I think it could be cool to put together a board of the top Tumblristas in the world, that could see previews of what's coming up and advise on strategic direction. Who should be on it?
Okay, look. We're gonna do it like this, Matt. I used to work in market research. This one is free, next time I expect a month of free premium and if there's a third time I expect a job.
TO EVERYONE ELSE:
A series of ten reblogs is about to follow, since you can only have one poll per reblog. Please answer all ten polls. If you don't see them all, check the notes (this shouldn't take me long so if it's more than like, fifteen minutes since I posted this one they should all be there.)
7) with the understanding that Tumblr needs to attract new users or convert more current free users to paying users in order to stay online, what do you think of Matt's "top tumblrista" idea?
Absolutely not--this is very famously the influencer-hating site
Absolutely not--this site is too diverse for that to work
Absolutely not, for other reasons
I'm actually liking this poll method
The poll method is clunky but something similar would be great
In the following question, "pre-social media" refers to platforms like LiveJournal, forums, alt.net boards, early MySpace, and similar spaces.
9) thinking about the given definition of "pre-social media," how much do you agree with the statement "I think most tumblr users I know would prefer pre-social media to modern platforms like Facebook and X"?
"Strongly agree" is not strong enough
Strongly agree
Agree
Kind of maybe agree?
Neutral/I don't know enough about pre-social media to say
The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve.
Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.
If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.
Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.
This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!
It’s very clear that you all have strong feelings about Tumblr and about this change. We hear you. The passion people have for how Tumblr works is one of the things that makes this place special.
As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, we’ll keep reading your replies and reblogs, so please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas.
Your creativity has always been the heart of Tumblr, whether you’re the original poster or adding something brilliant in the reblogs, and nothing about this change is meant to limit that.
If you’d like to talk directly beyond the comments, leave a reply and we’ll follow up with as many of you as we can. We want to work with you to make Tumblr better.
hey y’all! i haven’t talked about it much publicly, but for all of january and a bit of december and february, i was knocked out with a truly gnarly sinus infection and the worst bout of burnout i’ve ever experienced.
between that and the store getting royally screwed over by multiple factors at the end of last year, things are pretty rough right now. i’ll go into this more some time later, but the TLDR is that the majority of the garments we were supposed to have in stock for the holiday season sales were so late they only got ready for sale in the past few weeks.
i know a lot of people are struggling right now everywhere and frankly with ICE still very active in my city it feels incredibly selfish to ask for help when i know others have it much worse, but i’m not really sure what else to do. we have a lot of bills due and thanks to receiving the bulk of our inventory four months late, we don’t have the money to pay them. but we have a lot of things in stock now and it would mean the absolute world if y’all would share this.
the clothing in my store is made with certified ethical labor and is designed by a queer, neurodivergent three person team. we carry sizes S-6X in some garments and XS-8X in others. we specialize in mid- and plus-size clothing and pride ourselves in doing extensive fit tests to make sure our clothes fit properly—that we consider and accomodate things many clothing retailers forget, like the curvature of a belly causing shirts and dresses to ride shorter, like sleeves and necklines needing to be widened, like thighs and fupas existing. and our clothes have real, usable pockets.
we ship domestically from the US and UK!
Maya Kern's online store for skirts, enamel pins, journals and more! For shoes, masks, and other products visit my Threadless shop.
Maya Kern UK
as a hail mary we’ll be running a sale next week, but some items are very low in stock and expected to sell out on the first day.
You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?
I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet
Stop tagging this about the Unabomber it's not about the Unabomber, it's about time we give the other fucked up mathematicians some recognition, it's about this fucking guy
OP you're right and you should say it. There are 9 planets in the solar system and two of them are in a binary planetary system. I will die on this hill.
EXACTLY. EARTH-MOON IS A BINARY PLANET SYSTEM. AND I WILL BECOME NOTABLE FOR MY FREQUENT POSTS TO VARIOUS TUMBLR BLOGS AND MY ADVOCACY FOR THE RECOGNITION OF THE MOON AS A PLANET.
Now, dear reader, you might say: "But three of the Jovian moons and Titan are bigger than the Moon!". And to that I say yes, but two of those are bigger than Mercury also and people aren't usually upset about that. Plus all of those are satellites of bodies that are completely incomparable in scale.
Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system, is 0.008% the mass of Jupiter. The Moon is a bit over 1.2% of Earth's mass and a solid 27% of its radius. There's no other planet* in the solar system with a satellite anywhere close to the kind of similarity in size that the Earth-Moon system has.
You might also say "Fine but it's literally called 'The Moon' so that's a bit silly". To which I say that I've been calling it that to be more easily understood but it would be extremely easy to switch to calling it "Luna" which is what most people do when they encounter situations where saying "The Moon" creates ambiguity - like when writing sci-fi or a nontrivial amount of astronomical research.
In conclusion, lumping Luna in with the satellites of other bodies is unhelpful because it is geophysically distinct from most of them, and orbitally distinct from all of them. Luna is a planet and it's rad that we can see one so clearly in the night sky.
[*No, Pluto is not a planet, but yes Pluto-Charon is totally a dwarf planet binary]
hello???? hello??????????? have we walked into the twilight zone or something??????????? yes, the moon is a percentage (a percentage almost exactly) of earth’s mass, but that doesn’t magically make us a binary system! the barycenter is still well within the diameter of earth! what next, are you going to say that since deimos and phobos orbit mars, they’re actually a trinary planetary system?? you fucking better not!
Hi, I'm an astrophysicist, I am well aware of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) definition of a planet. It is a definition that is relatively controversial and doesn't really make a lot of sense - it was mostly written to prevent the list of planets from getting too long as we discovered more dwarfs. This definition does not include anything to do with barycentres - I'll get back to that.
The IAU definition of a planet has 3 parts:
1. Object in orbit around our Sun
2. Object has reached hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. it's a sphere, not a potato)
3. Object has cleared its neighborhood around its orbit
Both Earth and Luna satisfy 2. I will accept that 1 is debatable, but the crux of my argument is that Luna is the size of a terrestrial planet (yes, ~1% of Earth's mass, but still huge and of roughly the same order of magnitude as Mercury, which is a mere ~5% of Earth's mass) and exceptionally large relative to its orbital partner compared to any other "satellite", a factor the IAU does not account for.
It's important to note that 1 literally does not permit binary planets - even if both bodies are identical, one must be the "moon". This is major criticism of the IAU definition. It also doesn't account for exoplanets or rogue planets, but that's another story.
3 is where this definition falls apart. You could easily argue that most of the planets in our solar system fail depending on how you interpret it, because it's so fuzzy. The Earth fails, because there's a planet-sized body chilling out in its orbit (Luna), Jupiter fails because it has huge quantities of asteroids trapped in its Lagrange points, etc.
In the latter case, we say that because Jupiter is determining the motion of these bodies, it still counts. For the Earth we simply ignore Luna and say that the rule is more about stray bodies than orbital partners. But by the same logic we can say that for Luna we ignore the Earth, and Luna passes.
So I would argue that the IAU definition is bad, but if you fixed it so that it allowed binary systems to exist, it would readily define Luna as a planet in my view (if you deleted the Earth from the solar system and left Luna, it would unambiguously meet the criteria).
Now let's talk about barycentres.
The barycentre of two bodies in orbit is just their overall centre of mass. People often point to the external barycentre of the Pluto-Charon system to indicate that they are binary dwarfs. However, this is a poor metric in my view, because it's highly dependent on orbital distance.
The centre of mass of the Earth-Luna system is inside the Earth at present, but if Luna simply orbited further away, the barycentre would be in the empty space between them, with nothing about the two bodies individually, or the qualitative nature of their orbits, having changed. In fact, given enough time and pretending the Sun won't consume both bodies in a few billion years, Luna would actually drift far enough away due to tidal interactions for this to happen - it would be silly for it to suddenly be a planet one day when it wasn't the day before.
To answer your question, no. I would under no circumstances argue that the martian moons are planets. They are minuscule space potatoes that are not even large by the standards of asteroids. If Mars were close enough in mass to them for the system to be considered plausibly trinary, it would be far too small to even qualify as a dwarf planet (and there's no way such a system would be gravitationally stable to perturbation by Jupiter regardless).
@hereticalteapot Thank you so much for laying this all out! I totally agree. Something that's motivating to me is the fact that Luna is more gravitationally attracted to the Sun than to Earth- and by that definition is orbiting the Sun, not the Earth. This is not true of any other "moons" in our solar system except some which are not even large enough to become spheres- so this is another way in which it is different from the moons in our system.
It's really frustrating to me when people lash out and say "You're wrong because there's a definition, for the love of god look up the definition" about a topic where I think it's clear my point is that I KNOW the definition and I disagree with it. And that's allowed! Definitions are made up! "Planets" are made up, and I think we should make them up differently!
All the things in our solar system are just different kinds of rocks dancing to each other's gravity- they're all affected by each one's gravity, even in tiny ways. They do not fall neatly into subcategories "planet" and "not a planet" - we made this distinction up because we wanted it. We noticed that some of the bodies in our solar system seemed much more important and dominant than others and we wanted a name for that. But the planets don't know that- they don't have an inherent major distinction between them, nor are they obligated to. When we wanted to come up with a way to clearly decide which bodies were planets, we had to make something up.
What we made up is a little bit vague, and even if it were extremely clear cut, we could still debate whether it was a reasonable or intuitive or useful definition.
In science we have lots of definitions, and they aren't handed down by god, they're made by people, and they are made to be useful, and when they aren't useful or reasonable, they can be and should be and are changed. Knowing which things fit which definitions is part of science, but another part of science is thinking critically about whether things SHOULD be defined, how they should be defined, whether definitions need to be changed, and other things like this- and that's messier than just knowing facts. But that's science.
I hate to say it folks, but my fondness for the "Luna is a planet" argument might not just be because it's silly and I like to be silly. It might be a really convenient training ground for thinking about definitions which are social constructs in other contexts. Like race, sex, gender, disability, economics. These things, like planets, are made up. They are very real, don't get me wrong! They are real because we made them up! But what, exactly, they are... we decided it. And we could decide differently. We have that power. If you don't like something because it doesn't fit a definition- that's not really an argument against it. Because the definition could be changed. Should it be?
Also for any barycenter definition fans - the barycenter of Luna and Jupiter is within Jupiter. I think we can all agree Luna is not a moon of Jupiter.
Something else to note is that IAU bylaws require a new definition to be voted on to be circulating for at least a year in the scientific community. The one voted on in 2006 was drafted the same day. Also, the vote was specifically and carefully planned such that most of the planetary scientists who were only there for specific parts of the conference relevant to their fields had left already. It was rigged and in violation of their own bylaws, so I think its well past time we stop listening to this absurd definition.
my pro-moon-is-a-planet attitude stems from an even sillier point of view than all of this very smart discourse: If the moon was a planet, Sailor Moon lore would finally make so much more sense.
I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.
And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.
I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc
and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.
this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told
when that's just not true.
the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.
there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.
there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.
there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.
Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.
Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.
Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.
the nearest depiction of an animal or other sentient fantasy creature to you at this moment comes to life right where it is (i.e. cat photograph, shark plushie, dragon painting, etc)
what happens to you
i am so dead
i need to go to the hospital
maybe a few things to be looked at but i’m fine in the end
i’m totally fine
i’m totally fine and i’m happy
my situation is really really really specific lemme tell you about it
n/a
Voting ended onJan 11
assume it doesn’t know you (unless it’s actually a specific animal you’ve met) and that it’s normal for its species and would do whatever was natural for it. including being too giant for and destroying the room it’s in. as well as dying immediately if its environment can’t support its life
My 2025 New Year's Resolution was to get back into reading books, and so I decided to keep track of the books I read this year by month.
How many of these have you read and which one was your favourite?
All the books I read in 2025 - as you can see a lot of it was Seanan McGuire, I've loved the Toby Daye series this year. How many have...
How many of these books have you read (in any language)?
0
1-9
10-19
20-29
30-39
40-49
50-59
All 60!
Voting ended onJan 9
My Summary Statistics:
Total books read: 58 (+2 partial)
Total books read by @seananmcguire : 20 (1/3 of books read this year)
Total pages read: 23,118 (plus one audiobook: a re-listen of @thebibliosphere 's Hunger Pangs)
Average number of pages read per day: 63
Also: many, many fanfics on AO3. Most memorably, at least one and a half re-reads of @inexplicifics Accidental Warlord AU, which is a great Witcher AU and would absolutely recommend.
Most common genres: Fantasy (32 books), Sci-Fi (9 books), non-fiction (7 books), historical fiction (5 books and my favourites were definitely Mrs. Victoria Buys a Brothel and Tales of Swainsburg by @wheeloffortune-design ), crime/thriller (4 books)
Books with canonically queer characters: 29
Books read in German: 16
Books read in Spanish: one partial
Favourite book: Impossible to pick just one - I've loved reading the October Daye series and I can't pick my favourite (but am planning a re-read 2026). Excluding any books in series, I think The Great Undoing would be my pick.
Most important lesson: Reading is fun but sometimes life gets in the way and that's okay.
Monthly breakdowns and individual comments under the cut. Ratings and reviews are subjective, 5/5 being essentially "I have or want to re-read this book and have been pushing my friends to read it" and 0/5 would be "I have decided to set my copy of this book on fire and also sworn to never read anything from the author ever again" - there are no 0/5 in the list.
January:
Rumo und die Wunder im Dunkeln by Walter Moers:
Set in the world of Zamonien, a hero origin story. I love the fantastic worlds created by Walter Moers and how they tie in together, and this was a fun read. 4/5
One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire:
The 5th part of the October Daye series, I'm not going to be doing individual reviews here especially since I tagged the author but I love Toby and her found family and the series overall is 5/5. Might do individual reviews/posting when I re-read.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus:
A Christmas gift from family - very popular book with a recent TV series. I was rather unpleasantly surprised by the graphic sexual assault and dark themes given the optic of the book, but I did enjoy the chemistry and cooking aspects and the latter part of the book was quite enjoyable. Overall 2.5/5.
Scandor by Ursula Poznanski:
Another childhood/teenage favourite author. She's great at building tension and threatening plots, and this book really makes you question if you could stand not telling a single untruth to get a million euro prize. Still very much enjoy her books. 5/5
Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe:
Very interesting non-fiction about evidence of agricultural practices of First Nation Australians - made me mad about colonialism but also interested in using some native ingredients for my own cooking/baking. 4.5/5
Desert Star by Michael Connelly:
Detective novel about how far a main character is willing to go to capture a murderer that got away. Reminded me of why I don't read a lot of crime novels with police protagonists. They always break the law/don't follow procedure. I've got beef with the rogue cop genre. Disregarding that, it was a well-written book. 3/5
Das Einhörnchen, das Rückwärts Leben Wollte by Walter Moers:
A collection of Zamonian fables - as per usual for this author very fantastic and creative. I prefer the style he uses in his novels over the style in this collection, where he used significantly more references to the present world (explained as attempting to culturally translate the Zamonian originals). 3.5/5
Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire:
Part 6 of Toby Daye, still amazing.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton:
Historical novel set in the gold rush in Aotearoa. Many-layered and complex, a mystery solved slowly by a group of men. Took me quite a while to get through due to the complexity of language and plot. A TV adaptation exists but I didn't wind up finishing it. 3.5/5
February:
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire:
Part of the Wayward Children series, a very creative fantasy multiverse setting. I'm very much looking forward to both the next part that's sitting near the top of my to-read pile from 2026 and the next part that'll come out soon and I'll be ordering to my local bookstore. Series is 5/5.
Frau Komachi empfiehlt ein Buch by Michiko Aoyama:
A very peaceful slice-of-live novel set in Japan, where each chapter a person is recommended a book by the local librarian and learns a life lesson or embraces a new path. I quite enjoyed the way the different stories intertwined. 4.5/5
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett:
My first ever Terry Pratchett (other than Good Omens) - definitely love his wit and world building. Will be reading more Disk World novels. 5/5
Not pictured: Attempted to read La Ciudad de las Bestias by Isabel Allende in the original Spanish. Made it about halfway through before setting it aside for when work gives me a bit more brain space.
March:
Was still trying to read La Ciudad de las Bestias.
The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers:
I've loved this book since when I was a kid, still think the amount of creativity that goes into his world-building is simply astonishing. Bought an English version so I can make my friends here read it without making them learn German first. 5/5
Feed by Mira Grant:
Government conspiracy/investigative journalism thriller with background zombie apocalypse that's been going on for a few decades. Made me cry on the commuter train home. 5/5
April:
Pretty much read three of these in a single long weekend away from work. I'd been steadily burning the candle at both ends before then due to work being very busy and took a few days off to chill next to my uncle's pool. I think one re-read of Accidental Warlock belongs before this period.
The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry by C. M. Waggoner:
Took me personally a while to get into - I tend to struggle a bit if I can't relate to a protagonist from the get-go, especially in a world that I still need to learn the rules in. I did come to like the group of more or less ruthless ladies and enjoyed the plot once it sped up. 3.5/5
Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire:
Toby Daye. Still amazing. 5/5
Die Wälder by Melanie Raabe:
Crime/thriller about trying to solve a childhood mystery. Being pulled back into trauma that you'd tried to forget about. The book left me wondering if the childhood bogeyman was actually the bad guy or not pretty much right until the end. 4/5
The Winter Long by Seanan McGuire:
Still Toby Daye. 5/5
Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson:
A book about the history of the English language. Very much written by a white dude in the 80s. Contains pearls such as "the Irish language is dying out because it doesn't make sense and English is much easier to learn". Examples using German were also frequently wrong. Spent most of my time reading this ranting to friends about particularly atrocious passages. Some parts were interesting. 1/5
A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire:
I had finally found a way to purchase the rest of the Toby Daye series without waiting 3 months for it to be printed and shipped and was reading one book by Seanan, one book by someone else. Still 5/5.
May:
Wit'ch Fire by James Clemens:
A fantasy book very clearly written by a cis guy. Not quite breasted boobily but getting there and I couldn't stop noticing. Inciting incident is protagonist girl having her first period - cramps and then the entire seat of her pants is covered in blood. She goes home and sits in a nice bath for a few hours and then shit happens and she goes climbing trees and running away from bad guys and riding and fighting and her period never gets mentioned again. The world building was still quite nice and I did like the framing device of this being a historical document. Probably won't read the other parts though. 2/5
Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire:
Toby Daye. 5/5
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller:
I know it's hyped up quite a bit, and I love mythology, but it didn't really capture me terribly much. The tragedy is sad, but Achilles spent a bit too much time being mostly a jock. I don't entirely know, maybe it's because I've got a childhood attachment to Odysseus lol. Maybe it's because of the same reason I don't particularly like Titanic. I spent most of it waiting for the main event and for everyone to die. 3.5/5
The Brightest Fell by Seanan McGuire:
Toby Daye. 5/5
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros:
The mediocre Marvel movie of books. Popular on booktok I think. It's entertaining as long as you don't think about it a whole lot. I could still predict pretty much the entire book from reading the blurb on the back. Might read the other parts if I need something light that doesn't require thinking but if I do I'll get them from the library. 2.5/5
June:
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire:
If there is an opposite to Fourth Wing this is it. The plot twist definitely caught me by surprise (but could've been figured out from foreshadowing now that I know it), I loved the world building based on linguistics and mathematics. It did take me a while to read this, I think I read the first 50 or so pages several years ago but didn't have the focus to finish. Enjoyed it much more this time around, though still wouldn't call it a light read. 4.5/5
Mrs. Victoria Buys a Brothel:
Neurodivergent, middle-aged queer women finding love (and family) in the late 19th century wild west. Got some gorgeous art work and stickers by signing up for the Kickstarter too. Lots of characters I either loved to love or loved to hate. You can very much tell that the author is at home in fandom on Tumblr, focussing on character development and found family, though the plot is also tense and there were parts where I couldn't put the book down. 5/5
Night and Silence by Seanan McGuire:
Toby Daye. 5/5
Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar by Tom Holland:
Picked this one up from a free book box. Did find large parts of it quite interesting, but it felt like the author quite gloried in the violence and perversion of the various early emperors. Interesting view of Augustus's wife Livia as the master manipulator behind the dynasty using political acumen rather than feminine wiles. 3.5/5
The Unkindest Tide by Seanan McGuire:
Toby Daye, 5/5.
Not pictured:
The Marmalade Files by Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlmann:
At this point I went on holiday for a few weeks, so no photos and lots of books that I read in German. This one was from the same free book box as the previous one, an Australian political thriller. I found the outlook to be incredibly pessimistic/nihilist, which I get plenty of in real life and would prefer avoiding in my fiction most of the time. Everyone sucks and is selfish type of worldview. The mystery itself was still interesting though. 2.5/5
The Great Undoing by Sharlene Allsop:
A really interesting dystopian sci-fi novel with themes of whether you can ever return home again and how much of any story can possibly be truth. In this world, everyone was using blood-based satellite communication to do everything from shopping to banking to accessing your photos or calling friends, and when that system stopped working it left everything in chaos and our protagonist struggling to get home. 5/5
Star Trek Prometheus - Feuer gegen Feuer by Bernd Perplies & Christian Humberg:
The first part of the first Star Trek series to ever be written in German. Featuring a great crew, the Prometheus, exploring a star cluster and trying to find the people responsible for recent terrorist attacks. The local aliens are normally reclusive and isolationist and this is unexpected behaviour. A Klingon crew and their aggressive commander are (sometimes) helping resolve this. Ambassador Spock is also present of course. Rating the series 4.5/5.
Die Unsichtbare Bibliothek/The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman:
A great multiverse setting with an interdimensional library trying to collect every version of every book in existence. The protagonist is an agent of the library, trying to find a book in a steampunky world full of elves and danger. This is the first part of a series and I should find the next part in 2026. 4/5
Der Sternenleser/The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville:
A book based on the historical events during the arrival of the first fleet in Sydney, when an astronomer/lieutenant built the first bit of the Royal Observatory and also, and probably more importantly, the story of how he made friends and learned the language of the local Gadigal people. The book also covers the atrocities committed by the first fleet and how relationships soured. 4/5
Der Ring der Nibelungen by Wolfgang Hohlbein:
An adaptation of a very well-known German myth, a story of the disaster brought on by jealousy, the need for vengeance (and a cursed treasure). It's been a while since I read the original myth but I am not sure the adaptation added much. Would rather read the original. 2.5/5
July:
Not pictured because still on holiday for half the month:
Star Trek Prometheus - Der Ursprung Allen Zorns by Bernd Perplies & Christian Humberg:
See comment on part 1 of the series. 4.5/5
Star Trek Prometheus - Ins Herz des Chaos by Bernd Perplies & Christian Humberg:
See comment on part 1 of the series. 4.5/5
Die Sache mit Tom by Rüdiger von Fritsch:
An autobiographical narration of how Rüdiger helped his cousin Tom (and friends) escape from the GDR using faked passports. Complete with supporting documents and a well-written, tense adventure, made even better by the fact that it was true. Also interesting historical context about life in a divided Germany and Europe. 4.5/5
Hunger Pangs - True Love Bites, Fluff and Fangs Audiobook by Joy Demorra:
Having now read both Terry Pratchett and Jane Austen I can confirm this book is a great mix of both of them. I love my progressive vampire, disabled werewolf and stubborn [redacted]. Patiently waiting for the next part while Joy keeps her body together with what I believe is some string, hope and finally a competent team of doctors. Fantastic gaslamp fantasy, 5/5
August:
Thief's Magic by Trudi Canavan:
Fantasy novel about a grave-robbing archeology student finding a sentient book and figuring out that technology causes (magic) climate change, then having to flee from the establishment. Secondary protagonist who spends most of her time angsting about wanting to fuck a guy (he's hot but her family wouldn't approve). Gets a bit better towards the end but overall meh. 2/5
This is also when I started DMing a homebrew campaign of DnD so shout-out to the various reference books like the Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual and Player's Handbook. That's where most of my free time for the next while went.
September:
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien:
It's the Hobbit. You know the Hobbit, I know the Hobbit, everyone knows the Hobbit. I hadn't read it in English before so I went and did that. 4/5
October:
When Sorrows Come by Seanan McGuire:
It's time for a wedding - congrats Toby! This is also when I realised that the newest part of the series would come out soon and picked up my reading habit again. DnD can be improv'ed.
Weltgeschichte by Manfred May:
A children's history of the world that I re-read to see if I could give it to a friend who's into history and learning German. Found it to be very Europe-centric (Australia gets mentioned once, I counted) but a solid summary to be supplemented by proper school history and some additional reading of non-European sources. 3/5
Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant:
Killer mermaids and how their biology might work. Read this, was very glad I was on a plane at the time and not a boat, gifted it to my aunt who used to sail around the world, she confirmed the ocean is scary (no mermaids though, luckily). Couldn't put it down. 5/5
Die Lange Reise by Samantha Cristoforetti:
The diary of an ESA astronaut, covering the training to become an astronaut and her first mission on the ISS. Loved it, really interesting. 4.5/5
Be the Serpent by Seanan McGuire:
Another Toby Daye book, another fantastic reveal (I did suspect but that's sometimes the best part). 5/5
Tales of Swainsburg by Talhí Briones:
A collection of short stories about the characters in Mrs. Victoria Buys a Brothel, how they got to where they were in the book and where they went after the book. I loved all of the different stories, it was great to see the different perspectives. 4.5/5
Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire:
Poor Toby. And fuck [redacted] for doing this. 5/5
Not pictured:
Klingon Next Door: Off Duty the Warrior's Way by Joey Spiotto:
Cute comics. Let's be real this one was in there so I could stick to my rule of one non-Seanan book between Toby books without it needing too much time. 4/5
The Innocent Sleep by Seanan McGuire:
Tybalt PoV! Loved reading Tybalt's PoV. Poor Tybalt though. This was a rough one. 5/5
November:
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland:
December:
Zombies in the American civil war. Had the book for ages, similarly to Ruthless Lady's Guide I didn't much vibe with the protagonist to start out with but the book picked up a lot once I got past that initial getting to know the world bit. Very open-ended but not sure if I would go buy another part. 3/5
Deutsche Geschichte by Manfred May:
Essentially see my comments on his world history. It's a good summary, though needs a few chapters added given it was last updated in like 2005. 3/5
Silver and Lead by Seanan McGuire:
The latest of the Toby books! I'm so glad they got a little bit of a breather in this one, at least relatively speaking. Can't wait (patiently waiting) for the next one. 5/5
When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker:
I'll admit, I bought this book because of its cover. Insanely detailed world building, couldn't stop trying to work out how gravity worked in this world and what the rotation period of the planet looks like. Plot was standard romantasy. Not understanding how gravity works in this world annoyed me very much. Might read the next book but probably from the library if I do. 3/5
Todesglut by Cathrin Moeller:
Set on Rügen, first of a series. Once again my beef with crime/detective novels is that they never stick to the law and none of the evidence would be admissible in court. There are rules for a reason. However, the mystery was well-written and I would be interested in the next parts, I'd just like to lodge my complaint about the criminal behaviour of the detective. 4/5
Deadline by Mira Grant:
Part 2 of the Newsflesh trilogy, bigger on the government conspiracy, more zombies, made me immediately go and buy part 3. Will read part 3 soon. 5/5
Not pictured:
Partial re-read of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (in progress).
Also started crocheting a blanket while listening to the Accidental Warlord podfics
DM'ed a few one-shots using the AtlA RPG Quick-starter and quite enjoyed that.
Hope you enjoyed my little summary, happy to chat about any of the books I read or hear your recs for stuff I should really try to read next year. I've already got a bit of a pile including more Seanan McGuire, more Star Trek, Wheel of Time and some other books.
I came up with this three-way table to help me (and now you, if you want) to rate things out of 5 stars. I was thinking of books and films when I made it, but you can probably use it for other stuff.
The idea is that you rate the thing on how much stuff you loved and how much stuff you hated, and those things weight against each other. There's only one way to get 5 stars or 1 star, so those should end up as the rarest ratings, wtih 3 stars being the most common.
'Spicy' means that the thing inspires emotion, whether positive or negative, while 'bland' means it doesn't affect you much either way.
An example of a 3-star (spicy) - for me personally - would be the Twilight series, because there's plenty of garbage in there but also some things that are like crack to me. I can't think of an example of a 3 star (bland) because by nature they don't stick in the mind.
(This also assumes giving 0 stars isn't allowed. That'd throw it out of whack...)
Just weeks after announcing his split with fiancée Katy Perry, English actor Orlando Bloom was photographed Friday dining with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Angela kept Orlando laughing all night—he couldn’t keep his eyes off her!” said an insider source who spotted the pair sipping wine, slurping oysters, and splitting a decadent piece of chocolate layer cake at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the 'fairies' be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.
And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not'.
Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.
At work me and a couple coworkers (black, white, and mexican) had a fun discussion on whether there are more ghosts at a hospital or a cemetery.
everyone individually took a moment to specify that ghosts probably aren't REAL real. then weighed in on where and why.
for the record my position was that there's probably way more ghosts in hospitals because that's where people die horribly, but since you can only see ghosts in dark, solitary conditions, graveyards at night is where the majority of ghost sightings occur. hospitals are usually well lit and busy, so even if they're crammed with ghosts the living are too damn busy to see them. meanwhile if a cemetery has even one ghost that followed her corpse there from the hospital, she'll be spotted because that's where all the ghost hunters go to look.
this theory was received as extremely sensible, and a coworker drew the conclusion that that's why abandoned hospitals are even scarier than graveyards. once the place gets abandoned then you can tell how much ghosts got built up.
we all liked this explanation a lot and explained it to everyone else all night. and of course, none of us believe in ghosts.
Oh yeah trolls aren't real, they're a representation of the devastating forces of nature, I live in the mountains and fjords of Norway and the amount of times I've gone "yeah I see how someone could think that was supernatural" - like you have giant rocks on the top of mountains, and yeah, the ice age glaciers probably moved them there
But when I am walking around at night I am minding my own business. I heard a sound? Nope I didn't. Saw something weird? Nope, not me.
