february lasted 8 years but march is already half over even though it started 3 days ago
Book recs: black science fiction
As february and black history month nears its end, if you're a reader let's not forget to read and appreciate books by black authors the rest of the year as well! If you're a sci-fi fan like me, perhaps this list can help find some good books to sink your teeth into.
Bleak dystopias, high tech space adventures, alien monsters, alternate dimensions, mash-ups of sci-fi and fantasy - this list features a little bit of everything for genre fiction fans!
For more details on the books, continue under the readmore. Titles marked with * are my personal favorites. And as always, feel free to share your own recs in the notes!
If you want more book recs, check out my masterpost of rec lists!
personally, if my mother chose some old ass elf dude over me, i’d be pretty upset about it
Pets love to show up like Hello i am Mystery Wet :)
Me: "Cat, why? Where has this tail been?"
Cat: "Perhaps I explored the tub after your shower. Perhaps I sat too close to the sink. Perhaps it is pee. I love our little mysteries."
When I was young we had this little blue Toyota truck. It was an absolute piece of shit, but it stayed in the family for ages.
It was really easy to steal and consequently got stolen several times. We always got it back though. Anyone could’ve stolen it, really. With no car jacking experience necessary anyone could drive off in it. Even you. This truck was like an excessively friendly lab, it would go home with anyone.
Foremost in ease of theft, neither door locked. But second and only slightly less easy: the truck would accept anything as a key.
My dad kept a loose saw blade on the dash to use as a key. The first time I saw him do it I was horrified that instead of a key the ignition answered to a loose bit of a power tool.
When my dad saw my expression he held up the saw blade and made an attempt to connect with the youth.
He said, “Look! It’s the keyblade!”
tiktok objectively sucks in a lot of ways but I will admit that getting to witness thousands of allegedly heterosexual young women have an identity crisis in real time after attending Olivia Rodrigo's Guts tour is both a) not something I'm seeing on tumblr and b) an absolutely magical experience
ok so, the Guts World Tour Heterosexuality Crisis (tm). There's basically three key elements here.
First off: Olivia Rodrigo. You guys know Olivia Rodrigo right? Drivers License, Vampire, Good 4 U, Brutal: tons of high-charting hits. Easily one of the biggest pop stars in the world right now. Olivia is a former Disney Channel star. To this day, a lot of her diehard fans are people who've been following her since her Disney Channel days. So a significant percentage of her fanbase are people who were watching the disney channel in the year of our lord Two Thousand And Also Nineteen - i.e. pre-teen to teenage girls who are possibly a tad sheltered.
Since leaving The Mouse behind, Olivia's musical output has not exactly been Disney Appropriate, but you might not immediately know that if you haven't listened to the albums. Olivia isn't like Miley Cyrus where she hit 18 and immediately needed to let everyone know she FUCKS. Being "No Longer Kid Friendly" isn't part of her branding. So a lot of parents, even the more conservative ones, are still willing to take their daughters to an Olivia Rodrigo concert even as her content has gotten more mature since her High School Musical days.
The third component of this situation is Chappell Roan. During her rise to pop stardom, Olivia has worked hand-in-hand with a guy named Dan Nigro (don't worry it's pronounced "NYE-grow"). He's handled production on both of her albums and has gotten some pretty significant critical acclaim for his work. Well it just so happens that Dan's other main partner in crime when it comes to pop music is Chappell Roan- a campy, bisexual singer-songwriter who's been on the come up over the past year after a couple big tiktok hits and a sold-out headlining tour. This connection has given Chappell the opportunity to open for Olivia on the first leg of her world tour this year, which is an interesting choice because Chappell Roan is very decidedly not kid friendly. Her music is very overtly sexual and very, very overtly gay.
I give you all this background so that I can properly set up the absolute perfect storm of lesbian awakenings that is Olivia packing entire arenas full of sheltered teenage girls only to hit them right out the gate with a self-described Drag Queen singing about getting eaten out in the passengers seat and developing a big gay crush on your bff, dropping lines like "I heard you like magic? I got a wand and a rabbit!" and doing what I could only describe as "bouncing and moaning on it" during the bridge for My Kink is Karma. I really cannot overemphasize how funny this is as a big fan of Chappell - her solo concerts are gatherings of every femme lesbian in a 30 mile radius. She was sapphic tiktok's best kept secret. Olivia exposing her audience of normies to her is sending a lot of them into a full-on crisis of sexuality. The goddamn Disney Channel girlies are being forced to ponder kissing other girls it has never been more joever for heterosexual women than it is right now
top 10 most divorced men to ever live right behind henry viii
He was bitching about Mackenzie Scott, Bezos’s ex wife, because she’s donated tons of money to nonprofits who support minorities. Man invents a new level of petulance each day.
context is so important/funnier cause omfg this man is so Divorced he's endlessly bitter at ex-wives that aren't even his own
I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.
I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.
Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.
Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.
Are there any other particularly egregious examples?
This book already exists, sort of! Or at least, it’s a biology textbook but I bought it for writing purposes:
It starts with a chapter about freezing to death, and it is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of horror fiction).
This book can be downloaded for free on Researchgate, posted there by the author himself:
use, and i cannot stress this enough, thriftbooks
if thriftbooks doesn’t have what you’re looking for, especially if you’re looking for it used/cheap, alternatives include betterworldbooks and discoverbooks.
Other tips for cheaper books is checking amazon and scrolling down to the “buy used” or “other sellers” section and then checking to see if those sellers have storerfonts off of amazon.
There is also a good chance that you might have a local, indie book store that likely also has a used book section! Indiebound might help you find those book stores!
Also, check out your local library, sometimes, they have a for sale section or might have certain times of the year where they do massive used book (dvd, cd, etc) sales to fundraise!
(It’s also worth checking directly from an author’s or publisher’s page and seeing if they have other places they sell their books. I know this is about cheaper/used books, since some of y’all aren’t built for piracy or the library, but also if you want to dodge supporting amazon AND want to more directly support artists you support, there’s a good chance they might have alternate ways to buy the books!)
I use thriftbooks a lot, it's so good!
as someone who works in an independent bookstore, alibris is the best for supporting yr local bookstore! abebooks is now owned by amazon. thriftbooks is great also just doesn’t usually support independent stores.
they need to invent a way out that isn't through
Not relevant to anything but how come whenever someone gets a silver bullet to kill a werewolf or whatever the shell is silver too. Do they know that part gets ejected or is it some kind of scam
catch me in the woods the next morning with a metal detector gathering up casings to melt down and sell to more dumb fuck city shits next month
The Earthbound music is what turns this from a funny animation project into an untapped source of extremely chaotic energy
this is why I fucking hate teens
I think about the writers who stopped writing because people went after them.
I think about the new reader who got scared off from commenting because they might say the wrong thing.
I think about the artist who was going to dip their toes in, but saw a blacklist posted and debated in the fandom they so recently were excited about.
I think about all the people who would be here with us, writing meta and squeeing and creating and lifting up creators. Who became ghosts, afraid that to speak up is to stick out your neck.
How many stories won't we get to read, how many pieces of art won't take our breath away, how many comments won't be put in notes or on stories that push us through our blocks... because anger and pettiness and jealousy and aggression are so common in fandoms that so many become ghosts before their time, and the ones who stick through it are still healing from their battle scars?
I mourn all the stories I will never see, all the friends I will never make, all the headcanons that will never bring stars to my eyes.
And I hope that all those who went quiet before they could speak will find a place to be safe, so that one day I may hear their voice.
A team of Rhode Island School of Design students and researchers have created tesselated, floating planting beds made of a mycelium biomaterial to cleanse waterways of pollutants and restore wetland habitat.
The floating Biopods act to introduce native plants back to degraded wetland systems while cleansing the water through bioremediation, or the re-introduction of microorganisms that naturally decontaminate their environment.
"Because of the urbanization of the Providence River itself, a lot of the wetland that acts to actively remediate pollution had been removed. So the project is really about reintroducing this new biology to kick start these ecosystems again so that the river might repair itself."
"It's interesting, the relationships that we have to biomaterials and the way that we are connected to systems that have the potential to remediate in a way that isn't electricity intensive or chemically intensive," said Banerjee.