bookwyrms like shiny things

genre, tech, science, feminism, literature, and the world.

[vulcartist]

I translated the Ea-Nasir complaint into vulcan and engraved it in on a cooper plate

[tournevis-real]

The tumblrest sentence I have ever seen

[iesika]

“Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. ‘There’s only one true evil in the world,’ he said through his characters. ‘And that’s treating people like they were things.’ And in the last of his ‘grown-up’ Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.”

— John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via liquidlightandrunningtrees)

[in-libris-liberta-s-deactivated]

Just finished hamlet & had to share THIS

[iamnmbr3]

btw this is literally what goes down. it’s great. 

[ovenroastedtwerkey]

You just know the ye olde peasants went NUTS at that last part

[elodieunderglass]

We don’t say sblood enough we should bring it back

[letseyx]

Revolutionary Rom

[komakesthings]

I've slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I've drawn on Tumblr!

[bwabbitv3s]

I finished the last constellation tonight. All 40 of them are now done! Went through and double checked and every stitch is in place for them and all the beads are in place. Which just leaves the milky way part to do.

[bwabbitv3s]

Started stitching the Milky Way in. Slowly making progress on it as I am hiding the travelling thread so the back will look nice.

Looks pretty cool and keeps the readability of the other stitches. Very happy with it. Just a thousand or so to do. As they are in a grid roughly every centimetre apart.

[bwabbitv3s]

Update on the constellation quilt. I have gotten the last Milky Way stitch done now. Which means the quilting part of this project is done. My next step will be to baste the edges down, remove the pattern, trim the quilt square, and lastly attach the binding.

[bwabbitv3s]

Progress on the constellation quilt has come along quite a lot now. Finished the binding on the quilt over the weekend. I prefer to machine stitch the binding to the front then hand stitch the back side. It gives such a nice finish to the quilt. Took the time to measure it also and it ended up being 72" by 72" (183cm by 183cm).

With that done I could finally start removing the pattern. Which is taking both less time and more time that I thought it would. As it rips really easily so that goes fast, but the tiny corners and removing it under the beads is slow. You can now see the difference in the glow effect with it against the dark front of the quilt instead of the pattern.

[bwabbitv3s]

Behold the stars of the constellations of the northern sky! I love how this quilt has turned out. It was a lot of fun to work on and the effect is so cool in person. Overall I would estimate it took about 90-100 hours to complete. Give or take 10 hours if you want to count the time I spent custom dying the fabric.

I made sure to get a nice photo of it in daylight. For once I also remembered to get a quilt label on it. The back really shows the difference in readability of the quilting on the ice dyed fabric compared to the solid front. Thank you everyone that has followed this. I am glad you all found joy in it.

Those that are interested, here is the pattern I used by Haptic Lab. I made the large northern hemisphere version, and plan to make the matching southern hemisphere one next year. I also got your back for the less crafty people. Haptic Lab sells finished quilts in this pattern, both as a large quilt and a small one.

[monstermonger]

I've been studying botany lately for the art book I'm working on, and, while not getting tooo bogged down in scientifically accurate things, still happily trying to apply some little details while drawing the flowers in my recent pieces :D thinking about what makes each specific flower itself.... that sort of thing 🌸🌺🌼🌻🌷🌹

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"What do we learn from all this? Mostly the same thing we learned when the crypto bros repeatedly rediscovered financial fraud, or when effective altruists decided the most effective altruism was to buy themselves a castle, or when ride share companies kept accidentally reïnventing the bus. If you start by ignoring everything that we already know, the best you can ever hope for is to accidentally rediscover the already-known."

- - Rusty Foster, Over Leveraged

[nopizzaaftermidnight]

[nopizzaaftermidnight]

June 26, 2014

What the heck! As of this reblog, this comic has 21 notes. Apparently a little reblog chain happened, but I don’t really remember noticing. Much higher numbers than my usual 0 or 1. My first taste of success, and I totally missed it!

[nopizzaaftermidnight]

honestly, if I had a comic take off I wouldn’t mind this one. I still like the joke.

[sawed-on-shotgun]

Im glad they made up romance for stories and music but can you imagine how scary it would be to deal with all that for real

[sawed-on-shotgun]

this is a certified AROMANTIC POST!!!!!!!!!!! NO yearning on my shit..... GO ON . GET

[aromanticofficial]

official aromantic post

[gailstephensleatherjacket]

midsomer murders out of context

[allsonargent]

I didn’t go missing, David. The FBI knew where I was the entire time.

[trucywright]

When the actual academic scholarly book makes the tumblr meme post a reality.

[pocket-deer-belly]

at some point in being autistic it becomes really clear that everyone wants you to come up with solutions to problems you've never been helped with

[pocket-deer-belly]

i don't know how to fix our communicative problems, you're the source of it and it's exhausting to be treated as irrational for not responding correctly to small talk, do you think you could help a disabled bitch out and not put the onus of solving the problem on me, the one who is constantly excluded and treated as a freak

[pocket-deer-belly]

and then when you point this out they're like "but we literally put up with you, could you do something for us please?" and it's like. you put up with me?

[lakemojave]

You know that whatever character did those problematic things isn't like. Real, right?

[lakemojave]

You are aware that a fictional character is just a rhetorical construct designed to fulfill a narrative/thematic purpose right? That their actions are written by an author who wants to use them to explore complex ideas and moral gray areas within the safe confines of fiction right? That they aren't a real person who has killed real people right?

[rottingapotheosis]

[sanguinifex]

You gotta read and watch some old books and films that aren’t 100% modern politically correct. I’m not saying you should agree with everything in them but you need to learn where genres came from to understand what those genres are doing today and where media deconstructing old tropes is coming from.

Also, more often than you might think, they’re not actually promoting bigotry so much as “didn’t consider all the implications of something” or just used words that were polite then but considered offensive now.

Kill the censor in your head.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

When we choose to avoid history because it's Problematic or Says Bad Things, we are choosing to divorce ourselves from understanding how we came from that time to this one, which makes it even more likely for the cycle to repeat, with no one but a few people with shelves of old books aware that it's happened before.

[swimmingblue]

and this shit's important. Media from the past tells us how people from the past acted and thought and behaved.

Plus, a lot of these media pieces were socially acceptable and/or progressive for their time. For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while it contains a lot of words and ideas that are offensive now, was very progressive for its time. The book is a statement piece for how a young man who's grown up in a racist environment, with no words to explain himself other than racist and bigoted ones, decides that the whole system is shit and he's not going to follow those rules any more. So not reading or engaging with it because it uses the n-word a lot really misses the point.

[prokopetz]

There's a thing in Classics studies where you'll read surviving descriptions of Ancient Greek automata which attribute all manner of near-lifelike behaviour to them – then you look at the reconstructed plans for the automaton in question, and it's a device with roughly the sophistication of a wind-up mouse.

The broad consensus seems to be that the authors of such descriptions are exaggerating for clout. For my part, I look at all the people in the year 2026 who've managed to genuinely convince themselves that LLMs are not only sapient, but smarter than they are, and I think: hmm.