lurking on r/machinists and it's good
i find that machining as a profession is incredibly compatible with the specific blueprint of autism mapped out by reddit infrastructure
Poop Qu—no, wait, sorry—POP QUIZ! Birds can fart: true or false? 🤔
It’s true! But it doesn’t happen often. While birds, like these pelagic cormorants, have the anatomical ability to fart, they don’t carry the kinds of bacteria that produce gas in their stomachs (unlike humans 😅). So it would be abnormal for them to toot but not impossible—the more you know! 🌟
i’m just… so tired of reading posts complaining about problems that only exist because people won’t read romance novels… it is a huge genre there are books about werewolf dukes, there are books about black revolutionary war soldiers, there are books about south asian doms who care about enthusiastic consent, there are books about shape-shifting cowboys who turn into bears, there are books about lady scientists learning how to trust that their boundaries will be respected, there are books about alien barbarian warriors, there are books about genies, there are books about women of color in victorian london, there are books about polyamorous earls, there are fake marriages and marriages of convenience and basically every fanfic trope that people lose it for exists as a book with original characters but some of the same people who complain about how books no longer satisfy them turn a blind eye to a whole genre because it never occurs to them to read a ~bodice-ripper~ when they could read romantic fanfic of a more respectable genre instead
look, if you:
- don’t wanna read about two people falling in love and fuckin’
- just wanna read more about some specific characters
good news! this post is not about you. here are some posts i have seen with great regularity on this site:
- no one who writes original fiction is capable of writing good sex
- no one who writes original fiction understands tropes
- original fiction doesn’t understand kinks
- too many books are about high-stakes things and not enough books focus on character development and interaction
all of which is blatantly and on the face of it absurd to anyone who reads a lot of romance and which is what this post is about. it downplays and devalues the good work being done, especially by marginalized authors, in the romance space. authors should get paid! authors should get rewarded for originality! if you read a shitty romance novel once, i don’t care! so have i! i’ve read a lot of shitty books in a lot of perfectly good genres. if you can spend three hours sifting through pairing tags on ao3 to find the one fic that doesn’t suck, you can look through ebook previews to find something that looks good.
‘books are expensive’ is almost a compelling argument, except that romances and mysteries are two genres where ebooks go on sale for $1-2 with startling regularity. my bookbub emails regularly get ebook boxed sets with tons of different books by different authors going on sale for a buck, which is a great way to find new authors. most authors have newsletters where they let you know about sales and send out freebies. and if your library has overdrive, you can request books. you don’t have to just… see they don’t have it and give up.
anyway, here’s books:
will i ever stop recommending courtney milan’s brothers sinister series? literally never. if you prefer contemporary and don’t mind first person there’s also the cyclone series. if your local library does not have at least one courtney milan book i will be shocked. don’t worry about it if they’re not the first in a series. you can read it out of order. that’s how romance novels work. lots of her books also go on sale for the low price of free on the regular, especially the novellas.
alisha rai’s forbidden hearts series also rules.it’s got starcrossed lovers, it’s got feuding families, it’s got hatefucking, what more could you want
alyssa cole has never written anything bad in her entire life, i’m pretty sure. you want historicals? you want contemporary? contemporary but there’s still sexy dukes? post-apocalyptic? pick your poison, enjoy.
i just read this one recently and now i need to read all the other cat sebastian books i’ve acquired over the years because whenever a book is a dollar and looks like this i buy it immediately (it’s literally a dollar right now). this graphic was very helpful and i wish more authors had ones like it. it’s 2019, bring back web banners for link pages.
i discovered six de los reyes when courtney milan recced beginner’s guide: love and other chemical reactions and i’m really interested to read more of her books. also it made me realize i’d never read a book that took place in the philippines before? no one fucks in this but it’s really cute and sweet and involves a hyper-logical lady scientist, an artist/barista/bad boy, a coffee shop, and Making Out For Entirely Scientific Reasons.
bound with honor is the only book i’ve read from the regency reimagined series. the reimagining seems to be that it’s very bisexual and polyamorous and everyone fucks a lot and also there’s bondage. i am cool with this. i actually bought the whole series at some point?? i… should read these.
i haven’t gotten around to reading tess bowery’s treading the boards series (i have bought so many books) (i was not kidding about the one dollar sales) but i’ve got high hopes because look at them
kj charles is… prolific. and another author whose books i haven’t gotten around to despite owning a lot of them. i actually just bought that one on the right, just now, because i saw that it was a dollar when taking this screenshot.
I’ve read Bound to Be a Groom by Mulry, and it’s fantastic! As is the whole series.
It's Mendak Monday y'all, touch the science orb before clocking in.
my brother started calling our cat "doobie brother" which he then lengthened to "dubious brother" and has since morphed into "brother dubious" like he's some sort of fucked up little monk
brother dubious
"My liege, I'm afraid I have reason to believe your concubine plots against you. Worry not, your eminence, you can still trust me, of course..."
hello!! I wanna hear about the research now :0
The line in question that I did a ton of research for: "It tipped over like it was a toy rather than a sixty-ton war vessel." - Infernal Fascination
Okay, so first I had to identify what kind of ship the Dragon Hunters from Race to the Edge use, which was very difficult because it's a fictional ship. So, I had to find something close to it. I can't remember which ship I figured out was closest to it in size and design though. (This was years ago.)
Then I had to fucking figure out how much the damn thing weighed. I can't remember if there was math involved, but I think there was.
Yep. I did all that for a single line, because I wanted it to sound cool and have impact about how powerful this dragon attacking them was.
Pumpkin garden
If these all fell on you…. you… you’d….. get squashed……….
Steve: 1
Secret Service: 0
For those who don’t know, Steve Jackson Games was raided by the Secret Service in 1990, and all copies of the then-upcoming GURPS Cyberpunk were confiscated. Though this was bad for the company financially (they were set back months on a major project, and had to do layoffs), it did lend a certain air of pizazz to their product.
They ended up suing the government, and won. This was the first high-profile case for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which successfully sued on behalf of the company, winning around $300,000 in the case.
The full story is here: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
I knew the EFF had been around longer than I've been alive, and that they've done so much for the internet that I take for granted. I like learning about how it came into being and what they've actually done. And I love learning that it actually worked, at least some of the time, that the people didn't just get conveniently disappeared, that the EFF sued and actually won and I live in a world with a better internet because they did that.
The affidavit on which SJ Games were raided was unbelievably flimsy . . . Loyd Blankenship was suspect because he ran a technologically literate and politically irreverent BBS, because he wrote about hacking, and because he received and re-posted a copy of the /Phrack newsletter. The company was raided simply because Loyd worked there and used its (entirely different) BBS!
... and also I find it amusing that in their illegal raid they didn't bring their own lockpicks or whatever. They tried to use the office letter openers.
In their diligent search for evidence, the agents also cut off locks, forced open footlockers, tore up dozens of boxes in the warehouse, and bent two of the office letter openers attempting to pick the lock on a file cabinet.
"i don't like this thing and i wish i didn't have to see people talking about it all the time"
girl (gender neutral), you are on tungle dot com:
choose your fighter.
in case you don't know where you find the blacklist feature:
if i really hate to see something it goes in both cause sometimes i find the filter doesn't always work right. but if you put a term people tag (and this is why censoring tagging is stupid) then you should not see posts with that tag on your dash or if you do a tag search, things in the tag search that have tags you've put here will also not show. it just shows a post that's blank and says it contains a tag you filtered and you can choose to look at it or not. anyway, happy blogging! curate your own experience!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds "Subspace Rhapsody" & Buffy the Vampire Slayer "Once More, With Feeling", requested by @thecaptainoutoftime
you know what’s a trope that never gets tired is when theyre bouncing around in the plot and suddenly an important name crops up- it’s blorbo bleebus. and some dude is like who the hell is blorbo bleebus. and we immediately cut to our new friend blorbo bleebus pulling the most absolutely buckwild shit you’ve ever seen
enhanced edition of this trope is when they cut to blorbo bleebus doing something entirely contradictory to how they were just introduced, like “i know a professional, someone discreet who can handle things quietly” cut to blorbo bleebus in the wildest fucking bar brawl you’ve ever seen, screaming their own name and stopping to down shots while still holding some dude in a headlock
We need a Dracula movie where they do this with Van Helsing.
dmv: can i have you birth certificate
me: i dont have it but you can trust! 😁✌️
dmv: ok! 😁✌️here is your license
me: its so small and cute! 😳
dmv: just like you! ☺️
can't get an algorithm like this on twitter
August 6: Dracula
“She is steered mighty strangely, for she doesn't mind the hand on the wheel; changes about with every puff of wind. We'll hear more of her before this time tomorrow.”
don't forget your computer condom
