Books And Stuff

[fictional-llamas]

I used to work in my university archives and took pictures of some of the articles I came across. This one was particularly heartwarming. It's from around 1930.

[fictional-llamas]

Okay so this one started out overexplaining the behaviour of the main character and her mental health which could have been revealed through the way she reacted to situations but I promise it gets better. There were some really good creepy descriptions in this book and while it gave some explanations to what was happening it also left enough unsaid to keep it interesting. For those of you who enjoyed the episodes of the Magnus Archives where people were replaced with doppelgängers, this is similar to that. Also keep a pen handy to decode the morse code at the end of the interlude chapters. :)

[fictional-llamas]

Moon Knight - Fist of Khonshu

Just some fun quotes from this comic.

[fictional-llamas]

A man disappears from a room that is locked from the inside and he is later found dead miles away. To solve this mystery the Empire sends two investigators: Ana Dolabra, a woman with an incredible ability to analyze the world around her, and Dinios Kol, a man who has been altered so he can remember everything he sees.

Another fantastic book! It is the second book in the series which I figured out when looking for more by this author at my library (whoops), but still easily understood without the first one. I really enjoyed the more scientific take on altering people to achieve more-than-human effects.

[fictional-llamas]

"You cannot look at life through the veil of irony or you're gonna miss so many great things"

- Griffin McElroy, mbmbam 221

[allsortsoffuckedup]

Hey hey, as a librarian, can I just say don’t pace yourself at the library. I get a lot of customers saying “oh I shouldn’t get too many books out at once” but like you should!!!! Max out your card, take everything we have on a subject you’re interested in, make a book fort in your home. We love that shit! It doesn’t matter if you read them or not; just take them for an adventure and bring them back whenever they’re due!

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

Help your local library; get books out even if you know you can’t read them all!

[fictional-llamas]

Nettle & Bone Quotes

"She should at least keep chickens," said the dust-wife. "Or take up gardening. Immortality is wretched, but you can always make the best of it."

"You're a terrible liar Marra. You look as if you're afraid the universe is ashamed of you."

Also you're about to enter the cursed palace of the dead. That tends to have an impact on your nerves.

"So that bird really is a demon," said Fenris, eyeing the shadow.

"Of course she is. Why would I lie about something that ridiculous?"

The Harbor Kingdom, sensibly, believed that the dead went into the sea, and the good were reborn from it, while the damned sank to the bottom and were devoured by crabs. Still, she couldn't blame the Northern Kingdom for their confusion. There probably weren't very many crabs up here.

I'm surrounded by lunatics, and I love them all, but maybe we should be running anyway.

[fictional-llamas]

A princess turned "nun" makes the decision to free her sister from an abusive husband. The only problem is how do you kill a king without starting a war? She enlists the help of a dustwife and her demon chicken, a dog made of bones, a man who willingly trapped himself in a fairy ring, and her own fairy godmother. This strange group travels to the northern kingdom with the goal of assassinating a paranoid king without being detected.

I really loved this book, it is probably the first fantasy book I've read that has a 30-year-old woman as the protagonist, and one that is described as round faced and stocky rather than thin as a needle. Don't worry, the dog doesn't die (again), but the chicken REALLY is a demon.

[fictional-llamas]

"As it turned out, not allowing animal corpses to rot in the street has a variety of positive benefits. "

-Patient Zero

[fictional-llamas]

Patient Zero by Lydia Kang, MD, and Nate Pedersen

[fictional-llamas]

Nature's Archive - #110: Why We Need Apex Predators - Coexistence with Dr. Jonny Hanson

https://doublepod.page.link/LGtX5cckd1fzPjm87

Not a book but something I care about a lot as both a wildlife ecologist and someone who grew up coexisting with apex predators.

[oaky-dokey]

love the library. there's no risk. you can take out a book and go "wow this sucks" and just give it back. and when you do that you're still making the library's Number Go Up so you'll be able to roll the dice on even more books. all for the low low price of free/you already paid for it with your tax money so you might as well use it

[fictional-llamas]

Immune by Philipp Dettmer

"If cells were conscious, viruses would be terrifying to them. Imagine spiders that don't crawl on walls, but passively float around in the air, hoping to get into your mouth when you are not careful for a moment, crawling into your brain and forcing your insides to produce hundreds of new baby spiders until all your body is filled with them. And then your skin would burst open and all these new spiders would try to get your family and friends. This is literally what viruses do to cells."

"But then, suddenly you see a guard charging at you screaming - you get ready for a fight. But instead of swinging at you, the guard rips open his chest, splitting his ribs into countless sharp splinters while pulling out his intestines. You don't even have time to get confused before he starts swinging his guts, spiked with sharp bone splinters at you, like the world's most disgusting whip. You cry in pain and confusion as he mercilessly strikes you, causing deep wounds and leaving you stunned and unable to flee. And then he punches you in the face. "This did not go as expected," you think, as he begins eating you alive."

[cryptonature]

My Turn: Why I'm Not Interested in AI for Writing

Ok, software and websites. You can stop asking if I want to use AI when writing. I don't. I never will. I get that a lot of people have invested a great deal of money in it (mostly, it seems, to allow the rich to approximate skill without paying for it), but I'm just not interested in participating. Sure, it's unethical, unsustainable, and harmful to the environment. But those aren't even my main reasons. And, yeah, it was trained on my published works without my consent, but again, not my primary objection. It's also lazy and antithetical to my goal of continuing to develop my writing skill and creativity, but that's not the biggest issue either. Mostly, the problem is that it is a crass, empty automated circumvention of life and human experience designed to imitate and masquerade as both. So, not only is it essentially the opposite of art (art being personal effort expended to connect us through intentional, crafted expression of individual human experience), but worse, it is engineered to impersonate a perspective detached from a living person. It has no perspective. It has no accountability. It is a mimicry of human acts of creation and expression, a sophisticated parlor trick of pattern recognition, that cannot connect us to anyone (because it has no perspective or life experience with which to connect). I'm not saying AI has no good applications. But writing? Art? I guess AI makes sense if your concept of writing or art is mostly as a "product" or "content" divorced from the foundations of why humans give a shit about art and writing in the first place. So, mostly, I think it's gross and kinda sad. It's like seeing a toddler turn away from her mother to focus on hugging a mannequin. It's like seeing a gardener spending his limited life-minutes whistling and watering plastic flowers. It's like waking early to take your toaster to witness a sunrise. Also... if I may... these companies have spent billions to build a plastic facade of what I do. I don't need it. I'm the real thing.

[cryptonature]

In my new novel Strange Animals,

a man is killed by a city bus.

A crow on a "no parking" sign undoes his death

and gives him an acorn.

After that, things get weirder.

Yet, it's a very human story about loving nature

and finding home/family.

Interested?

Preorder is now available!

[fictional-llamas]

"So we are all stardust or, if you are less romantic, nuclear waste..."

-Antimatter, Frank Close 🌌

[fictional-llamas]

oh...cool, i guess. Are they...nice? No? Cool cool