This is a screengrab from Findaway Voices (the big audiobook distributor everyone who is not Audible exclusive basically uses) Rights Holder Agreement. The Rights Holder is generally the author (sometimes a publisher) but almost never the narrator.

SO. This is a Big Fucking Yikes from me. AI-generated audiobooks are a Thing that Apple is now doing - they sound horrid because they don't give the intonation or emotion that a human narrator can - and this agreement is an absolutely naked rights grab for rights that the author doesn't actually possess. That is, the right to use the narration to train Apple's AI to do better narration, and, incidentally, the right to use the WRITING to train the writing AI's to replace authors too. Double fucking yikes. As a narrator, I'm absolutely fuming. You have to choose to opt OUT - or rather, the authors I have worked for have to choose to opt out FOR ME, because apparently I don't even have the rights to my own voice in this situation. Well, you can bet I posted this in the big narrator group (8,000 members) on Facebook and I'm putting it all over Twitter as well, because Apple can absolutely fuck all the way off.

This is horrendous. I am so sorry this is happening, and I am opting out of this immediately.

Author friends, if any of you have audio work with Findaway please also opt out and side with our voice actors on this.

Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because this sets a precedent that will affect ALL of us.

There is no doubt in my mind that this kind of thing will also be used to feed authors works to AI writing tools to mimic our work. They’re coming for our illustrators, our voice actors and they’re absolutely coming for us.

We need to kill this and we need to kill it now.

Something interesting i spotted on twitter. For anyone interested in going on T!

People in the notes asking why this is directed at only people on T when this can help transgender and cis women too - it can! This thread is a direct response to a person on twitter who detransitioned from a trans guy, who then went on a rant about how testosterone made them “ugly” and how they lost a lot of hair and, in classic transphobic detransitioner fashion, tried to dissuade people from transitioning bc they will be stuck with the “ugly” after effects forever, like balding (Which, in itself, isnt an ugly trait!)

This person made a thread to show that even on testosterone, you can grow back hair youve lost…if youve done your research about it anyway!

We thought my grandma had a tumor in her heart and it turns out she was born with a small hole in her heart (she was born at home in rural Appalachia in the early 1940s and had two older sisters who died within days of birth, spotty childhood medical care) and her body somehow fixed it. Built up scar tissue until her heart no longer had a hole. She gave birth to two children, lived a normal life and only had this diagnosed in her 70s. How cool is that? How badass is the human body?

My great grandma cut her leg and contracted tetanus in the 1930s and survived lockjaw untreated. It kills about 25% of the people it infects. It’s crazy to me that if either of these ladies weren’t so strong and badass, I wouldn’t be here.

It’s weird to think that your existence on this earth is dependent on a whole lineage of ‘near misses’ going back through eternity. A young lady falling in a stream while doing the washing and managing to pull herself out before her many shirts weighed her down and drowned her. A young man contracting the plague and being a part of that rare population that survived it, living the rest of his life knowing death was so very close. A man being shot with an arrow in war and laying fevered for weeks before his body fought off the infection and he hobbled home to his wife. A little baby girl being so fevered she loses her hearing but recovers and goes on to lead a full life. And backwards further. A young Neanderthal boy breaking his arm quite badly and being unable to hunt but being loved and cared for just the same. A little human girl wandering off and losing toes to frostbite 60000 years ago but returning home to her family and surviving. Surviving.

I actually don’t think that is necessarily true. You’re the product of the strongest communities in your lineage and those who were shown human kindness. You’re the product of midwives making the effort to correct a breech baby and saving your great great great grandmother’s life. You’re the product of neighbors lending their neighbor food in times of famine. You’re the product of the hunter-gatherer tribes taking the time and effort to care for their sick and injured. You’re the product of mercy, grace and the human collective. I think the ability for strength, resilience and endurance lives within us all. There may have been stronger people through history who didn’t have the luck, community and connections your ancestors did.

You’re the product of mercy, grace and the human collective.

Romanticizing your own loneliness and turning it into a cool girl thing only works for like a few months and then it just becomes a throbbing black hole i think. Not that ive ever experienced anything like that

love is attained through embarrassing yourself by asking for it instead

TW: MEDICAL TRAUMA AND GASLIGHTING- UK FRIENDS, PLEASE HELP

Hey, this is a long shot, but do I have any followers in the UK--specifically Scotland, but I’ll take anywhere--diagnosed with MCAS/D with a doctor they can recommend?

My younger disabled brother who I share a lot of health problems with has just been hospitalized at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (aka 'the Death Star') for symptoms consistent with a prolonged MCAS flare. He's hardly eating, he's got undiagnosable bladder pain, blinding headaches, worsening allergies, and his skin/eczema is so bad he’s at risk of sepsis and losing his eyesight because he’s been left to claw himself raw with chronic urticaria near his eyes that has been brushed off for years as “anxiety.” (Which he was then prescribed diazepam for and nothing else 🙃)

When my mother brought up my MCAS diagnosis over here in the US and how similar my brother’s symptoms and reactions are, the attending doctor said that MCAS “isn’t real” and won’t even prescribe famotidine for what my brother is describing as “suffocating acid reflux”—presumably because this doctor is now on some sort of bruised ego trip over my mother questioning his prognosis that my brother is suffering from anxiety and “a lack of personal hygiene.”

(My brother is severely disabled, and my elderly mother has to bathe and dress his wounds daily, just like she’s been doing for the last 32 years since he was born. This is not a lack of personal hygiene this is a lack of medical care!!!)

My mother is trying her best, but she’s got her own health problems and suffers severely from her own medical trauma, which is making advocating harder. They do have an appointment to see a dermatologist on Friday, but considering it's at the same clinic that said my chronic urticaria was also anxiety (🙃), we're not holding out much hope.

I've managed to find him some OTC meds that might help stabilize things, but he's at the stage where he needs a knowledgeable MCAS doctor to either confirm or rule this out and figure out what the hell is going on.

I'm trying to help, but from 4000 miles away, it's proving difficult and every possible lead I've found so far has been a dead end.

NHS is preferable but it doesn't have to be. I will find a way for him to go private if I have to. Fuck if you are an MCAS doctor in the UK, I'll pay for your petrol to go to Scotland. I'll pay for anything. I just can't listen to my mother crying in the Queen Liz car park anymore because she might be about to lose her second child to the illness that almost took her first.

Thank you. Sorry. I just don't know what to do anymore.

One of my big executive function struggles is feeding myself.

I live alone (apart from the cat). I lose track of time when I’m involved in a project, and I don’t feel hungry so much as tired a lot of the time, which tends to lead to the wrong solution.

I hate taking five minutes to make myself food. If I have energy, it feels like I’m wasting time that could be spent writing or researching or whatever. And if I don’t have energy… FUCK. Even peeling a banana is beyond me.

When I drove to work, pre-pandemic, this often meant Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast, Burger King for dinner, maybe head over to the bakery for a sandwich at lunch. I’d try not to do all three on the same day, but… I never had the patience to make food.

But now I work from home in the suburbs. There’s not a lot of places in easy driving distance, and only a few of them deliver. Food I get through Uber Eats or Grub Hub arrives cold. Always. I’m signed up to one of those weekly meal delivery services but they keep raising the prices and now I’m down to 4 meals a week.

I’m not asking for money, btw. I can afford to feed myself, I just don’t have the energy.

Now, in today’s society, this is considered lazy. Inefficient. How many times have we seen people saying working class people waste their money on fast food, and don’t they realize it’s cheaper to buy and cook healthy fresh foods? And you can say over and over again about the cost of exhaustion, but there’s still this sense of “no, you should be able to do this, just like everyone always has, this generation is just lazy…”

Not just from other people. Got that voice in my head, too.

And whenever it starts to get abusively loud, I just remind myself:

Working class apartments in Ancient Rome didn’t have kitchens. Apartment blocks (insulae) had shops on the ground floor, especially bakeries and places that sold quick hot food you could eat on your way to work, maybe with a few seats along a bar where you could rest for five minutes on your break.

Not just a few. These were goddamn EVERYWHERE.

We’ve known for two thousand years that people who work all day don’t have the energy or resources to cook for themselves. Longer, because Rome didn’t invent this, it’s just well-known there cuz Rome.

Anyway. I think if as a society we just accepted that “people don’t have the energy to cook but still need healthy food” is a real and valid issue, we could find some affordable fucking solutions. And step one is to stop blaming people (and ourselves) for not having that energy.

On Representation, Diversity, and “have characters of color just don’t write about the experience of being a person of color”

Alright. I’m gonna piss a bunch of people off and also confuse a bunch of well-intentioned white people because I don’t think that you can write about a character of color without talking about the experience of being a person of color of a certain culture.

Seriously. There’s so many conversations celebrating how people have narratives where it “doesn’t matter” that one of their characters is a person of color and that their characters’ identity as a person of color “doesn’t affect the storyline” or whatever.

I’m going to cut right to the chase here: as a reader and storyteller of color, I’m not a fan of narratives where race doesn’t affect the story.

My race and culture and ethnicity ABSOLUTELY impact the way I perceive the world around me! For instance, many South Asian families bond with lively debates and discussions and lovingly roasting their family members. The way that I develop positive relationships, often with a solid dose of conflict and loudness and argument, is therefore fundamentally different from the way a white person would develop relationships; in fact, many white people are intimidated by how loud South Asians like myself are. We’re dramatic and loud and love jokes with wordplay! That’s just how it is and it means I form bonds with people differently.

I also have different values. White people are often more individualistic in culture, with more weird distant formal bonds with their parents (shit like referring to their parents by first name or, on the other end of the spectrum, calling their dads “sir”???) as opposed to the more comfortable and closer bond I have with my parents, where my family is all up in my shit literally all the time LMAO.

Literally white families are SO DISTANT to the point where white people consider practices like co-sleeping with your young child, something very common in South Asian families, to be child abuse?? Like, as if keeping your baby in a crib in another room where they’re not close to you and it’s harder to hear them isn’t dangerous but apparently suffocating a child while sleeping (which is very rare especially since co-sleeping is a practice that has gone on for MILLENNIA) is the bigger threat here??

White kids might perceive that as invasive or a violation of their privacy; I don’t perceive it that way because of the way South Asian families are structured. There’s a stronger emphasis on closeness with family. Of course, there are situations of kids being estranged or difficult family relationships or child abuse in South Asian families as well, but family is more valued in my culture.

The plants I put in my garden are different because of my identity; flowers like bela (Arabian jasmine) and bougainvillea and roses and gladiolus and marigolds and such things are what I’m fond of because of biases based on what my parents and grandparents like. I even once grew nenua (a type of squash). (I’m gonna get my hands on a raat ki rani soon I hope!!) And, of course, not every South Asian is partial to these flowers, but there’s definitely a cultural aspect as to why I personally like them!

The colors and patterns I gravitate towards are also different! I’m not a big fan of western “neutrals” and I find bright colors more appealing, especially because hey, those vibrant shades look better on brown skin! And GUESS WHAT, part of why the western world gravitates towards neutral colors in formalwear is because of colonialism and a disdain for the vibrant colors and dyes that colonized countries used. I love wearing jhumka earrings and statement necklaces and bright, vibrant jewelry as well. Now, obviously, this isn’t the case with every South Asian, but there is certainly some level of impact on these choices from my culture and upbringing.

Hell, even the food I eat is different! I drink chai in the evenings. I gravitate towards spicier dishes and better seasoning. I don’t eat meat other than fish/seafood and chicken and occasionally turkey because of cultural stuff, though ofc lots of South Asians are vegetarian and on the flip side lots of South Asians DO eat red meat and stuff.

And this isn’t even universal to ALL South Asians by any means, because my parents are specifically Hindu and from northeastern India and I’ve grown up in California! And there’s so many other details I could go into but for the sake of not writing a twelve-page essay I’m stopping here. 

Basically, my point is, I don’t want representation where race “doesn’t matter” to the story. Race impacts so many aspects of my life and how I perceive and interact with the world around me.

It’s ridiculous to me how so much “representation” is basically just starting with a default of a white character, making her brown, avoiding the stereotypes, and that’s….it. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel authentic to take away cultural impacts on your characters. People start with white western archetypes and tropes and try to mold them to fit characters of color, instead of starting off with an authentic character of color, and it really, really shows.

Especially because Tumblr and writeblr are such white spaces, and also because culture is usually picked up from the environment as opposed to online, the conversations centered around “representation” are always about “don’t do x stereotypes” as opposed to how to actually learn about other cultures and actually….write a character of color. So many of y’all only know how to NOT write a character of color as opposed to how to ACTUALLY write a character of color.

I see so many lists of tropes and things to not include in stories, and not enough things about values and family structures and food and fashion and ways of developing relationships and all that fun stuff that will shape who you are as a person.

And some of y’all don’t even TRY to, I dunno, engage with the culture of your character of color to actually write them. For instance, if you’re writing a South Asian character, go explore South Asian cinema! Go make South Asian friends who can tell you little details about their lives as they, y’know, exist and are your friend! In general, explore the movies and literature and music and dance types and food and drink and whatnot of the culture your character is from! Form relationships with people of those cultures; it’s the internet! I know this is a super white space but there’s PLENTY of poc on here! Make an effort, not just to avoid harmful stereotypes, but to write a character of color whose identity actually MATTERS.

When I’m reading escapist fantasy/sci-fi/romcom/etc. literature where characters aren’t being hurt by racism, I don’t want a story where RACE doesn’t exist, I want a story where RACISM doesn’t exist. I want cultural understanding, empathy, and compassion!

I don’t want a role a white character would play just switched out with a character of color.

For instance, in the movie To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Lara Jean’s identity as East Asian is reflected in her fashion choices; book author Jenny Han lent inspiration for this. The Yakult drinks she likes, inspired by Korean tastebuds, plays a role in the story, too. These are details that don’t necessarily heavily impact the plot; it’s a fake-dating high school romcom. But they make a more real, fleshed-out character. They’re little details, little in-jokes and references, showing that the character’s race and culture actually MATTER to the story.

There’s a part in Pacific Rim where Raleigh Beckett, a white man, is frustrated with Mako Mori, a Japanese woman, for not going against the wishes of her father figure, Pentecost. When he tells her she doesn’t have to obey him, she responds, “It’s not obedience, Mr. Beckett. It’s respect.” This depicts her cultural understanding of family and respect; her relationships and her responses to things are impacted by her culture.

This is what I’m talking about! In order to write an actual character of color, you MUST write about their experiences to a certain extent. Of course, don’t make your characters of a certain culture a monolith in terms of personalities and responses and all that, but understand how they may be similarly impacted by their identities.

Now, don’t write a whole damn novel about a character coming to terms with their racial identity and coping with racism, but you absolutely MUST holistically incorporate their identity into your narrative.

Otherwise, it’s not actually representation. It’s you essentially writing a racebent white character. It’s you using a white default and trying to adapt it to totally different experiences.

zlibrary gone... FUCK TIKTOK FUCK BOOKTOK I hope that app burns in hell

library genesis is still up (very similar site) and r/freemediaheckyeah and r/piracy have lots of other alternatives. zlib was the GOAT though. fuck tiktok

(originally commented. putting as a reblog as its important)

for anyone that wants to know about other sites, I also didn't know so this is a big help!!! thank you!

some sites i use to read online: - https://libgen.li/ - https://www.pdfdrive.com/ - https://libretexts.org/ - https://openlibrary.org/ - https://novel80.com/ - https://www.allfreenovel.com/ - https://bookreadfree.com/ - https://allbookshub.com/ - http://thefreeonlinenovel.com/ - https://www.epub.pub/ - https://www.readingsanctuary.com/ - https://yes-pdf.com/ - https://www.booksfree.org/ if none of the links work if you just search up "(book title) read online free" there's almost always gonna be a pdf link and those are always good to read from too

“What is it that the child has to teach?

The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.

And the child is right.”

— Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

“Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’” –Barbara Alice Mann

+

Mina quotes on love that have utterly destroyed me.

I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.

I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."

Feel free to repost, no need for credit

hey

hey friend

dont kill yourself tonight ok

you have a really pretty smile and i know its not always easy to manage one but itd be a bummer if we never had the chance to see it ever again

youre really important and you matter a lot so stay safe and try and have a nice sleep

I would like a moment to thank the people who reblog post like this so that it eventually shows on my dash.

It is keeping me alive

I actually really needed this tonight, thank you

MA? MAAAAAAHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAM?!?!…MAAAA oh there you are!” (via)

The IMMEDIATE change in the tone of the meow when he sees her, oh my god.

Yeah

I think it's a bit weird that the aros and the gays are kind of against each other when it comes to representation because the gays want to ship everyone and we want to ship no one and like, while I understand the feeling of "if one more person says these characters are just friends I'm gonna punch them", I also understand the feeling of "if one more person ships these characters I'm gonna punch them". And they're both valid I guess but can we PLEASE acknowledge that not all queer characters have to be in relationships for them to count as representation? A single trans character is still representation. A single aro character is still representation. Even a single bisexual character is still representation. It's about who we are, not about who we're with.

— Ijeoma Umebinyuo (via thehopefulquotes)

open a new window somewhere in the world. 

i love this because it’s such a simple concept but it answers things i didn’t even know how to ask

Looking out of people’s windows is such a peaceful way of travelling… I got a snowfall in Argentina, a nice sea view in Ukraine, a clothes line in the fog in Bangalore. Antonella from Tavernaro, I like your wooden bird.