a lot of YA and fantasy stuff has always been a little cringe and silly but at least it used to be cringe from the heart instead of designed in a lab to get teens on tiktok to use a certain sentence from it

I grew up in the age when 80% of YA fantasy was a soulless Twilight knockoff and 80% of YA sci-fi was a soulless Hunger Games knockoff. There was never a golden age of speculative YA where most of it came from the heart, it's kind of always been 20% earnest and 80% jumping on trends to make a buck.

Jesus, after coming back from the dead: hey guys it’s me Jesus, just look at the scars on my hands

Thomas, a known freak: show us the feet as well please

Happy Easter everybody

Every single Easter you monsters give me a million notes on this post

Greek Nathan's foot long Yogurt Hot Dogs

reblog if you enjoy napping, being cozy, being conked out, snoozing, wrapping up in blankets, sipping a hot drink, catching some z's, hugging a plushie, or otherwise relaxing and resting

i like how this post gets circulated the most around evening. like yes gang settle down! we know when it's bed time!

Tbh the problem with ship wars is that everyone tries to find a moral high ground to prove their ship is superior when actually shipping should be about making two characters kiss like a kid playing with barbie dolls

You don't like my two characters kissing? That's fine you can go play with other people that want your two characters to kiss it's literally that easy

Thinking about... Grieving the undead.

You aren't dead, but you're moving 12 hours away.

You aren't dead, but you're leaving our friend group.

You aren't dead but you've moved to a different state and now we text twice a year.

You aren't dead but you blocked me.

You aren't dead but we stopped talking, not on purpose but so long ago that I wouldn't even know what to say to you now.

You aren't dead but you're a stranger to me now.

You aren't dead but we lost touch and now I don't even remember your username.

You aren't dead but I ended things with you and now we never speak.

You aren't dead but I still have to grieve you. Whether I'd change it if I could or not, you're still a presence that I'm used to and now you won't be there anymore.

And so I grieve.

blood test came back i'm full of blood

Is it your blood?

Finders keepers

while kissing my cat's little head: you're a problem *smooch* you're a terror *smooch* you're a menace to society *smooch smooch smooch*

Everything deserves to love on once it’s gone.

so cruel of this sourceror to cast such wicked spells on an innocent beaste

“do we think maybe a vegetable would cause less despair” still living in my head rent free

I think the funniest dynamic for arranged-marriage royalty would be a queen who came here 100% prepared to murder her future husband and rule as a widow queen in her own right, only to discover that the king is autistic as hell and responds to her wish to rule with "oh thank god please do, I don't want to be bothered by these people. I can just tell them to go bother you instead, if you really want that. I've got beetles I wanted to study."

"I'm really not good at it," the king admits with horrible, aching grief. The country is in disarray. Peasants go hungry. Nobles trade power amongst themselves with impunity.

So the queen takes over and ruthlessly sets things to rights. Fires several generals, hangs nobles, redirects wealth to the peasantry. It isn't long before the first assassination attempt, which she expected.

She did not expect her docile, beetle-obsessed husband to go absolutely feral and fling himself at the assassins wielding a pair of sharp knives.

Also, the beetles are intended to attack and kill a certain type of invasive worm that has been killing off the gourd and potato crops for decades. He’s been trying since he was a child to crossbreed several native species to be hardier and better diggers. When he finally gets it right it’s all over for you bitches (“you bitches” being mass starvation of subsistence farmers).

Mad Scientist and the Head of HR ass dynamic

in the latest cyber-news: the internet archive has lost their case against 4 major publishing houses (verge article). they’re going to appeal, but this is still a bad outcome. the fate of the internet is currently hanging in the balance because 4 multibillionare publishing groups missed out on like $15 of combined revenue during the pandemic because of the archive’s online library service. it’s so fucking stupid.

for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.

so how can you help?

and finally…

cannot stress enough that donating to the internet archive to help them appeal this without going broke is the most important thing you can do right now. my day job revolves around fulfilling digital article and book scan requests at an academic library and a huge part of that is borrowing from other libraries that do controlled digital lending (incl. the internet archive!). copyright law is already hugely restrictive on what we can and can't lend, and we absolutely don't have the option to pirate anything for our patrons due to being a large academic institution. it's difficult to overstate just how bad this ruling could end up being for libraries that have digital lending programs, esp ones that rely on CDR for old/archival/hard-to-find texts.

I'm incredibly fucking disappointed at the bootlickers in the comments claiming that the IA steals from small creators. Eliminating a valuable research, academic and cultural resource because you've bought into the fiction that "potential sales" are lost sales is exactly what these big corporations want. You aren't saving small creators by swatting down a non-profit, you're allowing ginormous publishing monopolies to consolidate even further while they smile a snake's smile over independent creators.

The Internet Archive is absolutely vital for my work and research. Without it, a good chunk of Welsh LGBTQ+ history would be inaccessible. The Welsh books hosted on IA are indexed and searchable, meaning any Welsh LGBTQ+ terminology can be searched for. Otherwise, me sitting down to read every. single. Welsh book ever published *just in case* it contains one of the terms in my data is an impossible task (Welsh books have been published since 1546) . In fact, this is something I refer to in my methodology for this very reason.

I'm also broke as hell rn but when I get the chance I'm gonna donate. Without IA, you can kiss goodbye to a *massive* chunk of academia. My lecturers use IA. So not just like, undergrads and PhD students, but seasoned academics will lose access to a major resource if IA stopped existing.

The argument of "potential sales lost" also makes no sense from an author's perspective. Published authors are usually paid an advance before publication. After that point, they would have to sell an obscene amount of books to qualify for extra pay from those sales, so many authors are unbothered by someone reading their book for free. Libraries allow people to read books for free and IA is essentially one giant library. It even has a feature where if you're reading a book and "check it out" for an hour, no-one else can read the book your reading until the time runs out. Just like a normal library. Potential sales lost to the company is just like when companies claim to have lost millions at a start of the year when they haven't actually lost any money at all. They just didn't earn as much money as they were predicting.

IA provides a vital service and we should be fighting to ensure it isn't lost.

Seconding all of the above -- Since the IA lost its case, I've noticed a number of books have rapidly become inaccessible for me. The negative impact this has had on my work can't be understated, as I've been left without a crucial resource for my research. I. don't believe there's a single article I've written that hasn't been impacted by this, with me often having to scrambling to get access to sources that are rare and/or our of print. I have the advantage of a well-stocked uni library that is good at ILLs, but this is a taste of what's going to come if this isn't resolved in the Archive's favor.

power couple

the media loves them i bet