary, and Goldie Hawn as Lottie.
Volume Ten: Based on New Musical Express. You know why :”) These are all victims of fanon, but this one especially. I wanted it to be NME instead of the re-invented logos I’d been doing for all the rest, as I wanted it to look like the magazine the Sister gives to Tonya. I referred to an issue of NME from October 1979 for this and layered in fic references where it made sense to. The cover image for this one is (I think) Cigarettes After Sex. This issue also contains all of the B-Side chapters, and the Marauders song lyrics too just for fun :)
Slasher Chick: This is just my take on what Sybill’s zine could’ve looked like. Prob way off but I just wanted to have fun with this one since I had no cover to reference lol. The zine contains her little write-up and the interview, lifted straight from the fic :")
ok yap sesh over byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee lmfaooooo
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ourdailybill · 24 days ago
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Wilson Books
TL;DR: Good books are good! Links!
Cheltenham in Antarctica – Biography of Edward A. Wilson, amply illustrated, correct in its quotations where Seaver took some editorial liberties. The paperback is only available used; a very very nice deluxe leatherbound edition in a slipcase can be ordered direct from the publisher.
Discovery Illustrated – A coffee-table sized treasure trove of the rarer or otherwise unavailable images depicting the whole of the Discovery Expedition (1901-04). The actual book is nicer than the image there, which is a promo leaflet and not the cover. Also available used.
Nimrod Illustrated – Same but for the Nimrod Expedition (1907-09)
Edward Wilson's Nature Notebooks – Same sort of big juicy edition, but of Wilson's sketches, paintings, and observations of natural subjects in more temperate climes.
Edward Wilson's Antarctic Notebooks are also a thing (a glorious thing) but they're not presently available on the publisher's site or on World of Books.
Terra Nova Illustrated – Keep reading ...
Nonfiction bookselling is an unforgiving place. If you want to publish your research, you either have to convince a publisher that there's a market for it and tailor your output to the lowest common denominator, or publish academically where maybe a few dozen people will see it at best. The middle ground is going with a tiny independent press – even a vanity press – and hoping your book finds the people who are into the subject enough to appreciate something detailed and esoteric, with no marketing budget. This is where the real nerd gold is, but it's hard to source, often our of print, and with no economies of scale, expensive.
David M. Wilson, great-nephew of Our Bill, has been putting together books on Antarctic history – most, but not all, having to do with his predecessor – and these are full of stuff you will not find anywhere else. In order not to compromise on content or depth, he's published through a one-person outfit in the West Country which, aside from the digital printing, operates in roughly 1998. Sales are slow; neither of them are on social media and the books are too esoteric for most bookshops to stock.
David is currently working on the latest in his Illustrated series, and it's the big one – Terra Nova. Because of his unique connections with institutions and expedition families worldwide, it's going to be an assemblage of images that you likely haven't seen before – the whole point of it is to fill the gaps in the visual record, and oh boy there's some good stuff in there. (I have been occasionally consulting on Guy IDs and I can vouch for this.) But his publisher is hemming and hawing about his previous Illustrated books not selling well. Obviously Terra Nova Illustrated is going to be the most successful of the bunch (at least until he comes out with Endurance) but in order to give his publisher a little more confidence it would be great to shift some of the backlist.
As I am on social media, I offered to signal boost a link to the online shop, but whoa the website is terrible and that may explain why they're not selling anything. I have now taken the trouble to take you to the shop pages for each individual book, and also link you to new and used copies on World Of Books, which is kind enough to kick a little back to the author even on used copies. They also have a slightly more modern website.
Shipping in A.D. 2025 is not making anything easier, but polar fandom is a cooperative bunch, and it may be possible for multiple people in one country to group their orders and divide the combined shipping. This ought to work out cheaper for everyone than each person individually paying full price to ship from the UK.
Let's make Terra Nova Illustrated look like more of a commercial prospect!
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shalottpress · 3 months ago
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like someone would is a wonderful botw fic by @bahbahhh. It is all about avoidance, grief and resentment whilst examining what love looks like when you are stuck in a 10,000 year cycle with your soulmate.
The interaction Link has in Gerudo Town with the sitar player lives rent free in my brain and I come back to this story pretty much monthly.
This is another bind of mine which looks far better in motion so I have included the video before the cut because I am vain.
I managed to whip this up very quickly for me, I am normally the world's slowest fanbinder but I do find quartos so much simpler to complete than full size books.
The statues of Hylia are a key motif in the story which is why I used the statue art on the back cover and I love how the vinyl turned out.
My casing skills remain non-existent but we move.
Many thanks to @bahbahhh for giving me permission to bind this fic and to edit my copy to be an edition that uses UK spelling!
More pictures below the cut.
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dduane · 7 months ago
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Hi! Possibly a bit of a weird question for you, but I'm trying to collect all of YW in hardbacks before my old omnibus finally gives out, and I was wondering - do you know if books 1-4 ever got published in hardback with the Harcourt black base/white text cover art? So many websites use blank placeholders that I can't tell if what I'm searching for even exists!
It’s not weird at all. I get occasional inquiries (especially from librarians) about how to get their hands on complete hardcover sets of the Young Wizards books.
Let's make this simpler from the start by establishing that in the forty-plus year history of the series, there has never been a unified hardcover edition of all the YW books, from any of their publishers... mostly because there've been too many publishers over that stretch of time.
Let's take the books in order, as far as possible, and you'll see what happened.
The books' first home was at Delacorte Press, an imprint of Dell Publishing. So You Want To Be A Wizard was published in hardcover in 1983, the Deep Wizardry hc in 1985, and the High Wizardry hc in 1990, with these covers. (The art, respectively, by David Wiesner, Darrell Sweet, and Neal McPheeters.)
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All of these editions are now difficult to find in good condition, especially SYWTBAW—which as a first book in a series by a new/untried author, perhaps understandably had a very small print run and was mostly sold to libraries. (The run might have been as small as 1500 copies. It's hard to tell now, as this wasn't data that was shared with authors in those days.) As a result, most copies of the Delacorte SYWTBAW hc are either very beat up, or (if signed and/or in good condition) relatively expensive. The Delacorte DW and HW hardcovers are a little easier to find, but not that much.
In the early 1990s there was a change in publishing direction at Dell shortly after HW came out. The publisher's interest had pivoted toward wanting more bestselling authors; so they jettisoned many then-new or midlist authors so as to be able to pay the best-selling authors more. (In this particular micro-bonfire of the vanities, Dell's stupidity in throwing Jane Yolen overboard, FFS, astounds me to this day.) So though the books continued to be published as paperbacks at other Dell imprints (Laurel-Leaf, Yearling) through the mid-1990s, that was the end of the Dell hardcovers.
The next hardcover publication was therefore in 1990, from GuildAmerica / SF Book Club. Support Your Local Wizard contains SYWTBAW, DW and HW, and was a Book Club bestseller: it sold a quarter million copies and set a record as their most popular new-member-requested book that lasted until they went out of business. As a result, there are a lot of these books around.
Also in plentiful supply is The Young Wizards, which SFBC Fantasy published in 2001. (NB that a lot of sources list this as being a 1984 book, which is incorrect. As it also contains, besides the first three, A Wizard Abroad and The Wizard's Dilemma, this makes it impossible to have been published any sooner than 2001.)
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Anyway, after that, things get a bit simpler. In the mid 1990s the series was picked up by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt / Harcourt Trade Publishers' new YA imprint Magic Carpet Books, which began republishing earlier works. Possibly the oddest of these was a small-format (mmpb-sized) hc of SYWTBAW, which turns up here and there used. (I really need to ask Jane some time what the heck the thinking was on this book...)
...Anyway. A Wizard Abroad had until then been published only in the UK (in a mass-market mmpb from Transworld/Corgi); its first hardcover came out from the SF Book Club/GuildAmerica in 1993, Dell having passed on acquiring it. (The cover on this one was done by the fabulous David Cherry, artist and brother of my old colleague C. J. Cherryh.) Harcourt did another of the unusual small-format hardcovers, this time of AWAb, in 1997—testing the waters, I think. Then, when that sold strongly, they went straight to full-size hardcovers with The Wizard's Dilemma (with art from then until now being done by Cliff Nielsen) and have stayed with that format since.
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Harcourt also did a lovely 25th anniversary hardcover edition of So You Want To Be A Wizard in 2003, which is easy to find inexpensively. I strongly suspect this republication trend would have continued with Deep Wizardry and High Wizardry when their respective anniversaries came around. But unfortunately the Magic Carpet program wound down soon afterwards, and the most recent hc volumes have been published simply as HMH, with no apparent interest at the publisher in going back to fill the holes in the hardcover backlist.
...So you can see, you've got kind of a mixed bag to deal with in terms of what you want. Availability has also been something of an issue, as the books are considered pretty deep backlist by Harcourt's current owner (HarperCollins), and warehouse supplies of some books in the series have been iffy.
So. The simplest I can make things for you is to help you avoid dealing with large corporate warehouses (because when some of these hc editions were preparing to go out of print, whenever possible I bought up the remaining stock to spare it from being pulped). Signed Books Direct—by which I mean the Ikea shelves out back in our boot room—has ample mint-condition supplies of many of the Harcourt hardcovers (though not Games Wizards Play, unfortunately: we've run out of those). Ignore the site’s front page inventory, which needs to be updated. Instead, just drop an email to the SBD email address and query me about what you're looking for.
HTH!
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kimberleyjean · 9 months ago
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What did Adam change? (Part 1)
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To follow up on my recent reblog about the baby swap, I'm going to take a closer look at Adam where we leave him at the end of S1. Because, by the end of S1, Adam had changed quite a few things... and I'm going to use both the TV show and the book to provide evidence.
To become the Young's real son, I don't think Adam really needed to change all that much. He just says the words to Satan, Satan disappears, and that should be it, right? But no, because Adam goes much further, and I think he does it because he can.
Because Adam has opinions, you see. Opinions on how the world should be and what he wants to happen. Except, unlike Agnes, who needs to write a prophecy and then wait 300 years for her descendant to enact it, Adam can just make it so.
The Other Two Babies
I originally thought about putting all the things Adam changes into a single post, but instead I'm going to make this a short series of posts, because he changes a fair bit. Let's start with where we left off with the baby swap, crack open a copy of the book and discuss the changes for Warlock and Greasy first.
Warlock
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Here's some excerpts of Warlock flying home from Megiddo to America (my bolds for emphasis):
It was Sunday afternoon. High over England a 747 droned westwards. In the first-class cabin a boy called Warlock put down his comic and stared out of the window.
...
And now he was going back to the States. There had been some sort of problem with tickets or flights or airport destination-boards or something. It was weird; he was pretty sure his father had meant to go back to England. Warlock liked England. It was a nice country to be an American in.
...
And Warlock flew on to America. He deserved something (after all, you never forget the first friends you ever had, even if you were all a few hours old at the time) and the power that was controlling the fate of all mankind at that precise time was thinking: Well, he's going to America, isn't he? Don't see how you could have anythin' better than going to America. They've got thirty-nine flavors of ice cream there. Maybe even more.
So it's Adam who has sent Warlock back to America, despite Warlock wanting (even, expecting) to be on his way to England. And he's controlling the fate of all mankind.
Greasy
Likewise, he has changes for Greasy Johnson too (the discarded baby who grows up to win prizes for his tropical fish).
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The plane was at that point passing right above the Lower Tadfield bedroom of Greasy Johnson, who was aimlessly leafing through a photography magazine that he'd bought merely because it had a rather good picture of a tropical fish on the cover. A few pages below Greasy's listless finger was a spread on American football, and how it was really catching on in Europe. Which was odd… because when the magazine had been printed, those pages had been about photography in desert conditions. It was about to change his life.
Adam is deciding here how to alter Warlock and Greasy's paths. Warlock wants to be back in the UK, but Adam thinks America is better, while Greasy's magazine is changed to American football, which I guess is implying he's going to become an American footballer.
Now, not everyone may be aware, but these parts weren't in the first release of the novel. It only came about later, in the American edition. Apparently the changes were in response to prompting from the American editor, but they got "carried away" making those changes (source).
Season 3 (warning: speculation)
So, do you think this could be relevant for S3? For me personally, the fact that these bits were added later makes me wonder if this was helping to set up for a potential sequel. It's certainly poetic - just like the baby swap that originally involved all three, we are now implying a potential adolescent swap of Greasy, who is interested in American football, and Warlock, who is interested to return to the U.K.
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If you've read at all about the hypothetical plot of the proposed written sequel, you'll know that it involved a trip to America, ostensibly to look for a lost Jesus. So, if the next book was originally meant to be about going and finding someone (Jesus?) in America, then Greasy or Warlock could make sense. It would be a switcheroo all over again if Warlock had left for the UK and Greasy for America.
Another alternative is that all three could end up converging in America, since Warlock already lives there and both Adam and Greasy have interests in going there. But if that's the intention, why mention that Warlock wants to be back "home" in the U.K.?
So, those are my possible takes on how this passage can be interpreted. I know there are some theories that either Greasy or Warlock may be the Second Coming. I've also seen a theory now that Adam himself could be a contender (both spawn of Satan and spawn of God - it'd certainly be interesting!). I'm not placing bets on any of these outcomes just yet.
In addition to this passage in the book, we also see some interesting changes made by Adam which are featured more prominently in the show - one's that have implications for the ineffable husbands.
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Part 2 coming soon!
Thanks as always to everyone at the @ineffable-detective-agency (including @noneorother, @embracing-the-ineffable, @lookingatacupoftea, @251-dmr, @somehow-a-human, @maufungi, @havemyheartaziraphale, @theastrophysicistnextdoor, @dunkthebiscuit, @komorezuki, & @ghstptats).
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literaticat · 4 months ago
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I realize this may be a tough question to answer but when pubs buy a book for world rights, do they typically distribute in many places? I am an author with a big 5 UK pub for world rights who lives in the UK temporarily but I’ll be back in the US by the time my book comes out. Of course I’d love to see my book in the US.
OK soooo I am going to try and explain this simply, but it might get confusing, apologies in advance!
If your UK publisher has World Rights, that means they can:
1) distribute their version of the book (English language, UK cover, etc) anywhere in the world, AND,
2) license the book to other publishers to create versions of the book for that other territory. ie, a German Language version from a German publisher, etc. (This can include a license to a US publisher to create a US version!)
I bolded the word "can" above, because "can" is not the same as "will." They WILL likely distribute widely in the UK and UK-commonwealth countries, and try to license the North American/US rights to a US publisher, who would then distribute THEIR version widely in the US/North America.
It would be the same going the other direction, by the way -- and this actually totally makes sense. US publishers have a robust sales, marketing, distribution system already in place -- they have accounts with every bookstore in this country, etc etc. UK publishers have that for the UK... but of course they don't have it for the US, or vice versa!
So that's the ideal scenario -- UK publisher deals with the UK, and either their US arm or a different US publisher makes a US version to sell directly to the US market. Bing bang boom.
If that DOESN'T happen for whatever reason -- like all the viable US publishers pass -- the UK version CAN be sold in the US. So US readers will be able to get the book on Kindle or Audible, or order physical copies. But it probably won't be stocked in a lot of bookstores the same way a US book might be unless the stores happen to have a relationship with YOU and order it specifically to stock -- simply because that UK publisher (probably) doesn't have US sales reps and whatnot to tell them about it and encourage them to order it!
Sidebar: You didn't ask this, but I think it must be said: If you had sold UK/Commonwealth rights ONLY to your UK publisher, that would mean they could NOT sell the book in the US. It would be on you/your agent to find that US publisher -- and if one could not be found, US customers would be unable to buy the book on Kindle, etc. They could still order a book from a UK bookstore -- but it would not be available in a regular way in the US at all. Likewise, if a US publisher only has North American rights -- they CAN'T sell it in the UK.
(That isn't to say you should always sell World or World English Rights! There are very good reasons to go for North American or UK only -- you just have to be aware that the rights/territory thing means something!)
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fookinhellcurlyyy · 4 months ago
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Hello! I have a question about your previous anon who talked about Larries who blame Harry being closeted on Louis; this is a ridiculous take, so I’m not agreeing with that, but you mentioned something about a bad/annoying thing that Louis did earlier this year and I wanted to ask, what did you mean? I feel like I maybe missed something significant happening in this fandom, cause I can’t recall anything right now. Sending you lots of love x
Hi, love! Forgive me, but Imma copy-paste my previous rant from earlier in January because I already broke down what was happening at that time lol Imma put it under a cut because it was a whole-ass rant I did back then, and I do believe a lot of people out here felt the same at that time. And these things happened between Jan 1-4 or so—so barely halfway through the first week of the year) 😅 In reference to this.
Right now, the issue is about him blocking a fan on twitter (again), and some people on tumblr has come out as anon and said they got blocked the same time as the chicken parm bullshit tweet - which imo are all very childish to do using a very public account in a very public platform (I mean, if he himself hates his feed so much, he could use his dump acc and block people there instead and use the official twitter occasionally). Idk if it’s his own doing or his team; regardless, it’s not a great move. The recent one he blocked also happened to be a no stunt larrie, and bc of that, he has given antis yet again more power to bully us. There’s also Daisy Tomlinson posting F on her snapchat, hinting since post-Christmas - and ultimately posting photos of F with emojis covering his face. Many people then asked why she covered F’s face to which she answered, “it was Louis’ request and the kid’s face gets plastered all over the internet whenever we do it anw” (non-verbatim). Which is utter bs to me. They ignore the kid for good 5 years or so; then starts this good father image propaganda as Louis TM takes off his solo career; posts him whenever convenient (such as the Christmas/holiday stunts); showed him on AOTV which premiered worldwide btw (and could’ve been omitted for the sake of not exposing the kid to the world - I mean, as a romantic guy, he never even mentioned anything about his relationships apart from the band, the UK family, and randomly, F who he wants to protect apparently); and then suddenly they’re worried about his privacy? Sorry to say but they are 10 years too late (for god's sake, there's even a fan account/UA for F which is a big ???????? to me). Even if it's not his own doing - even if it's his team (management/label) that has to do it for him - larries are consistently getting thrown under the bus and take the most hit. To be fair, it seems that they still do the annual bs stuntery, and the twins have to be the one to do the posting, bc they are influencers that need the engagement. No one else posts the kid (again, poor, poor kid being the subject of attention in all of this), so they do the dirty work to satisfy the gp and feed the 'i'm a father' narrative. I probably have so much more to say but that's basically the summary of what's happening so far lol I mean, it happens all the time (this has become an annual thing apparently), but then again, like I said, you are allowed to be upset and call him out whenever he or his team messes up. Real people and real fans get hurt bc of miscalculated actions.
Note that that was the time when I also declared this towards the end of my rant: "(I’m so sorry for the long rant, I have been going through this the past few days lol He better be bluegreening/coding heavily on Lollapalooza India while singing 7 and Back To You with all the I LOVE HIMs and any other song that was ever connected to Harry bc we’re only halfway through the first week of the year and he already pissed off a lot of larries lol)" AND:
We did get a coded clothing through the Yohji Yamamoto x NEIGHBORHOOD T-shirt he wore in Radio One India.
He sang the I love HIMs.
We got confirmation that WDBHG's lyrics are actually printed correctly, and he deliberately changes the lines he sings every time just to avoid singing the "when I let you go" part lol
Soooo, I'm in still in my happy bubble atm lol
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sgiandubh · 1 year ago
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Good morning to you...as always, this person is very indignant and enraged.
https://www.tumblr.com/maximumwobblerbanditdonut/748583730081333248/the-unexpected-guests?source=share
Dear (returning) Mythomaniac Anon,
Sorry for the delay and see below why. Well, then: how was that, at their end of the rope, across the street?
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I know, I am quoting BIF (that petty, nasty, condescending woman), their Main Intellectual Luminary (LOL for years), but see how easy it is to boomerang anything?
And I will even suit myself and quote her some more, lookie here:
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I am not even sorry. Karma is a bitch, like that and it seems to have backfired badly on BIF's comadre, 'Max'. You see, I can immediately tell when people who have NO idea about what LAW really is, start talking about it. They will always be oh so damn literal and oh so damn mechanical in their 'reasonings'. I mean, if law were to be read as is, why would we even bother going to law school, right? Why not have AI sort it out, literally and mechanically, too (and boy does 'Max' sound like an android when she starts droning her maximum wobbling bullshit)? You see, in law, it's never enough to copy/paste something, because this is about people, money and interests, being those individual or collective. Timelines are important (and indispensable in any legal approach), but never enough: what makes the difference is always the particular context and the interpretation of facts - that is, by the way, called jurisprudence, when it becomes a legally binding precedent (not our modest case, here), in common law system countries (the UK, the US) or a complementary source of law, like in Roman/Civil law systems, such as the French and Romanian ones, which I know best. There is a technical distinction between those two concepts (legally binding precedent and complementary source of law) and I once passed a whole year written exam in Public French Law with honors, picking this exact topic, but I won't bother you with it, Anon. In a nutshell, tread carefully when you open that droning mouth and leave no stone unturned, if possible. Otherwise, you'd make a fool out of yourself, with bullshit like this:
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There is no Midhope Distillery Company Ltd, you fool. There once was the Midhope Castle Distillery Ltd, as I have abundantly shown in not one, but two posts. It did not 'change its name' in 2023, it was dissolved by voluntary write-off (third time might be a charm, across the street, maybe the coin would drop?). And one more time, for you Mordor people in the back: there is no way to know who the shareholders of a given company are, based on the Company House records, nor the amount of their participation. This is confidential information, as shown also in the Planning Proposal - once more, I repost the screenshot:
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' The Business Plan, submitted (...) under Private and Confidential cover, provides background information on the applicant'. Including, but not limited to, the existing investors/shareholders - it is essential to show the local authorities your business project is not a whim or a dream.
She also writes confidently stuff like:
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That is simply not true. As I have also shown in my last post, Outlander is explicitly mentioned in both the first and the revised Planning Proposals, as a strong argument for the entire business project. It may serve to remember that one of the elements justifying it was to provide the 20k seasonal visitors of the Midhope Castle Grounds an opportunity to access the (vastly) improved interior of the castle, along with a whisky related experience/discovery activity, accommodation and high-end dining opportunity. Again, I repost the screenshot, because those people are mendacious by nature and it is perhaps the only way to show them some facts (not useless factoids):
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That being said, we can speculate and deduct a simple correlation between a company actively looking for investors to support their now vastly revised, ten-year project and an actor-cum-entrepreneur who might be interested/already involved in that project. Unless he'd make a formal announcement himself, at some point in time, there is no way to confirm. 'Max' should perhaps learn to water down her confident tone, sometimes, especially when it is obvious she did not look at the documents herself, used only Google in the arrogant and foolish hope 'those tinhat shippers are stupid' and has 0 (zero) legal expertise.
This whole thing might be pending approval, but let's not forget the first Planning Statement was approved back in 2020 (which is a good starting point), that they have secured a business partnership with the owner of the land, Lord Hope (the 4th Marquess of Linlithgow) and that as far as I could read during those past two days, all the reports seem ok, at least up until this point in time. I see no reason why they wouldn't meet and talk about it: on which planet is that such a big deal and on which planet could that be construed as 'conflict of interest' (another one of 'Max's' arguments), given the organic link between OL and Midhope, since 2013?
I also have made a hasty mistake, in my previous post, when dealing with Ken Robertson's participation to the project. He continued to be involved, as my penned timeline shows, in both Hopetoun Estate Distillery Ltd and Hopetoun Estate Whiskies Ltd, as a Director, continuously from May 2017 until their dissolution, in December 2022. Again, it's all on the timeline - see what I just did, here? LOL for a century and a half.
And for Marple's 'Sorry' clip, I have the perfect reply. Especially the chorus, of course - ignore the rest, it's about some Seventies playboy, quite an Alternate Universe from hers:
youtube
I will stop now, Anon. With the MPC Gala just round the corner, all the eyes will be on that one. This drama will probably draw to a fizzled denouement, as they always do, in this fandom. But I will follow that business project and report from time to time. I bet the farm we'll have news, rather sooner than later.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
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Sphinxmumps Linkdump
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On THURSDAY (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On FRIDAY (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.
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Welcome to my 20th Linkdump, in which I declare link bankruptcy and discharge my link-debts by telling you about all the open tabs I didn't get a chance to cover in this week's newsletters. Here's the previous 19 installments:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
Starting off this week with a gorgeous book that is also one of my favorite books: Beehive's special slipcased edition of Dante's Inferno, as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with new illustrations by UK linocut artist Sophy Hollington:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beehivebooks/the-inferno
I've loved Inferno since middle-school, when I read the John Ciardi translation, principally because I'd just read Niven and Pournelle's weird (and politically odious) (but cracking) sf novel of the same name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Niven_and_Pournelle_novel)
But also because Ciardi wrote "About Crows," one of my all-time favorite bits of doggerel, a poem that pierced my soul when I was 12 and continues to do so now that I'm 52, for completely opposite reasons (now there's a poem with staying power!):
https://spirituallythinking.blogspot.com/2011/10/about-crows-by-john-ciardi.html
Beehive has a well-deserved rep for making absolutely beautiful new editions of great public domain books, each with new illustrations and intros, all in matching livery to make a bookshelf look classy af. I have several of them and I've just ordered my copy of Inferno. How could I not? So looking forward to this, along with its intro by Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky and essay by Dante scholar Kristina Olson.
The Beehive editions show us how a rich public domain can be the soil from which new and inspiring creative works sprout. Any honest assessment of a creator's work must include the fact that creativity is a collective act, both inspired by and inspiring to other creators, past, present and future.
One of the distressing aspects of the debate over the exploitative grift of AI is that it's provoked a wave of copyright maximalism among otherwise thoughtful artists, despite the fact that a new copyright that lets you control model training will do nothing to prevent your boss from forcing you to sign over that right in your contracts, training an AI on your work, and then using the model as a pretext to erode your wages or fire your ass:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand
Same goes for some privacy advocates, whose imaginations were cramped by the fact that the only regulation we enforce on the internet is copyright, causing them to forget that privacy rights can exist separate from the nonsensical prospect of "owning" facts about your life:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/
We should address AI's labor questions with labor rights, and we should address AI's privacy questions with privacy rights. You can tell that these are the approaches that would actually work for the public because our bosses hate these approaches and instead insist that the answer is just giving us more virtual property that we can sell to them, because they know they'll have a buyer's market that will let them scoop up all these rights at bargain prices and use the resulting hoards to torment, immiserate and pauperize us.
Take Clearview AI, a facial recognition tool created by eugenicists and white nationalists in order to help giant corporations and militarized, unaccountable cops hunt us by our faces:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that
Clearview scraped billions of images of our faces and shoveled them into their model. This led to a class action suit in Illinois, which boasts America's best biometric privacy law, under which Clearview owes tens of billions of dollars in statutory damages. Now, Clearview has offered a settlement that illustrates neatly the problem with making privacy into property that you can sell instead of a right that can't be violated: they're going to offer Illinoisians a small share of the company's stock:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/clearview_ai_reaches_creative_settlement/
To call this perverse is to go a grave injustice to good, hardworking perverts. The sums involved will be infinitesimal, and the only way to make those sums really count is for everyone in Illinois to root for Clearview to commit more grotesque privacy invasions of the rest of us to make its creepy, terrible product more valuable.
Worse still: by crafting a bespoke, one-off, forgiveness-oriented regulation specifically for Clearview, we ensure that it will continue, but that it will also never be disciplined by competitors. That is, rather than banning this kind of facial recognition tech, we grant them a monopoly over it, allowing them to charge all the traffic will bear.
We're in an extraordinary moment for both labor and privacy rights. Two of Biden's most powerful agency heads, Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra have made unprecedented use of their powers to create new national privacy regulations:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does
In so doing, they're bypassing Congressional deadlock. Congress has not passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history to newspaper reporters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
Congress hasn't given us a single law protecting American consumers from the digital era's all-out assault on our privacy. But between the agencies, state legislatures, and a growing coalition of groups demanding action on privacy, a new federal privacy law seems all but assured:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
When that happens, we're going to have to decide what to do about products created through mass-scale privacy violations, like Clearview AI – but also all of OpenAI's products, Google's AI, Facebook's AI, Microsoft's AI, and so on. Do we offer them a deal like the one Clearview's angling for in Illinois, fining them an affordable sum and grandfathering in the products they built by violating our rights?
Doing so would give these companies a permanent advantage, and the ongoing use of their products would continue to violate billions of peoples' privacy, billions of times per day. It would ensure that there was no market for privacy-preserving competitors thus enshrining privacy invasion as a permanent aspect of our technology and lives.
There's an alternative: "model disgorgement." "Disgorgement" is the legal term for forcing someone to cough up something they've stolen (for example, forcing an embezzler to give back the money). "Model disgorgement" can be a legal requirement to destroy models created illegally:
https://iapp.org/news/a/explaining-model-disgorgement
It's grounded in the idea that there's no known way to unscramble the AI eggs: once you train a model on data that shouldn't be in it, you can't untrain the model to get the private data out of it again. Model disgorgement doesn't insist that offending models be destroyed, but it shifts the burden of figuring out how to unscramble the AI omelet to the AI companies. If they can't figure out how to get the ill-gotten data out of the model, then they have to start over.
This framework aligns everyone's incentives. Unlike the Clearview approach – move fast, break things, attain an unassailable, permanent monopoly thanks to a grandfather exception – model disgorgement makes AI companies act with extreme care, because getting it wrong means going back to square one.
This is the kind of hard-nosed, public-interest-oriented rulemaking we're seeing from Biden's best anti-corporate enforcers. After decades kid-glove treatment that allowed companies like Microsoft, Equifax, Wells Fargo and Exxon commit ghastly crimes and then crime again another day, Biden's corporate cops are no longer treating the survival of massive, structurally important corporate criminals as a necessity.
It's been so long since anyone in the US government treated the corporate death penalty as a serious proposition that it can be hard to believe it's even happening, but boy is it happening. The DOJ Antitrust Division is seeking to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and they are tipped to win:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
And that's one of the major suits against Google that Big G is losing. Another suit, jointly brought by the feds and dozens of state AGs, is just about to start, despite Google's failed attempt to get the suit dismissed:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-loses-bid-end-us-antitrust-case-over-digital-advertising-2024-06-14/
I'm a huge fan of the Biden antitrust enforcers, but that doesn't make me a huge fan of Biden. Even before Biden's disgraceful collaboration in genocide, I had plenty of reasons – old and new – to distrust him and deplore his politics. I'm not the only leftist who's struggling with the dilemma posed by the worst part of Biden's record in light of the coming election.
You've doubtless read the arguments (or rather, "arguments," since they all generate a lot more heat than light and I doubt whether any of them will convince anyone). But this week, Anand Giridharadas republished his 2020 interview with Noam Chomsky about Biden and electoral politics, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind:
https://the.ink/p/free-noam-chomsky-life-voting-biden-the-left
Chomsky contrasts the left position on politics with the liberal position. For leftists, Chomsky says, "real politics" are a matter of "constant activism." It's not a "laser-like focus on the quadrennial extravaganza" of national elections, after which you "go home and let your superiors take over."
For leftists, politics means working all the time, "and every once in a while there's an event called an election." This should command "10 or 15 minutes" of your attention before you get back to the real work.
This makes the voting decision more obvious and less fraught for Chomsky. There's "never been a greater difference" between the candidates, so leftists should go take 15 minutes, "push the lever, and go back to work."
Chomsky attributed the good parts of Biden's 2020 platform to being "hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and other." That's the real work, that hammering. That's "real politics."
For Chomsky, voting for Biden isn't support for Biden. It's "support for the activists who have been at work constantly, creating the background within the party in which the shifts took place, and who have followed Sanders in actually entering the campaign and influencing it. Support for them. Support for real politics."
Chomsky tells us that the self-described "masters of the universe" understand that something has changed: "the peasants are coming with their pitchforks." They have all kinds of euphemisms for this ("reputational risks") but the core here is a winner-take-all battle for the future of the planet and the species. That's why the even the "sensible" ultra-rich threw in for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and why they're backing him even harder in 2024:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckvvlv3lewxo
Chomsky tells us not to bother trying to figure out Biden's personality. Instead, we should focus on "how things get done." Biden won't do what's necessary to end genocide and preserve our habitable planet out of conviction, but he may do so out of necessity. Indeed, it doesn't matter how he feels about anything – what matters is what we can make him do.
Chomksy himself is in his 90s and his health is reportedly in terminal decline, so this is probably the only word we'll get from him on this issue:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/1aj56hj/updates_on_noams_health_from_his_longtime_mit/
The link between concentrated wealth, concentrated power, and the existential risks to our species and civilization is obvious – to me, at least. Any time a tiny minority holds unaccountable power, they will end up using it to harm everyone except themselves. I'm not the first one to take note of this – it used to be a commonplace in American politics.
Back in 1936, FDR gave a speech at the DNC, accepting their nomination for president. Unlike FDR's election night speech ("I welcome their hatred"), this speech has been largely forgotten, but it's a banger:
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/acceptance-speech-at-the-democratic-national-convention-1936/
In that speech, Roosevelt brought a new term into our political parlance: "economic royalists." He described the American plutocracy as the spiritual descendants of the hereditary nobility that Americans had overthrown in 1776. The English aristocracy "governed without the consent of the governed" and “put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power":
Roosevelt said that these new royalists conquered the nation's economy and then set out to seize its politics, backing candidates that would create "a new despotism wrapped in the robes of legal sanction…an industrial dictatorship."
As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, this has strong parallels to today's world, where "Silicon Valley, Big Oil, and Wall Street come together to back a transactional presidential candidate who promises them specific favors, after reducing their corporate taxes by 40 percent the last time he was president":
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-06-14-speech-fdr-would-give/
Roosevelt, of course, went on to win by a landslide, wiping out the Republicans despite the endless financial support of the ruling class.
The thing is, FDR's policies didn't originate with him. He came from the uppermost of the American upper crust, after all, and famously refused to define the "New Deal" even as he campaigned on it. The "New Deal" became whatever activists in the Democratic Party's left could force him to do, and while it was bold and transformative, it wasn't nearly enough.
The compromise FDR brokered within the Democratic Party froze out Black Americans to a terrible degree. Writing for the Institute for Local Self Reliance, Ron Knox and Susan Holmberg reveal the long shadow cast by that unforgivable compromise:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/045dcde7333243df9b7f4ed8147979cd
They describe how redlining – the formalization of anti-Black racism in New Deal housing policy – led to the ruin of Toledo's once-thriving Dorr Street neighborhood, a "Black Wall Street" where a Black middle class lived and thrived. New Deal policies starved the neighborhood of funds, then ripped it in two with a freeway, sacrificing it and the people who lived in it.
But the story of Dorr Street isn't over. As Knox and Holmberg write, the people of Dorr Street never gave up on their community, and today, there's an awful lot of Chomsky's "constant activism" that is painstakingly bringing the community back, inch by aching inch. The community is locked in a guerrilla war against the same forces that the Biden antitrust enforcers are fighting on the open field of battle. The work that activists do to drag Democratic Party policies to the left is critical to making reparations for the sins of the New Deal – and for realizing its promise for everybody.
In my lifetime, there's never been a Democratic Party that represented my values. The first Democratic President of my life, Carter, kicked off Reaganomics by beginning the dismantling of America's antitrust enforcement, in the mistaken belief that acting like a Republican would get Democrats to vote for him again. He failed and delivered Reagan, whose Reaganomics were the official policy of every Democrat since, from Clinton ("end welfare as we know it") to Obama ("foam the runways for the banks").
In other words, I don't give a damn about Biden, but I am entirely consumed with what we can force his administration to do, and there are lots of areas where I like our chances.
For example: getting Biden's IRS to go after the super-rich, ending the impunity for elite tax evasion that Spencer Woodman pitilessly dissects in this week's superb investigation for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:
https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2024/06/how-the-irs-went-soft-on-billionaires-and-corporate-tax-cheats/
Ending elite tax cheating will make them poorer, and that will make them weaker, because their power comes from money alone (they don't wield power because their want to make us all better off!).
Or getting Biden's enforcers to continue their fight against the monopolists who've spiked the prices of our groceries even as they transformed shopping into a panopticon, so that their business is increasingly about selling our data to other giant corporations, with selling food to us as an afterthought:
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/
For forty years, since the Carter administration, we've been told that our only power comes from our role as "consumers." That's a word that always conjures up one of my favorite William Gibson quotes, from 2003's Idoru:
Something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.
The normie, corporate wing of the Democratic Party sees us that way. They decry any action against concentrated corporate power as "anti-consumer" and insist that using the law to fight against corporate power is a waste of our time:
https://www.thesling.org/sorry-matt-yglesias-hipster-antitrust-does-not-mean-the-abandonment-of-consumers-but-it-does-mean-new-ways-to-protect-workers-2/
But after giving it some careful thought, I'm with Chomsky on this, not Yglesias. The election is something we have to pay some attention to as activists, but only "10 or 15 minutes." Yeah, "push the lever," but then "go back to work." I don't care what Biden wants to do. I care what we can make him do.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/15/disarrangement/#credo-in-un-dio-crudel
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Image: Jim's Photo World (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimsphotoworld/5360343644/
CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
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thisbluespirit · 1 year ago
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How To Find Your (British Actor) Blorbo On The Radio: A Brief Guide
(Disclaimer: British, because the main tool I'm using is the BBC's Genome.)
If you want more of your fave actor, or you love full-cast drama podcasts/audios (and audiobooks/NF content too) here's a guide on how to get your hands on BBC Radio broadcasts.
The BBC have a great free resource called Genome, which has all the Radio Times listings from 1922 to the present day (plus some of the actual articles), and it's searchable. Up until its arrival, it was really hard to do that, so \o/
Not all actors do radio and not everything you find will be obtainable, but it's always worth a try! It's especially likely for actor-blorbos who do other audio work, or theatre (theatre tends not to pay so well, and radio is a handy extra thing that can be more easily slotted in between performances than TV/film.)
Go to Genome, and put your blorbo's name into the search box:
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Press search, which will bring back a bunch of results from both radio and TV listings from 1922 up to the current year:
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2. Filter down to "radio only" on the sidebar to avoid scrolling through all the TV. At the top of the page you can change the display order to First broadcast (or Availability, if you want it only to bring things currently available to stream on the BBC website), among other options.
I can also cut down on extraneous results by selecting a date range that only covers when my guy was active.
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I scroll down until I find something that looks interesting, in this case a proper audio drama, called The Hornblower Story. It's from 1980 and is an adaptation of a well known book. The details give me enough info to search the wider internet, and see if I get lucky...
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3. Search the internet and listen to your blorbo act in radio drama!
There are several ways to obtain radio drama online. If you use streaming sites like Audible and Spotify, it may be there, although usually only if it's had a commercial release.
The BBC still broadcast old programmes on the radio, so it might be currently available on their website to stream - and unlike TV, you can listen to BBC Radio anywhere in the world! (If you are in the UK, you can also download and use the BBC Sounds app.) The Genome will usually provide a link for you to go straight there, if that's the case.
However, obviously, most BBC Radio from past decades is not available commercially or being broadcast by the BBC now and some doesn't exist in the archives, or was never recorded (as with TV), but as methods of recording audio at home have been widely available since the 1950s and 60s, there are loads of off-air recordings of radio made by listeners/collectors, and some have freely shared their copies online. Some are in closed forums etc., but three good sites to try first are YouTube, RadioEchoes & the Internet Archive.
I usually start with a Google search - e.g. '"Title" radio' or radio bbc and if that doesn't give me anything add on first "Radio Echoes" and then "Internet archive" to the search.
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And I'm in luck! Radio Echoes appear to have the adaptation I'm after. I need to check the broadcast dates to see if they match up & then I can stream or download for free - and hear my blorbo play a stern Admiral for 5 minutes or less, hurrah!
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Clicking on the links takes you to a screen where you can press play to stream or right click on the play bar to download the mp3 file to your device. (Click the "Save audio as..." option).
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These are archive off-air recordings, so the quality can vary, especially for older programmes.
4. Rinse and repeat with each new likely Genome discovery.
If you find a copy of what you're looking for on the Internet Archive instead, you'll get up a page with a play bar (like the one above), with episodes listed plus details (to varying degrees) below. If you want to stream, just click play and enjoy. If you want to download it, then click on the MP3 files line on the right-hand sidebar, which will then give you an "X no of files" button to click and you can download them to keep.
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(You can download all the files, but I usually cut straight to the chase and just nab the MP3s.)
Sometimes the BBC have released a commercial audiobook. In those cases, if you already use audio/music streaming subscription sites like Audible or Spotify, you should be able to find it there.
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If you don't, or you want to buy a download, I've found the best option (weirdly!) (for UK users, at any rate) is to get the audiobook up at Penguin Books, which links to various paid subscription streaming and download options, so you can find the best one for you (and you know it's been recced by a hopefully reputable source.)
Last year, I wanted to buy Vivat Rex, the BBC's landmark dramatisation of all the English history plays rolled into one giant starry-cast Jacobean audio serial, and successfully used this route. (I'm very old by internet terms and still like listening via MP3 files on my MP3 player, as long as it survives.)
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Pretty much the only affordable download option I've found so far I got courtesy of Penguin's links to Hive. (But this may be a UK only option.)
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If what you're looking for seems likely to exist even if you can't find it by any of these methods - keep trying! New things are being added daily to all these websites, and the BBC cycle round old shows all the time.
And if you want to go deeper, there are closed forums etc. for radio enthusiasts where you need to make an account, but you may then be able to torrent or download an even wider variety of things.
Of course, whether or not your blorbo has been in anything good or any radio at all will depend on them, but I hope this guide will help enable you to find out!
YouTube, Radio Echoes, the Internet Archive and Old Time Radio all have radio from other countries too. So while the BBC Genome can't help you with anywhere outside the UK, the other links here can be good places to look around and browse for things you might be interested in.
You can of course use the same methods to search for things like a favourite author, or particular plays, to see if the BBC have done any radio adaptations - BBC Radio have done heaps of things that have never been adapted on screen, so it's always worth a look for anything you'd be into.
Radio Echoes is browsable as well as searchable, and while Internet Archive is a bit less so, there are some excellent collections you can look through, like the Saturday Night Theatre collection, and the BBC Radio Shows listings.
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welcome-to-the-end-of-eras · 3 months ago
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Live Read - The Hymn to Dionysus
IT'S TIIIIIIIIIIIME.
Spoiler-free observations:
I WISH there was an option to get the UK cover in the US. I do actually like the US cover a lot I just like the UK cover better, and I like how much it would match with my copy of The Kingdoms
So from the description, it looks like Dionysus is going to fully be a character??? Like interacting directly with Phaidros??? Is it like a Percy Jackson scenario where they have like human forms and shit??? Inch resting.
It makes me SO HAPPY seeing the list of Natasha Pulley's work almost takes up a full page at the front of my book
The new narration style is very interesting tbh, I don't know if it's because he's supposed to be a child at this point and children are a lot more straightforward, or if it's just how he always is???
The prologue sounds a lot more like the typical narration style so I think it probably is meant to be a bit more childlike in the beginning
Maybe this is me being delusional but...is she talking about the pulleyverse as a whole in the prologue??? Starting in the middle, with bits artfully left out to Reveal Unto You Later??? Is this like the very beginning??? It is the earliest chronologically so ig it must be???
"But I was distracted by a green bird and money was boring" HE'S SO REAL FOR THAT-
I'm liking the way that everything is being explained upfront. It's probably out of necessity since the average person can conceptualize life in Victorian London or Soviet Russia a lot easier than Ancient Greece, but it also does feel a lot more child-like that really hammers home the idea that the story is in its beginning
Wait wait wait, Helios is 15??? I've been picturing him as a grown man this whole time??? Damn this is about to get sad.
This is probably going to be my shortest live read yet because I'm already getting so invested that I can't keep up
Also Helios and Agave using a KITE for the lightning rod to get rid of the baby gave very much Agatha and Missouri vibes. She's also used the word "filigree" like four times now. Inch Resting.
I really don't know how to word this eloquently but the ship turning into pear trees that eventually saved Phaidros' life reminds me of the mechanical pear tree Thaniel took from the workshop, and how Grace made the workers cut them down, and all that fun stuff. Surely that wasn't the original intention (unless Ms. Pulley is playing the long game), but the connections make me happy
Also Phaidros lowkey hallucinating for a decade because he was in such close contact with a god is giving The Salt Miracles a little bit.
Pls Phaidros is such a dad with his little knights I adore himb
My brother in christ how is your biggest op a 15 year old kid named Jason-
I like the way the narration style slowly shifts to a more adult tone while keeping the overall personality consistent (Natasha Pulley best writer on earth confirmed???)
So does Agave remember Phaidros at all??? Does she know that him breaking rank is what caused Helios to die??? Does she know that it was him and Helios who stole the baby she wanted dead??? Pls I need to know
I hope to god there are wlw in this book. Idk why I've been thinking that but I WILL start foaming at the mouth.
"...even Jason, unfortunately, failed to vaporize" MY BROTHER IN CHRIST-
Are the marvels the same sort of thing as the statues from tbs??? Helios assumed they had gears and shit but nobody has ever opened them to check???
He made Phaidros-specific sign language for "where the fuck is Jason" WHY IS YOUR BIGGEST OP A CHILD-
Wrong, he has two ops; Jason and all of Athens.
I’ve tried explaining why age gaps in the pulleyverse are generally not the toxic evil kind that people generally dismiss without a second thought, but most of the time it comes off long-winded and defensive when I don’t mean to be defensive. The way Phaidros describes his partnership with Helios just gave me the PERFECT way to word it tho: Pulley is extremely aware of the way age gaps can affect both people in a relationship, and she really does not shy away from the insecurity it brings out in people, making it very realistic and easy to empathise with while not falling back onto toxic stereotypes
“…I said, with evil in my heart.” SOLIDARITY MY BROTHER!!!
Take a shot every time the word “filigree” comes up jesus christ-
Phaidros is a little PRICK leading that guard around on errands instead of doing anything useful, I love himb sm
He gave him a mask??? Welcome to the cult of Dionysus babey
“…and I would make him eat his fucking mask” GIRL CHILLLLL MY GOODNESS
“Make him eat his mask” my brother in Christ he made you eat your WORDS!!! And now you’re in PRISON!!! Dumb bitch (affectionate)
Lowkey I’m LIVING for the chaotic x orderly dynamic they have going on, I think it’s hilarious and very cute (but also I like the idea that over time Phaidros will learn to let loose more and Dionysus will develop more of a sense of duty and honour)
“He sounded genuinely cheerful, the bastard.” I fucking LOVE Phaidros being a grumpy bitch, thank you Ms. Pulley’s brother for convincing her to make him more of a bitch
“…he would take that as a hilarious challenge and try to lick me.” PLS WHY DO YOU THINK HE’S A DOG-
Also is his name not actually Dionysus??? Does he have like a birth name and then decide to become Dionysus permanently??? This vow is 100% getting broken and I’ll definitely find out but I must say I’m interested af now
Imagine how awful it would be if you came back from a war and the government was so “happy” with your performance they forced three creepy strangers to live in your house. That’s so fucked.
Wait wait wait, didn’t a pack of wolves in tbs die the same way as the wolf and the fox here??? My theory about the marvels is looking pretty good 👀👀👀
Is Dionysus doing all of this??? And, better question, is he AWARE he’s doing all this??? Because it seems to me like he genuinely has no clue what all the stuff with the wine and the madness is, but those are quite literally the hallmarks of Dionysus, and he seemed very aware of the ship turning to ivy and all that jazz??? I’m very confused
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S GHOSTS IN THE FOG 😀😀😀 WHAT’S THAT ABOUT 😀😀😀
Chemicals in the ground are making people sick…but it’s actually a god…hmmm…it’s giving alternate thlovk ending…
“…where is this rancid shame coming from, who did this to you?” I’M LEVITATING
I haven’t counted the pages yet but I think Phaidros is the new record holder for “pulleyverse narrators refraining from mentioning their love interest” which is fun.
…well now I feel bad for calling the triplets creepy
I’m slightly more than halfway through the book now and that makes me extremely sad, I don’t want to be finished with it
Wait is Katsu like…a mini marvel??? Is that pretty much what he is??? And they just put him in a little fish tank and let him take socks and have beef with next door’s cat???
(I got wrapped up again and am almost finished oops)
So Phaidros canonically has never seen his reflection in a mirror in his life, and we STILL have more canon information about what he looks like than Thaniel. That’s so fucking funny to me-
Okay!!! Book finished!!! And…holy shit!!! I forget how genuinely blown away I can be by Natasha Pulley’s writing until I read something new she’s written but my god was that good. It had almost an eldritch horror vibe to it while somehow also being pleasant that I really enjoyed??? And obviously I was a Percy Jackson kid (if you couldn’t tell by the everything about me) so I’m thrilled about the Ancient Greek elements and the elements of stories I could recognise from all that strewn throughout. But the characters were utterly and completely brilliant, the story was so expertly crafted, and obviously this is standard with Ms Pulley but it’s just especially poignant rn. I don’t think I can be more eloquent at the moment but. Yeah. 100000/10, no notes (except there were quite a few spelling mistakes in my copy but I kinda love it)
Edit a few days later: the way I completely thought I got this post out of my drafts 🧎‍♀️‍➡️anyways no new opinions really, the aftg worms are still eating my brain, but I really REALLY want to get back into doing my pulleyverse headcanon posts so if anyone wants to send me any requests I would be very grateful.
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shalottpress · 3 months ago
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Roots by clara-aeri
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Roots by @clara-aeri is one of the fanfics which made me decide I needed to learn to bind books. It's one of my absolute favourite botw fanfictions and if you haven't read it, what are you doing? It is out of this world, stop looking at this and go and read it! I am obsessed with this version of Link and Zelda and their relationship, and how link slowly recalls their relationship over the story.
I have been working on this bind for since August last year. I had been struggling to find a fitting cover since 2024 and to find the courage to use my guillotine on it. I am so pleased with the final result.
There were lots of first in this bind. It's a chonk of a fic clocking in at just under 250k words which meant I needed to split it into two volumes in the end. I learned how to make my own bookcloth so I could use the beautiful concept Artwork of the Master Sword released to celebrate Breath of the Wild's one-year anniversary for the cover. I made my own headbands and endbands using the bookcloth on the spine. All in all I am so proud of how far I have come with binding when I look at the finished volumes.
I made some mistakes like the title pages with the small lizard I used for breaks in different places, but because the lizard gets higher between vol 1 and vol 2 and I had intentionally reversed the image so the lizard was looking a different way for vol 2, I have decided it is that the lizard is meant to have climbed higher between the volumes.
I love the chapter headings and how the typeset came out it makes me so happy.
Video is before the cut because I think these binds are best in motion with the shiny gold vinyl. I was inspired that I wanted it to look like sunlight coming through the trees in the korok forest.
Huge thanks to @clara-aeri for giving me permission to bind this fic and to edit my copy to be an edition that uses UK spelling!
More pictures below the cut.
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