CardinalMelody's Blog @cardinalmelody - Tumblr Blog

The Brutes intercept bartering between their own and the Overworlders, and the Grand Brute gets an idea.

(grandma is angry that MC: Legends stopped getting updates)

Minecraft: My World AU - Act II - Nether Arc Part 11

So...how much of the bad discourse surrounding Steven Universe is just because people were really hoping that the Gems would beat up Andy DeMayo in "Gem Harvest"?

quasi-normalcy

I was astonished to learn that there was controversy around this episode, because I felt like it was just kind of a normal children's cartoon about getting along with difficult relatives; and then I looked it up and learned that it had the extremely inauspicious timing of airing right after Trump's 2016 victory, and, yeah, okay, I can understand why a children's fantasy about reconciling with your obnoxious conservative relatives and getting them to accept your alternate family structure would play rather poorly at the time.

quasi-normalcy

I think that Rebecca Sugar probably assumed, like most of the world that wasn't my specific flavour of extremely online in 2016, that Clinton would crush Trump and that this episode would maybe help to smooth over divisions; but of course what ended up happening is that an episode about how you should be empathetic towards your bigoted relatives ended up airing just as your bigoted relatives were going around victoriously hate-criming people in the street.

quasi-normalcy

Watching it now, though, it ends up feeling wistful more than anything. Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did? It feels like a pleasant dream.

livingauthorssociety

Steven Universe is fundamentally a power fantasy—but the fantasy is being able to get through to people and heal things. The power is love instead of strength.

lilly-kittyeyes

"Like, yeah, sure, it doesn't work like that, and we all know that now...But wouldn't it be nice if it did?" Yeah....

queer-as-city-folk

Happy Pride everyone, today is the tenth anniversary of the nationwide right to gay Marriage in the United States and the 22nd anniversary of nationwide legalization of Gay Sex. In 2 days is the 56th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

queer-as-city-folk

We have won nothing without fighting and we have everything to lose, there is no gay liberation without trans liberation, none of us are free till all of us are free, we have won so much and come so far but the road ahead is still long, we must continue to fight for both our liberation and the liberation of all people

queer-as-city-folk

The gay liberation movement is young, everything we have fought for and won happened over the course of less than a human lifetime, and there are forces at play that wish to claw back at these hard fought for rights, we must be prepared to defend what we have fought for and we must continue to fight for improvement

queer-as-city-folk

We have to celebrate how far things have come, because we never would have made it this far without joy and hope, and while we can and must fight, we also must remain hopeful

queer-as-city-folk

This year is:

11 years since nationwide gay marriage in the US

23 years since sodomy was legalized

57 years since Stonewall

asteroidtroglodyte

I need Feminism because Patriarchy takes kind, sweet, loving little boys, and hammers them with stories about how kindness is a weakness; and that sweetness is to be ridiculed; and that love is a stupid thing; and it turns them into monsters; and I watched it happen to the boys alongside me growing up and to the children of my friends; and now this system of systems wants to take my sweet boy who loves without restraint and hammer him into shapes that will hurt him so that Executives and Statesmen can wield him as a weapon and I want to protect him but this world is owned and engineered by very clever men with no kindness or sweetness or love left in their hearts and I am so so afraid for him but I have it within my power to show him a home where the man and the woman are equals and friends and if that makes me some kind of political radical then so be it but I cannot believe that as I approach my 5th decade of life that we are still grappling with the notion that All Humans Are People.

blowery

c-rowlesdraws

Varishkava! I adored the flea caravan from the moment I met them--they're a cheerful light in a dark world. Way before I knew anything about Act III, I could imagine them inviting their new warrior friend to set down her weapon and enjoy their company and hospitality awhile before rushing off again on her quest.

And feeling inspired by the bug food other people have come up with in art and fics, I had to draw some, too. Everything here is made with blood--they're fleas!--and I think they'd mostly eat foods that keep well for traveling, with fresh-made foods as more of a special thing.

(also these drawings are set pre-Kratt because he'd spoil the vibe)

a sign from work :)

Help Me - Gator Days

Being obsessed with your own ocs is so so good for you i seriously can't recommend it enough

nikoisme

The only downside is that you have to do Everything around here

thetiredpenguin

I have to do everything around here and I WILL do everything around here if it KILLS ME

what-even-is-thiss

Why should all citizens get a certain amount of free food from the government to supplement what they can buy on their own? That’s the sort of stupid commie thing they do in *checks notes* the ancient Roman republic.

what-even-is-thiss

Yeah Rome had a free grain and sometimes bread ration program for its citizens, including the very poor ones. Surprise! Government handouts aren’t a new concept!

what-even-is-thiss

It’s crazy watching people say that something is gonna ruin society when we’ve been doing it in some form or another for thousands of years and people generally like it when it happens.

Even places that didn’t regularly provide their people with free food often had emergency stores in case of famine or natural disaster that they distributed to people like in ancient China.

Also are you against government loans to farmers? Like they had in *checks notes* feudal Japan?

oxyisdamoron

TIL America doesn't even have food distribution

what-even-is-thiss

We have SNAP

oxyisdamoron

Ooh what's that?

what-even-is-thiss

Supplemental nutrition assistance program. It gives low income households a certain amount of money on a card each month that can only be used at grocery stores. Some homeless people can also get one that works at fast food restaurants.

Personally I think that everyone should get a SNAP card but that idea is too radical for a lot of people unfortunately.

daburdboi

it is also very strict about what counts as low income. I have heard of people turning down raises at work cause they would lose their SNAP benefits. People who won't pick up money off the ground because they don't want to lose it all.

linguisticparadox

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

ri-writing

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free.

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.

linguisticparadox

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

wanderingchaos

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

athenadark

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

the-haiku-bot

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

elfwreck

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

noswordinourlake

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

stevespookington

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

rostekhorn

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

trambrosia

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

damnhotpocket

Gema.piano on instagram

Why are all music teachers like this 😭😭😭

communeist

THEY ARE

crematedequally

when i was 8 i had a very intimidating russian woman as a music teacher- she was both my opera instructor and piano teacher. about a month into piano, she sat me down and said to my mother and i "this child- very beautiful voice, good for singing. i will not allow this child to continue piano. god did not want this child to play an instrument. he told me this in dreams. that is all."

my mom had it written down on a slip so we could remember the exact words because it was so funny. i HATED playing piano and i was definitely not good at it (i did end up having a good 5 years of opera training and ended up being a pretty accomplished choir singer though) and the idea of god sending my incredibly severe and serious russian piano teacher a dream begging her to stop teaching me piano was probably the funniest way it could have gone.