3 kobolds in a trench coat

they/them | mostly harrmless | but queer af | also disabled

[datsderbunnyblog]

This comment was left on a post about making the most of the Libby app. "Excessive use of generous lending policies" is the most absurd phrase I've ever seen anyone use to discuss libraries.

[catboycommunist]

evergreen

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

looked up Heidi because I'm a journalist

for reasons I can't imagine this publisher of sexless Alaska love stories is averaging under 20 likes each on posts about her books, so if I can be so honest I kind of have my doubts that her books are getting read even with the excessive use of generous lending policies

[ariaste]

Also her claim that authors are not getting paid per borrow is.... wrong. With ebooks (which is what she's talking about here with Libby) there are two forms of licensing for libraries to lend out ebooks.

The first kind is that they buy a license for a pre-determined amount of check-outs. I'll just make some numbers up for the sake of illustrating what that looks like: Let's say $20 for 20 borrows. When the ebook has been checked out 20 times, the library has to renew the license and pay more money in order to continue lending out the ebook. The author gets a cut of that $20 as their royalties.

The second kind is literally paying per borrow. (Again just making up numbers here) Let's say the library pays 50 cents every time the book is checked out. The author still gets a cut as their royalties. Is it just 10 or 20 cents per borrow? Yes, but that adds up! AND it means that people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to read my book at all are able to read it, which is great! AND it means that the library is thriving and being used, which is also great!

So yes, authors DO get paid from library activity!!!!!!

Do not feel guilty for using the library. I don't know one single author (except this Little Miss Ma'am in the screenshots, apparently) who would resent their readers for using libraries.

[malacandrax]

I posted this on bsky so you can have it here too since I've been posting more sexy things lately.

[venerable-thief]

I am a huge fan of retiring to my quarters

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

In this economy you'll be lucky to retire to your nickels

[quinnception]

[aromanticduck]

Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you

[pangur-and-grim]

we have to write poems in my creative writing certificate program, so I pieced something together from Belphie's medical reports

[pangur-and-grim]

my professor really liked this and said that it should be 'the nucleus of a chapbook' (so like 15-30 poems of the same theme that I would attempt to get published) but now I feel awkward because I think that she thinks HE DIED? but it turns out, everything will be alright! his heart recovered! the FIP meds are working!

[pangur-and-grim]

if I do make a chapbook, this will be the next page:

[pangur-and-grim]

and then this will be the page after that:

[pangur-and-grim]

I couldn't believe how fast he went from death's door to running and playing once we got the GS441525 into him. I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who's spent their time researching and legislating it!!

[pangur-and-grim]

Belphie is over two years old now, and sometimes when I look at him, I still think he lived.

[malacandrax]

Angelic part of this comic

[artefarte]

A perfectly natural heterosexual black swan couple raising their cute fluffy babies together as God intended <3

SIKE

THEY'RE GAY

And they're not some rare exception to the rule, either!!!

About 25% of black swan couples consist of two swans of the same sex (typically, two males).

These couples will court each other, build a nest, and raise their young together in a more-or-less committed monogamous relationship.

In fact, these same-sex couples have a high success rate of 80% when raising their young to adulthood, as opposed to the 30% of their heterosexual counterparts! Two big buff papa swans are better than one when it comes to stomping on invaders of nesting territory.

"But," I hear you say, "where do their baby floofballs come from? Does mpreg exist among black swans?"

Alas, no, but there is a very elegant solution to this. The swan couple may simply temporarily associate themselves with a female swan.

Afterwards, the female swan deposits their eggs and swims off free to live her single girlie life if she wishes (or, find a boyfriend. Preferably one who isn't already committed to another boyfriend.)

So whenever someone commits the naturalistic fallacy "homosexuality bad because unnatural >:(" I like to point out not only their glaring illogicality, but also, respectfully, there is homosexuality happening in the local lake right now.

This concludes my Ted Talk on gay swans.

[oodlyenough]

a thing about me is i basically never notice a wig or other kind of hairpiece in tv/movies. it has to be party city territory for me to even twig it. people will complain about characters' wigs looking bad and i will nod along but there is like a 90% chance i did not notice for a second while watching. i consider this mostly a blessing.

[dogpuppy]

[mandywondering]

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

[dietspam16]

if you go from biology to physics without dying first you don’t go to heaven the uber driver went over this already

[innerchildabortionclinic]

interesting kink assortment on the dash

[ivy-michaels]

putting on the high vis corset and running in front of cars across a dark country road like a deer

[randomitemdrop]

Item: Corset of Visibility

[obscurelocalstranger]

[tavyliasin]

Safe sex starts with safe lingerie~

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[doberbutts]

My dad is Deaf and has been since before he met my mother. He had multiple different devices to monitor my sisters and I growing up- including a noise detector that would vibrate the bed or the couch and say exactly which room the loud noise was being made in. As a child I remember understanding that he could not "hear" me if we weren't looking at each other, and that I had to speak clearly in order for him to understand. He tells me as a toddler I used to ask him to get on my level, put my hands on his face, and ask him if he could understand me- and only once he verified would I say or ask anything. He used to leave me a signed note every day before school when I was in high school, giving me a different blessing and a couple bucks to buy a snack.

But also- hearing children of deaf adults (CODAs) are often more empathetic, more accepting of others' differences and challenges, more emotionally mature and able to read others' body language and visual cues, with experiences more similar to bicultural and bilingual children of the same age, because being raised Deaf while hearing is a look into two very different worlds. Not that I think anyone should need to prove their worth, but the statistics show the exact opposite of these doctors' expectations of Deaf parents. Deaf adults more often than not raise intelligent and well-structured kids that connect more readily with others, there is no additional risk of neglect more than any hearing parent.

[questionableadvice]

~ Every Day Home Advice and The Practical Business of Life, Containing The Best and Most Practical Advice in Household Management, 1882

[ariaste]

See, this sounds insane at face value, until you remember that Louis Pasteur had only invented pasteurization in 1865, that Robert Koch published his postulates on the link between microorganisms and diseases in 1884 (after this book was published), and that Dr John Snow's research on the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854 (in which he proved that cholera was waterborne and not caused by bad smells, as the entire medical establishment believed) was not publically accepted until 1866, eight years after his death (and only 16 years before this book was published) -- and despite that, there were still people who doggedly insisted on believing in miasma theory (aka that disease is caused by "bad air" or bad smells) well beyond that.

So the writer of this book isn't actually.... wrong, per se. In an age before they had clean, sanitary, safe drinking water, you probably DID get at MINIMUM awful diarrhea pretty regularly after drinking water. This is why so many people drank small-beer (very low alcohol content, but the fermentation process (and by some preparations, boiling the water) killed the dangerous microbes and made it safe to drink). The popularization of tea actually really cut down on cholera outbreaks and other water-related digestive troubles as well! not only because you have to boil the water, but the tannins in tea also kill off (at least some) bacteria.

And in case you cannot comprehend the state of how breathtakingly "they didn't fucking know" -- If you were really poor in London in the first half of the 19th century, you were often literally dipping a bucket into the nearest gutter, letting it sit for a day for the solids to separate out, and drinking what was left. Even the well-to-do houses with fancy newfangled running water were at risk of waterborne illnesses, because a lot of those water supply companies had intake pipes stuck into the fucking Thames (you know. the famously polluted river that all the sewers dumped into) and were so negligent about filtering it that people sometimes got live eels coming out of their faucets.

So yeah, drinking many glasses of water IS a potentially injurious one and DOES weaken digestive power -- IF you are unfortunate enough to live in the 19th century before public health became a government concern.

(I just read a book on the Broad Street cholera outbreak yesterday, The Ghost Map, and it was riveting, highly recommend -- the Broad Street pump's well, which provided water to thousands of people in a neighborhood of London, was situated two and a half feet away from a cesspit where residents of a house were dumping their sewage. According to reports by the inspectors after the fact, the bricks lining the cesspit were so degraded that they could be removed with hands, and upon excavation, the earth between the cesspit and the well was muddy and saturated with human waste. The well's water level was eight feet below that of the cesspit.)

[queerdungeons]

birth

[tamascotchi-deactivated20190101]

THE PORTAL OPENS

[walmartdionysus]

[yourreddancer]

The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.

Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.

[vintagewildlife]

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.

[briannyssey]

Oh easy mistake. Yearning actually rises from the floor and longing hangs from the ceiling

[briannyssey]

🥺🥺