@earlgreytea68 / earlgreytea68.tumblr.com
https://archiveofourown.org/works/49263976/chapters/164723662
He looked over at Pete, who was sleeping soundly, his face smashed into the pillow. Patrick smiled fondly, and thought of how exhausted he must feel after all of this. Maybe it was Pete’s turn to spend some time leisurely in bed.
Patrick crept carefully out of bed and into the adjoining room and rang for Joe.
So I have now started a book that has been billed as a "frothy rom-com," and setting aside the internal inconsistencies, because I've just decided no books get properly edited anymore and every book is just full of internal inconsistencies, I am mostly astonished by the fact that, in this book, a woman has just flown from Massachusetts to the French Riviera to act as an au pair. She has landed in France and gone immediately to an Uber that brought her straight to the family she's working for and they...put her immediately to work. Literally handed her a picnic basket and told her to take the children on a picnic. And then they followed this up by throwing a dinner party that she was required to be at and that started at 9pm.
Now, I think it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and immediately begin working as soon as they land but I could excuse that if we were meant to see it as part of the family's unreasonableness. But instead I'm pretty sure the author has forgotten about the concept of jetlag or time change or anything like that. The protagonist has never once mentioned being tired. Instead she's just blithely drinking wine with her hosts at 11pm after flying all night and working all day, with not a single mention of the fact that her body clock should be all messed up.
I guess I just need to tell myself this woman is a magical traveler who doesn't suffer jetlag or tiredness ever and is fresh as a daisy after an overnight flight, but wow, just a single mention of this person being tired would have gone long way toward establishing my trust in the narrative. Instead she's completely lost me and now I'm just going to finish the book to see if she can win me back over lol.
(Also this just seems like the kind of a thing a decent editor would have pointed out???????)
okay, this book is truly so badly edited -- it frequently now has used words that I'm like, "...that's not what that word means, though, you mean [totally different word]" -- that I literally checked to make sure it wasn't self-published. I mean, I have self-published so no aspersions on self-published books but this book is so poorly edited that I had to assure myself that no professional editor ever looked at it.
The book is from a "small, independent publisher," so i suppose it has been edited in some way, and I am just shaking my head.
I am the oldest of three children. Today my mother remarked, "Imagine if we'd had just you, and stopped after you, what our lives would be like," and I said, "They would be so quiet. Imagine if you only had me to worry about!" And then my father said, "But we wouldn't know our lives were quiet because we wouldn't know what life would have been like otherwise."
Which is so true. I don't know the lives I haven't lived. None of us do. But I was thinking how writing is an act of imagining such lives. And reading is also such an act. And I think we as a society could use more such imagining. Imagination really is vitally important to our continued ability to coexist together, and we are doing such a terrible job of cultivating imagination.
Generally speaking, I am supportive of kids when they struggle. Everyone struggles, and just because your struggle is different than mine, doesn't mean it's less valid.
But.
BUT.
Come on. 600 words is nothing. I will write and throw away 600 words ten times before I finish the 800 words I need to turn in. You can do this. You need to do this. You do not want a future -- and I don't want to grow old in a future -- where you are outsourcing your creativity, your critical thinking, and your ability to put words together to a computer.
Trust me? Please? I'm old and I've read / watched / written a lot of science fiction about this.
This is such a minor complaint but every time I'm in charge of watching my grandmother, I buy myself earplugs to try to protect myself from HOW LOUD THE TELEVISION HAS TO BE, and then when I'm done watching her, I put the earplugs in a "safe place" to use for next time, and then the next time I CAN NEVER FIND THE EARPLUGS and I'm so annoyed, whyyyyy do I keep doing this!!! This time around I swear I said to myself, "I will just leave them right here in my laptop bag because I always have that with me," and I can find no earplugs anywhere in my laptop bag grrrrrrr
EVERYONE. My mother randomly found my earplugs the other day!! They must have somehow fallen out of my laptop bag and I didn't notice???? But anyway, she randomly uncovered them buried under some other stuff and was like, "Are these yours?" HALLELUJAH.
my unpopular opinion is that i hate tiktok because now people just publicly watch loud ass videos in public spaces with no regard for anyone else. 100% it was not this bad with youtube, it’s such a different thing with tiktok. put on headphones. you are grown.
Girl……
This is it! This is what social media/smart tech have done! They’ve rotted away any distinction between private and public.
Yes, we do have the right to make demands on public behavior. Of course we do. Have you never heard of laws and etiquette? I’m not allowed to grocery shop naked. You can’t rummage through my purse. I can’t have a work meeting in the middle of a movie theatre.
I remember when it was taboo simply to answer your cell phone in public. The person answering would apologize and try to go to a more private area. Then public calls were normalized. Then putting people on speaker. Then listening to music without headphones. Do you know how many times I have hiked up a mountain or driven to the beach, only to be met with someone blaring shitty top 40 music from their portable speaker, because Heaven forbid you go one hour without noise?
Old woman yells at cloud and all that, but I can’t believe someone is not only admitting this behavior, but saying it’s a good thing! No one likes you! You’re a menace!
BEING INCONSIDERATE OF OTHERS IS STILL BAD.
It was obnoxious when it was youtube.
It was obnoxious when it was music.
It was obnoxious when it was the radio.
It was obnoxious when it was dudes wanting to talk to you instead of letting you just read your freaking book.
Do you want to be this guy? Because being obnoxious in shared spaces is how you become this guy.
Wear your damn headphones like an adult participant in the social contract.
Best art history lesson ever, thank you
So I have now started a book that has been billed as a "frothy rom-com," and setting aside the internal inconsistencies, because I've just decided no books get properly edited anymore and every book is just full of internal inconsistencies, I am mostly astonished by the fact that, in this book, a woman has just flown from Massachusetts to the French Riviera to act as an au pair. She has landed in France and gone immediately to an Uber that brought her straight to the family she's working for and they...put her immediately to work. Literally handed her a picnic basket and told her to take the children on a picnic. And then they followed this up by throwing a dinner party that she was required to be at and that started at 9pm.
Now, I think it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to fly across the Atlantic Ocean and immediately begin working as soon as they land but I could excuse that if we were meant to see it as part of the family's unreasonableness. But instead I'm pretty sure the author has forgotten about the concept of jetlag or time change or anything like that. The protagonist has never once mentioned being tired. Instead she's just blithely drinking wine with her hosts at 11pm after flying all night and working all day, with not a single mention of the fact that her body clock should be all messed up.
I guess I just need to tell myself this woman is a magical traveler who doesn't suffer jetlag or tiredness ever and is fresh as a daisy after an overnight flight, but wow, just a single mention of this person being tired would have gone long way toward establishing my trust in the narrative. Instead she's completely lost me and now I'm just going to finish the book to see if she can win me back over lol.
(Also this just seems like the kind of a thing a decent editor would have pointed out???????)
https://archiveofourown.org/works/49263976/chapters/164490157
“You always write poetry when your head is so full of feelings that you can’t express any other way, you know. And you have been through quite a lot recently. I think perhaps you ought to write some poetry.”
“I haven’t been through anything,” Pete denied. “Patrick has—”
Greta looked over at him and said softly, “I worry about you. About how much you love and ache and pretend that you don’t, and pretend that what you feel isn’t valid. You have been through quite a lot. I wish you would write some poetry and save me the worry, in my delicate state.”
I just finished reading The Tower by Flora Carr. Historical fiction about a year in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots. It's not at all fic-like but I thought it was really well-written and vivid. Also, when I read the reviews a bunch of people were like, "Did not think there needed to be as much sex, the lesbian relationship was a bit much and has no historical evidence," and...there is almost no sex in this book and the lesbian relationship is so gently done and Idk what "historical evidence" these people think would be left behind by these women whose inner lives have been effectively erased from history, that was the entire point of the book. So anyway, read the book just to annoy these "they were just really good friends" people, who are outraged by a tiny bit of women finding joy and happiness in the middle of a patriarchy that refuses to let them.
Fair warning, though, while there is a sweet, gentle lesbian relationship in this book, it's definitely not the focus of the book, so I wouldn't sell this book as a lesbian romance novel or anything like that, although it is also that to a lesser degree. It's more a piece of historical fiction, told from an overtly feminist perspective and focused on how these fully realized female characters are entirely whole people that the patriarchal society around them attempts to cut down to size again and again for the crime of their displays of independence. The book was really interesting about the ways in which women gain and use power in such a society, including the ways in which they use men in service of that.
It was also just informative historically. I know some stuff about Mary, Queen of Scots, but I'm definitely no expert, and I enjoyed having the historical events relayed from Mary's point of view. Because of when the book is set, it really also struck me how smart Queen Elizabeth I was to refuse to marry. It's not that Mary is portrayed as at all foolish -- she's not, she's very clever and smart in the story -- but it's clear that literally as soon as she gave birth to a boy-child, all of the men around her were like, oh, good, she's served her purpose, now we can get rid of the whore. Like, this book just made me really see how clearly the idea of a "queen" was just the men biding time until there was any kind of plausible male alternative they could have rule instead, and how smart Elizabeth was to grasp that and refuse to give it any ammunition. I always knew what Elizabeth was doing but this book just really drove it home for me. And this book does a great job not demonizing Elizabeth, too.
Also, the book is not too sad. I had to look up the timing of Mary's life to make sure I wasn't going to be too devastated by the book and the book is deliberately set in the middle of Mary's life, not the end of it, so that I was able to enjoy it.
the last couple of days I've been noticing way more buds than usual on the branches of trees and bushes. I think something big is about to happen
Tesla is tanking so hard it is dragging the entire EV segment's sales down into the negative. When you omit Tesla from the equation, EV sales are up 13% across the board.
Don't let anyone tell you EV sales are in a slump.
“The Price Is Right”
Absolutely amazing how AO3 is a part of the internet that doesn't sneak in any ads and doesn't have an algorithm and doesn't watch you or record how much time you spend looking at each fic or whatever. It's just right there to use for free. Legend
The internet was like this. This was the normal.
[attempting to flirt] if i was stuck in a timeloop id desperately explain my situation to you every single reset
Ever since reading my first time loop-based book as a preteen, I’ve had a Secret Time Loop Code Word. It’s been the same word all these years. I’ve never written it down anywhere or told anyone what it is, just kept it tucked away in my brain. That way, if someone I know ever confided in me that they were stuck in a time loop, I would have a way to confirm it: I would tell them the time loop code word and instruct them to find and talk to me again on the next loop. Of course, if it’s a time loop, I wouldn’t remember telling them the code word. But they’d remember it. So if someone ever came to me and said “I’m stuck in a time loop, and the time loop code word is [X],” and it was indeed the word I’ve secretly held onto for most of my life, I would know that we had had this conversation in a previous loop and that they were telling the truth.
Will this ever be useful? Almost certainly not. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with having a completely absurd contingency plan. In case of time loops.
Lol I've got mine now and I will absolutely be ready if there's ever a time loop
Happiness Will Come To You.
when tho
When You Least Expect It. Probably Late March
reblog for happiness to come for you in late march!
This is such a minor complaint but every time I'm in charge of watching my grandmother, I buy myself earplugs to try to protect myself from HOW LOUD THE TELEVISION HAS TO BE, and then when I'm done watching her, I put the earplugs in a "safe place" to use for next time, and then the next time I CAN NEVER FIND THE EARPLUGS and I'm so annoyed, whyyyyy do I keep doing this!!! This time around I swear I said to myself, "I will just leave them right here in my laptop bag because I always have that with me," and I can find no earplugs anywhere in my laptop bag grrrrrrr
https://archiveofourown.org/works/49263976/chapters/164164747
Eventually, Pete suggested that a bath be drawn for Patrick, and while Patrick was a little alarmed at the prospect of being out of bed for such an extended period of time, he had to admit that the idea of a bath sounded delicious. With Pete’s careful help, he managed to get out of bed and undressed and into the bath.
