Borrowed But Not Returned @borrowedbutnotreturned - Tumblr Blog

Pittsburgh Gothic

You’re waiting for the 61D. A 61A goes past. A 61A goes past. A 61A goes past. A 61A goes past.

The closer you get to the Squirrel Hill tunnel, the slower everything moves. Cars. People. Particles. It’s cold. Oh god, you’re so cold.

It was raining this morning, now it’s sunny outside. You check the thermometer, and it reads sixty. Better salt your sidewalk, gonna snow tonight.

You dropped a rock in that pothole on Brookline, and waited to hear it hit the bottom. You’re still waiting.

The sidewalk is getting steeper and steeper. Now there’s stairs. You climb and climb and climb. Look, a mountain goat.

Your GPS tells you to take a sharp right to stay on Forbes. Your GPS tells you to take a slight left to stay on Forbes. Your GPS tells you to hit the man in the suit to stay on Forbes. Hit the man. Hit him.

No one goes to Carlow University.

Bleeding? Buildings don’t bleed, don’t be silly. That’s just the steel rusting.

An orange sign just ahead of you reads “End Road Work.” You laugh, and see another sign. “Please. Please, I have children. End it.”

They built a bridge under the bridge to keep the bridge from falling on the other bridge under that bridge. The trolls are confused. Where can they live?

Someone said that if you fall in the Mon, when you climb out, your skin will peel off. Ridiculous. No one escapes the Mon.

You’re trying to get home, but every single street is a one way that takes your further and further away. Where is home? What is home?

They say the steel mills poisoned the air and killed the sky. Is that why it weeps? Whenever thunder roars, you swear you can hear a sob.

A man is stabbed with a bottle outside the bar, and ichor the color of tar drips from between his fingers, flecked with gleaming yellow. He bleeds black and gold. The gutters overflow with black and gold. Steelers going to the superbowl.

You woke up and found U P M C etched into your wrist. You went to UPMC physician, and he sent you to UPMC Shadyside. They checked you out and said it’s nothing serious. Good thing you have UPMC healthcare, could have been pricey otherwise.

The guy at Phipps laughs when you ask him what they use for fertilizer and shows you big bins of mulch in the back. Pitt students keep disappearing. The bins are never empty for long.

The treasure map reads “Turn left at the big church, then go straight till you see a PNC.” Thirty souls set out to find it, each took a different path. None returned.

borrowedbutnotreturned

Are you also reading this in the voice of Cecil Gershwin Palmer? Does Pittsburgh have a Dog Park?

#2016 yasummershowdown #pghfya #forever young adult #artifact hunt #fya snapstory

mostlysignssomeportents

Pokemon Go players: you have 30 days from signup to opt out of binding arbitration

Like most other online services, Pokemon Go’s terms of service are a reboot of the Book of Revelations, full of bizarre horrors, each more grotesque than the last.

But even by the standards of EULAs, Pogo finds new depths to plumb: to play Pokemon Go, you have to accede to a binding arbitration clause, surrendering your right to sue and promising only to seek redress for any harms that the company visits upon you in a system of secretive, one-sidedshadow courts paid for by corporations where class actions are not permitted and the house always wins.

In adding binding arbitration to its terms of service, Pokemon joins a small but growing movement of online services that strip their customers of their legal rights as a condition of sale, including Google Fiber and Airbnb (this is also disturbingly common in the US health care industry; when we moved to California we went through three doctors and two dentists before finding health care professionals that didn’t make surrender of your legal rights a condition of care).

But there’s a way out: if you want to play Pokemon Go without submitting to binding arbitration, you need to send an email to [email protected] with the subject “Arbitration Opt-out Notice” within 30 days of creating your account, and include in the body “a clear declaration that you are opting out of the arbitration clause in the Pokémon Go terms of service.”

You’ve got 30 days from signup to do this, and so do your friends, so spread the word: gotta warn ‘em all!

https://boingboing.net/2016/07/16/pokemon-go-players-you-have-3.html

atlfya

Please love us, team-that-must-not-be-named! Not that you’re evil, like Voldemort. You’re awesome. We just aren’t allowed to name you.

+50

BEST BONUS: +5 Name KC +15 Promposal CMG

fyasummershowdown

yay ATL!

mostlysignssomeportents

Laurel and Hardy and horror-Mickey-fursuit perform "Babes in Toyland" #2yrsago

The 1934 adaptation of Babes in Toyland with Laurel and Hardy featured a horrific, off-model, unauthorized Mickey fursuit that had to be seen to be believed. It’s still in copyright, but you can get a cheap DVD on Amazon, under the alternate title “March of the Wooden Soldiers.”

Read the rest…

borrowedbutnotreturned

lookatthisfuckingmouse found this for you!

fishingboatproceeds

Julian Bond died yesterday.

Bond was a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Poverty Law Center. In the early 1960s, he dropped out of college to work on voter registration drives in the American South.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bond was elected a congressman in Georgia’s state legislature. His fellow state congressmen voted 184-12 not to seat him because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, and he was only allowed to serve after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered it.

He also served as chairman of the NAACP for 10 years, between 1998-2008. And he was an early and outspoken advocate of LGBT+ rights, including same sex marriage. (He boycotted the funeral of Coretta Scott King because it was held at a church that opposed marriage equality.)

You may not hear Julian Bond’s name much in the coming days, but you should.

pghfya

1. The Floating Girl

2. Black Eyed Women

3. The Reflection

4. The Shadow

+30

borrowedbutnotreturned

All my captions sound like superheroes. Somebody write me a fanfic where creepy pasta monsters team up and fight evil...or things that are more evil than them? Maybe the should just team up and be super villains instead.

backofthebookshelf

Some Things Your Local Librarians Would Like You To Know

It is not a stupid question. Even if it is a stupid question, we have been thoroughly trained to answer your question without judgement or second-guessing. Besides, we’re mostly just glad you’re not asking us about the noise the printer is making again.

There are probably (at least) two desks in the library. One is where you check out books and is mostly staffed by people wearing nametags that say “Circulation Clerk.” These people can answer your questions about damaged or missing books, fines, and how many forms of identification we’ll need if you want to get a library card but your mailing address is in Taiwan. The other one is closer to the books and computers and is mostly staffed by people wearing nametags that say “Librarian.” These people can answer your questions about spider extermination, how to rent property to the United States Postal Service, and the number of tropical island nations in which you could theoretically establish the first United States Embassy. We would love to answer these questions for you. It would be a nice change from the printer.

We probably own a 3D printer by now. 3D printers, are cool, right? Please, please come use our 3D printer, it’s so lonely.

We spent a lot of money to hire this woodworker to come and teach a class at the library which you can attend for free. You will probably be the only person between the ages of ten and fifty in attendance, but your presence will fill the librarian with an unnameable joy. They will float back to their manager in a daze. “A young person came to my program,” they will say. You will have made their entire job worthwhile.

Every time you ask us for a book, movie, or music recommendation, a baby librarian gets their first cardigan.

Somewhere in the library, there is a form. If you fill out this form with your name and library card number and the details of the thing you are looking for, we will find you the thing. Sometimes the answer is “the thing is in Great Britain and they will not send it to us,” but more often the thing will just appear on hold for you, and one day you will pick up a copy of that out-of-print book you never thought you would read and maybe you will say, “Wow, the library is amazing,” and the librarian’s heart will glow.

Please bring back book #2. The rest of its series misses it very much.

Five dollars is not a large library fine. Believe me, before I started working in libraries, I too wondered how someone could sleep at night, knowing they owed money to the library. When we laugh as you sheepishly apologize for your $2.50 in overdue fees, we are not mocking you, we are thinking of the ten people we sent to debt collection already today.

We really don’t care why you’re checking out Fifty Shades of Grey. Maybe you have a specifically-themed ironic bachelorette party to plan. Maybe you’re working on a thesis paper about mainstream media’s depiction of female sexuality. Maybe you just got curious. We will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Whatever you’re smoking in the family restroom, please stop.

Somewhere on the library’s website, buried under “Links” or “Research” or “On-line Resources,” is a page that a librarian spent a month’s worth of work on. It contains many links to websites you thought everyone knew about, and one to a page that you could never have imagined existed that perfectly solves a problem you never expected to be resolved.

Imagine the kind of person who would think to themselves, “Library school sounds like a thing I should do.” For the most part, you are imagining the kind of person who is now a librarian. We want very much to help you, but we’re not entirely sure how to do that unless you ask. You are not bothering us. Please, come and say hi.

firstdraftwithsarahenni-deactiv

For a long time it stressed me out that I was not one of these people who was like, ‘I get up at four in the morning and I write 2,000 words even if they’re bad.’ I thought that was what you had to do to be a writer. I’m someone who fucks up for six months at a time and doesn’t do anything related to writing and then I sit down and write a shit-ton and then I let go of it again. My friend Nathan [Bransford] says the only thing that everyone who writes a book has in common is that they got it done. There’s so many different ways to get there.

Sarah McCarry (aka The Rejectionist), author of ALL OUR PRETTY SONGS, DIRTY WINGS, and the third book in the Metamorphoses trilogy, ABOUT A GIRL.

Listen to the full interview here, or download it on iTunes or Stitcher.

(via firstdraftwithsarahenni)

MCCARRY/ENNI 2016

(via clairelegrand)

Get it done

pghfya

This. Is. CHOCOLATE. …WARS.

(+3+5=+8)

librarianproblems

WHEN A FAMOUS AUTHOR INTERACTS WITH ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA

borrowedbutnotreturned

Every damn time

tai-korczak

Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.

Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.

weneeddiversebooks

I’m normalizing TV. I am making TV look like the world looks. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people equal WAY more than 50% of the population. Which means it ain’t out of the ordinary. I am making the world of television look NORMAL. I am NORMALIZING television. You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe. And your tribe can be any kind of person, any one you identify with, anyone who feels like you, who feels like home, who feels like truth. You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe, see your people, someone like you out there, existing. So that you know on your darkest day that when you run (metaphorically or physically RUN), there is somewhere, someone, to run TO. Your tribe is waiting for you. You are not alone.

Shonda Rhimes at the humanrightscampaign Gala in Los Angeles. You can read her entire speech on “normalizing TV” here. (via weneeddiversebooks)

diversityinya

Diversity in YA launched online in January 2011, and in February 2013 we joined tumblr. This winter marks our fourth anniversary overall, and two years on tumblr. We’re a little tardy on marking our anniversary this year but the wait was worth it, because we have assembled a giveaway of truly epic proportions to celebrate four years of celebrating diversity!

With generous donations from publishers and authors, we are thrilled to be giving away 100 books with main characters who are of color, LGBT, and/or disabled. (Click on the images above to enlarge them.)

For a complete list of books in the giveaway, go to this Google doc.

Giveaway Details

We will choose 20 winners at random to receive prize packs of 5 books each (we will choose the 5 books for simplicity’s sake).

All series titles will be kept together, so you don’t need to worry about getting a random book two in a trilogy.

Everyone may enter once for free.

Additional entries are available for signal boosting the giveaway on your social media of choice.

Teachers and/or librarians can also receive an extra entry.

You must have a U.S. mailing address to enter. We’re sorry but the publishers are unable to mail to non-U.S. locations.

The deadline to enter is Friday, April 10, 2015.

Enter here via this Rafflecopter form:

(Note to tumblr followers: If you’re reading this on your dash, you probably can’t see the Rafflecopter entry form. To enter the giveaway, click here to go to Rafflecopter or enter at the Diversity in YA website.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20

borrowedbutnotreturned

Baby, do you dare to do this?/ Cause I’m coming...

Why am I only now reading this?

thisfeliciaday

I had a day off this weekend from shooting Supernatural, and I was walking around downtown Vancouver on Saturday, sampling all the artisan coffee I could get my throat around. At one point I saw a pair of guys walking towards me wearing gamer shirts. Black short-sleeved, one Halo and one Call of...