Book that I sent out as an interlibrary loan today: We're not saying whether you should or should not Do the Thing. All we're saying is here's a bunch of cherry-picked information about how Doing the Thing is Bad and Evil and Deadly, presented in the most loaded language possible, with no acknowledgement of any arguments in favor of Doing the Thing. No bias and no pressure whatsoever. The choice is 100% up to you!

Hi it's just to let you know that the official romanization of Revaan's name is Raverne ! Also they have romanized Baul's name to Baur !

Twst coming back at us again with the least expected romanization! thank you everybody (oh god my inbox) (no it's great, I literally asked for this and the reactions have been INCREDIBLE, thank you all!)

I do like Raverne though, I think it's got a nice fancy sound to it! (I had kinda suspected it was going to be an R instead of an L, so the fact that it's SO close to Laverne except for that is hilarious to me personally.) and Dragoneye Duke is honestly probably the best translation for his title, I wasn't envying the localizers that one. :') Baur instead of Baul I was NOT expecting, but in retrospect I think his name's supposed to be a reference to the Bauru crocodile, so that actually makes way more sense!

someone else also said Meleanor has become Maleanor, which is the REALLY weird one to me, because I was so surprised it was written as Mel instead of Mal in the first place?! oh god no I can't decide which one I like better. 😭 (I wonder if they might change it to Mal...they have made romanization changes before) (like I remember House of Distraction being corrected to House of Destruction in Playful Land) (I did check and she's still Mel for now, but I dunno, they might Mal her up and some point and save me from having to make a decision about which one to use) (HECK I CAN'T DECIDE)

uhhhh thank you for letting me ramble about anime names, let's just say MONOGRAMMED SWEATERS FOR EVERYONE

it is all chaos and entropy. the thing is that the chaos and entropy make it beautiful and lovely.

yes, it's true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is terrifying. i have lived through some of the unfairness - i got born like this, with my body caving into itself, with this ironic love of dance when i sometimes can't stand up for longer than 15 minutes. i am a poet with hands that are slowly shutting down - i can't hold a pen some days. recently i found a dead bird on our front porch. she had no visible injuries. she had just died, the way things die sometimes.

it is also true that nature and the universe are uncaring and unspecific, and that is wonderful. the sheer happenstance that makes rain turn into a rainbow. the impossible coincidence of finding your best friend. i have made so many mistakes and i have let myself down and i have harmed other people by accident. nature moves anyway. on the worst day of my life she delivers me an orange juice sunset, as if she is saying try again tomorrow.

how vast and unknowing the universe! how small we are! isn't that lovely. the universe has given us flowers and harp strings and the shape of clouds. how massive our lives are in comparison to a grasshopper. the world so bright, still undiscovered. even after 30 years of being on this earth, i learned about a new type of animal today: the dhole.

chance echoing in my life like a harmony between two people talking. do you think you and i, living in different worlds but connected through the internet - do you think we've ever seen the same butterfly? they migrate thousands of miles. it's possible, right?

how beautiful the ways we fill the vastness of space. i love that when large amounts of people are applauding in a room, they all start clapping at the same time. i love that the ocean reminds us of our mother's heartbeat. i love that out of all the colors, chlorophyll chose green. i love the coincidences. i love the places where science says i don't know, but it just happens.

"the universe doesn't care about you!" oh, i know. that's okay. i care about the universe. i will put my big stupid heart out into it and watch the universe feast on it. it is not painful. it is strange - the more love you pour into the unfeeling world, the more it feels the world loves you in return. i know it's confirmation bias. i think i'm okay if my proof of kindness is just my own body and my own spirit.

i buried the bird from our porch deep in the woods. that same day, an old friend reaches out to me and says i miss you. wherever you go, no matter how bad it gets - you try to do good.

I’ve been a part of IRL queer and trans communities for almost 15 years, and I’ve watched every single one those remorselessly communities chew up and spit out transfems. None of them ever having been able to keep a transfem around for more than a year without getting a “bad vibe.” They’ve all kicked people with no other safety net to the curb, completely cutting them off from any of the benefits of an accepting community. Every transfem I know is either dead or living in poverty with no lifeline besides, perhaps, an extremely unhealthy tgirl skyrim house. Trans guys are just as quick to engage in this type of behavior as cis people! It’s like. Insane to me that I’m getting called delusional over this, I’ve watched this exact thing play out dozens of times. It’s happened to me and every transfem I’ve ever known IRL multiple times. Like. Everyone knows about the tranny hovels. Where do you think that comes from if not from the community widely excluding and discriminating against us? That’s not a situation that happens unless you have literally no where else to go. How do you think we would end up in such uniquely precarious situations if there were not power to leverage over us?

Books of 2024: WELCOME TO YOUR WORLD: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives by Sarah Williams Goldhagen.

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

sometimes the ghost of kelley puckett (he is still alive) haunts me. does he know. does he even know. he’s so detached from the comics community and he’s such a private guy (I RESPECT THAT WHOLEHEARTEDLY) that i really and truly do not know if this man knows how much cassandra cain means to us. does he know batgirl 2000 is heralded as the bible of dc solo books, as a lot of people’s favorite comic ever written. does he know how much we love cass. how we write essays over her character and how amazing she is and how she changed our lives. does he know how adored his writing is. does he know he wrote the best comics character introduction of all time. does he even. know.

I keep seeing sentiments about how Americans knowing about JKR being a terf is a very tumblr thing and that a lot of people don’t know she sucks ass.

I will say that 1. Even American mainstream news reports on her bullshit a lot and frequently and has for years so if you consume literally any news you’ve probably heard this 2. I do not know a single UK citizen, tumblr-poisoned or not who isn’t aware of this now if they give the slightest fuck about queer people because she is very very publicly funding hate drives and speaking at events and continuously writing thinkpieces affecting public life. Somehow because it’s not HERE it allegedly requires niche SJW knowledge to be aware of her open, public campaign.

I do agree that not everyone who still participates in HP shit “must” know, especially kids, but I think it’s very ignorant to pretend it’s a minority of people who are aware when 5+ years ago NBC and NPR and EW and US weekly and fucking Business Insider wrote pieces like “Rowling Under Fire For Transphobia Once More”

It is wholeheartedly a public conversation here.

i literally was thinking about this yesterday before going to sleep.. small joys really go a long way. i learned this the hard way but, if you spend your entire life waiting for an epiphany where you'll finally experience this everlasting happiness then, odds are you'll never truly be happy..

ultimate weapon against the social media addiction empire: sudoku books from the dollar store with a very nice pen and pencil

man. i've been diamond-mining bad-to-mediocre books for so long that i've forgotten how good pb can be when they actually put their minds to it

"It's normal for siblings to fight" Okay well it's not normal to be extremely classist and look down on your sister for being non-conforming. Or to go to the woman who ordered the death of your pet to tell her about your father's plans, when he specifically warned you against doing so, because you want to marry the boy you saw attack your sister and her friend (contributing partially to said father's death and your sister being unable to escape on the ship he chartered). Or to think of your sibling as unsatisfactory in comparison to another when you believe her to be dead. I notice that none of the "Sansa and Arya are going to reunite and instantly have no issues" crowd ever acknowledge any of this, which makes it seem like they don't actually believe what they say about their relationship being normal and easily reconciled. People wanting them to have no issues simply because they're siblings is another example of how fandom likes to flatten complex characters and relationships. They get reduced to being bickering siblings when their conflict runs deeper than that. If the author is telling you that they have "deep issues" to work out [X], I don't understand being so adamant about ignoring said issues. I also get the sense it's about ignoring the capacity for a certain character to be flawed, but that isn't going to change the fact that her "slip of the tongue" is very likely to be revealed and a source of further conflict 🤷🏾‍♀️

I remember when I was reading DOTC when I was around 10, and ever since Misty died I had been waiting for the moment where Birch and Alder learned about her murder, how everyone in their lives has kept it a secret. And then it just didn't happen.

I also remember obsessively re-reading the part where Quiet Rain blows up at Clear Sky.

Birch and Alder are two characters that are just so...

I WANT to say they were forgotten about, but that word doesn't feel right for how they're constantly showing up on the screen. Clear Sky occasionally feels guilty about how he murdered their mother, but for the vast majority of the time, that's described in passive voice. So you're not reminded of just HOW cruel he was, and still very much is.

It's like they're not allowed to be characters.

Like, how does Alder feel about Clear Sky, who seemed to be acting as an adoptive father until he beat her as a child? How did Birch respond later, when Clear Sky was so busy thrashing his sister that he was threatened by a dog? How do they feel about the man who took their mother away from them?

They keep getting cited as "Good Examples Of Non-Campborn Cats," dodging around the fact they were stolen and raised by Petal. Like a lot of the other "adoptions" in the series, she quietly stops mattering to them. But even this fact... like, they're being OTHERED when they were functionally raised SkyClan.

How do they feel about THAT? That their earliest memory is SkyClan, and yet, they'll never be considered truly, fully "clanborn."

Their whole life taken from them, by Clear Sky's cruelty, their formative years spent in his violent shadow, and the narrative is just not interested in that.

dumping some thoughts in the tags

2023 reads

The Deep Sky

scifi mystery thriller

on a deep space mission traveling from an environmentally devastated earth with hope to restart humanity elsewhere

when they’re halfway, an explosion kills 3 crew and pushes them off course

the only witness is the Alternate who has no specific role, and she has to figure out who caused it & if they might continue to sabotage, while they're figuring out a way to get back on course with limited resources

flips between present and the past: of her childhood and training for the mission, her identity struggles, and relationship with her mother

questions the ethics of ‘restarting’ humanity elsewhere vs putting resources into fixing earth