Lumina | just trying to get a degree @dreamy-n-stuff - Tumblr Blog

do you have any sci-fi book recommendations?

SO BROAD! I polled the choup grat for variety :D

Murderbot, obviously. Quick reads full of defensive humor.

The Broken Earth by NK Jemisin is a fave of mine. Mind the content warnings, but the world she builds and her writing style is PHENOMENAL.

Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace is like. What if Ready Player One was good. What if, instead of being an 80s wet dream, it actually examined the implications of a world wide MMO that you live in. What if it actually unpacked the dystopian aspect of it all. What if the supersoldiers were brainwashed babies that should've died.

Wayfarers by Becky Chambers is slow and meandering and character focused. It's like an old slice of life scifi show from the 90s. Think Firefly or Star Trek. You don't have to read them in order, but like Discworld some of them play off of each other.

Monk and Robot by Beck Chambers is similar but their feet are on the ground and each one is like 100 pages so it's a smaller commitment for similar fun. These two are often chategorized as "cosy scifi", but they actually deal with their world problems, it's just the problems that we see are more often internal character problems.

Space Opera by Cat Valente is like. What if Hitchhiker's Guide was good and also queer.

Imperial Radch by Ann Leckie, starting with Ancillary Justice. My favorite was actually Provenance which isn't connected to the main trilogy. What if your spaceship loved you so much it started a civil war between one person.

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee if you want a challenge. I started this two or three times before I got through it all and I ended up enjoying it a lot. I didn't know "strange guy in your head makes decisions for you" was a genre, but here we are.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine if you like the "annoying guy in your head" genre. This is more a scifi mystery which was nice, and reminded me a lot of Provenance. (or Provenance reminded me of this as I read this first.)

Leech by Hiron Ennes, @bigcats-birds-and-books says it counts as scifi, we both liked it a lot! Won't say much about it, I think it's good to go in not knowing too much :3

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone if you haven't read it and want something short and flowery. The audio of this was very nice!

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling if you have a fear of caves :3 A good blend of scifi and horror. The romance is a little bit fucked up too.

Skyhunter by Marie Lu omg a good YA duology! Monsters! Bird people! Found family! Pain! It was very good.

asexualbookbird

"but Broken Earth is fantasy isn't it?" it's good is what it is

liberalsarecool

Greta Thunberg is the courageous person that threatens all weak men.

It is zero surprise that immature and hateful MAGA/GOP are envious.

dadpilled

This is nauseating

Venezuelan prisoners held in bluebonnet prison (TX) who fear being sent to CECOT form SOS in the prison yard. Photo taken by Reuters who flew over the prison in a small plane after being denied entry to the prison by ICE.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/sos-migrants-held-texas-fear-notorious-el-salvador-prison-2025-04-30/

Please read the article. Do not let these people be swept under the rug and forgotten in two weeks. The injustice here is horrifying.

cottaegecore

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

heavensincarnate1111

my birthday entry 🪽💌💐👂🏽

archivedeathdrive

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Planers, 1875

redscharlach

All hail Gustave Caillebotte, the only Impressionist who bothered to say “You know what this art movement doesn’t have enough of? Shirtless rough trade, that’s what!” And then he became the change he wanted to see in the world, and I think that’s beautiful.

roach-works

i saw this in a museum once and i gotta go off on this for a second– not only is it a gorgeous display of technical mastery over light, darkness, composition, form. it’s also a slap in the face to artistic conventions at the time. at the time, you could have nudes but they had to be heroic. they had to be virtuous. 1875, paris– art was supposed to be elevating. it was for the wealthy, it was to be uplifting, it was so everyone who commissioned the pictures could flex their classics education. okay?

so here’s the floor planers. they’re workmen. they’re workmen. they’re not some rent boy you dolled up with a helmet to be achilles or adonis. artists have been hornily painting working-class models (and sex-worker boyfriends) into their portraits forever, but you’re supposed to frame your appreciation for the male form as an intellectually irreproachable appreciation for the heroic body from literature, or, conversely you could depict the humble beauty of peasants, if you must, but it had to be a sort of ode to nature and the simple life. peasants could be art, as long as they were… out there, you know. in a field. being a metaphor. so there’s your options for looking at a shirtless guy: he’s got to be mythic.

but no. look, here, at the workmen. the floor planers. the workmen’s bodies not dressed up in sandals and helmet, in flowers, on a pedestal. the workmen not employed as some distant paean to an arcadian countryside, not stacking sheaves or holding a lamb or elevating the beauty of nature. they’re here, they’re urban, they’re in a room just like you might have. the workers of your world, in your home, in this reality. the male body as a very real, very nonfigurative tool, humble and employed, but still gorgeous. the beauty of the men that the patrician class pays not to see. the men who come into your mansion through the back door and work unseen and leave unseen. those men. there, right there, this painting, glowing and beautiful.

not adonis. but beautiful.

anyway at the time everyone fucking hated this picture because it’s a direct slap across the classist chops. they were BIG MAD, this was filthy, it was an affront. they hated it. the paris salon rejected it. established intellectuals didn’t want anything to do with this kind of confrontation. it wasn’t art.

i just love that.

like, look at those hot guys go. look at the shine on the floor and the way their arms are. no virtuous framing, no classic allusions. just some regular guys making the floors nice for a rich fucker who never laid eyes on them at all. but here they are: look at them.

they’re still beautiful.

supreme-leader-stoat

#if youd ever walked barefoot on a floor that isnt planed youd think this is heroic too

petermorwood

“#if youd ever walked barefoot on a floor that isnt planed youd think this is heroic too” I HAVE walked barefoot on an unplaned wooden floor, and I second the heroism senitment.

volach-deactivated20230326

“When the handle has snapped off the basket that held all your eggs…” gone girl tier monologue

womenintheirwebs-archived

wow she read them down

wanderingjunkdrawer

When you manage a fabric store in a midwest town, you see this played out in real time. Young women coming in during that first year of marriage - when their husbands go to dental college - pert, bubbling with creative plans. Then, four years on, you help them shift to the reality of balancing budget with creativity - and they learn the value of that inexpensive flatfold table that they used to badmouth - to make that 2nd & 3rd baby their own quilts. And they're exhausted. And they're scared. And they are 1000 miles away from family.

And you have your staff play with their kids while you hold them in the tiny restroom as they come completely undone because they just found out that their golden boy husband is having an affair with the someone he's been doing residency with for the past three years.

He confessed that he'd rather be with the other woman but she's of a different faith and it's more important to have kids than to be happy. And no. No he will not grant her a divorce. And he will not stop seeing the other woman - because he's a man. It's his right.

TRUE story.

Also - She was NOT THE ONLY ONE to fall to pieces in our store for similar reasons.

I loath the ideology of "tradwives". It is a false doctrine preach by Patriarchy not a divine being.

It is the nature of evil to hide this way.

jeza-red

This is 100% what happened to the host mom I've been au-pairing for. And to many other moms my friends have been au-pairing for.

Married out of college, 4 kids, he spent 15 years building up his career while she took care of the house and the kids. When he was earning $600k a year suddenly he started to pull away - she wasn't as pretty anymore, the kids were loud, the house was a mess... She wasn't good enough anymore. He got himself a flat. He got her me and my precedessors to help with the kids. No, they can't divorce, that would make him pay her money for the kids and he didn't like that. Every once in a while a bill would be unpaid. My weekly checks would bounce. We lived in a $1,5mil house around DC and our gas or water was turned off more than once.

Somehow he was always out of money.

By accident she learned from a friend of a friend that he was actually seeing a young lady lawyer for a few years now. It wasn't her, it wasn't lost interest. He was just a piece of shit.

Thankfully, she had family that took no shit and they stood behind her and borrowed her money for lawyers to force the divorce now that she had proof of him cheating. She's spent tens of thousands to get there while he was resisting every step of the way - because without divorce he wouldn't have to pay her alimony, he could just throw scraps whenever he wanted and still pretend to be a good dad.

She's spent tens of thousands and two years to free herself from this man, and when she could finally go to work (thank fuck she finished college) she was earning $25k a year.

She only managed to get away with the support of her parents and family. Through the au-pair grapevine I've known other families like that. Too many. Lady down the street tried to commit suicide when same happened to her - she was from Taiwan and had no support to get free. And people around scorned her for being "dramatic" - women who held on to their places with their fingertips talked shit about her, because their own husbands would never...! Right?

Right?

techmomma

This? This is the kind of shit that first wave feminists and suffragettes were fighting against. Hell, even into second-wave feminism.

This? Is why conservatives want to take away no-fault divorce--because if some dude says no to a divorce and you don't have any (IRON-TIGHT) evidence of cheating? Then you're stuck in that situation and he doesn't have to pay a drop toward you and your kids. He can go get a flat, fuck his mistress, and you will starve with your kids until you can get some kind of proof of him cheating and a judge who likes you.

Now imagine all of this horror movie shit, AND you can't open a bank account without this piece of shit opening it with you. That was what women dealt with until about the 70s when we were finally allowed to open bank accounts with a man's signature.

That is what conservatives and fundies want to take you back to. When this shit was just the fucking norm.

There are old white guys still alive who remember who damn nice it was when a woman couldn't open a bank account without a man's signature and his dad could go live a double life with a mistress with zero repercussions and oh how they slather and drool for those times. And how they have waxed poetic about these halcyon days to their desperate daddy-issues sons now eager to please and without the social skills or emotional maturity to understand the fucked up nature of it all.

I'm willing to bet there's like 2 or 3 Tradhusbands(tm) out there for every Tradwife you see, they just haven't found someone they can sink their claws into. Which should maybe terrify you. This Tradwife(tm) movement should really be considered a canary in the coal mine.

witch-of-the-writing-desk

"Don't save her, she don't wanna be saved

There's an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas

Probably in Tennessee, that says

"Fool me once, shame on

Shame on you"

Fool me, we can't get fooled again

Fool me one time shame on you

Fool me twice, can't put the blame on you

Fool me three times, fuck the peace signs

Load the chopper, let it rain on you"

Y'all have to let people fail because conservatives are thinking on hard mode with one bar of health and a stick as a weapon. Don't you give that bitch a health potion.