i would have made kafka the happiest girl in the world if he was real

Come on founder/king of Athens, aren’t u gonna slay the Bull of Minos or not?

Huh...

Huh...

“Slay”, huh.

this isn’t the ship of Theseus I’m used to hearing about

Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers' libraries

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.

Customers will receive refunds.

This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.

When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.

People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html

If you’ve got an ereader and want to actually own your books, I heartily recommend using cailbre to scrape the DRM off and so you can backup the files.

Cailbre d/l:

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

How to use cailbre to remove DRM:

http://www.geoffstratton.com/remove-drm-amazon-kindle-books

Seconding calibre as a brilliant tool for ebook management in general. 

Some more tutorials and tools:

removing DRM from your kindle purchases

Removing DRM from epubs

Removing DRM for cross device use and archiving

where's the director's cut

david lynch works in mysterious ways TO YOU. i get it though.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam nisi lorem, pulvinar id, commodo feugiat, vehicula et, mauris. Aliquam mattis porta urna. Maecenas dui neque, rhoncus sed, vehicula vitae, auctor at, nisi. Aenean id massa ut lacus molestie porta. Curabitur sit amet quam id libero suscipit venenatis.

this is the oldest post on all of tumblr, posted in october 2006 before the website even launched publicly in 2007.

Oh my God they just used ipsum

Still trying to come to terms with the fact I’ll never be a librarian who can speak a dead language and be recruited by a ruggish but handsome explorer for a quest to lift the curse and save the world

because of the pandemic travel restrictions?

Because of the pandemic travel restrictions.

I gotta go I'm doing hot girl shit *continues to peel the yellow wallpaper*

i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it

like i tried to tell him suspense isn’t about having no fucking clue what’s going on, it’s about having expectations subverted in novel and interesting ways that nonetheless accord with one’s understanding of the story’s universe, etc

and he’s just like “no.  suspense is when i cannot guess what is happening next, full stop.  quantum physics is a suspense novel”

Frankenstein’s monster being called just “Frankenstein” is actually poetic justice on a meta scale. Oh, so you’re going to reject your son/creation for fear of God and his hideousness?? You won’t give him a name and only call him “Creature”?? Well everyone forever is going to only remember him by your family name.

How’s that feel Victor?

angela carter is the only motherfucker in this city who can handle me 

HOMESTUCK IS MY SUPERVILLAIN ORIGIN STORY

@everynight-cainite i feel like this is you

Douglas Adams & cat

straight boy: love you mom….no oedipus

International book covers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

when shakespeare wrote “beware the ides of march” he was talking about coronavirus

when ts eliot wrote “april is the cruellest month” he was also talking about coronavirus

When Andrew Hussie named his webcomic Homestuck and had it start mid-april guess fucking what

You’re not punk unless you EAT a pair of DOC MARTENS