No title available
Kaledo Art
Cosimo Galluzzi
Origami Around
pixel skylines
Kiana Khansmith
Andulka
Product Placement
oozey mess
trying on a metaphor
taylor price
sheepfilms
Keni
we're not kids anymore.
will byers stan first human second
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
occasionally subtle
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
d e v o n
★
seen from United States
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Germany
seen from France
seen from Greece
seen from Brazil
seen from Türkiye
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Germany
seen from Nepal
seen from Canada
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from Brazil
@made-in-manetheren
*~*Hello*~*
I have changed my blog name!
BeatlesandBards is now
=>>
Made-in-Manetheren
I've wanted to ditch my old one for a while, since I haven't been a Potterhead in many years. But since that was my original Tumblr, coming up with a new one has been surprisingly challenging. Until this came out of my mouth tonight while chatting with my husband 🥰 The wheel weaves as the wheel wills.
Idk man it’s so easy to get bogged down in all the bullshit online but when my then-6 year old cousin found out I was trans he said “ok” then corrected my grandma when she misgendered me. I was once the third between a gay man and a lesbian. Two lesbians once invited me back to their place when I presented as a man. I met an AMAB nb butch who looked strikingly to outsiders like a cis man and it was one of the more sapphic experiences I’ve had. I nervously wore a boydyke shirt to pride and got 3 different cis-looking femme folks tell me they loved my shirt. I once told a trans group at a protest that any pronouns were fine for me and one person said “wow, I’m impressed and intimidated by people like that. I don’t know that I could be that chill with pronouns.” I once told a GNC friend I wished I could wear a type of “opposite” gender clothing after I had already transitioned and so it would be associated with my AGAB and he said “You could just do it.” I’ve had cishet men fight cops for me before. The first time I had a doctor ask me if my name was different than what was on my forms I had to try not to cry. Last week, a phone call with a doctor’s office where I am generally cis passing asked unprompted if my name listed is what I want to be called. It touched me then too. I told a lesbian friend once I felt like my attraction to men AND women both felt gay. She said “makes sense.” And we moved on. I go by different pronouns in different circles. I’ve had gay women love my facial hair. I’ve had gay men like my tits. It’s all out there, I promise. It can be hard to find it but I promise there is community like you and community who likes you. And it’s more messy and beautiful than tumblr discourse makes it out to be.
These are from the last 8 hours only. And not all of them.
We're here! We're here we're here we're here!
Check the notes! There are so many of us and so many who love us.
Queer love, baby!
Check the notes! There are
so many of us and so
many who love us.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
The Watermelon Woman (1996) dir. Cheryl Dunye
Hey this movie is really important in queer history! It was the first feature length film directed by a black lesbian! You can watch it here for free!
I really recommend you do because while it is a rom-com (and a drama), it also looks at how the stories of black queers are over looked in history.
pov: you're al'lan mandragoran. your entire people was wiped out when you were a baby. your platonic soulmate girl bestfriend is falling for a gilf (weird. shrug.) you're falling in love with a girl half your age (hashtag oops) she Hates your girl bestfriend. you are all trapped together on a roadtrip. girl bestfriend is Thee ragebait queen. also the devil is coming back. everything is bad and this is the funniest anything has ever been.
Reblog this and tell me what was your biggest crying over a piece of fiction. You can be vague if you don't want to spoil.
it’s 2014 can taylor swift stop
Egwene al'Vere - Wheel of Time
Falling in love with saidar
might cry actually this is so pretty
How is it even possible to ship a ceiling fan including the downrod extender and shorter downrod piece but NOT THE DOWNROD & DOWNROD BALL. HOW.
If you're not familiar with such projects, the downrod hangs from a downrod ball that rests in the mounting bracket on the ceiling.
In other words, it's literally the thing the fan hangs from. Not really an optional piece.
It is too goddamn hot to be dealing with this kind of bullshit.
one of my creative writing professors once said that to evaluate a work as good or not, first you ask what the work is attempting to do, and then you evaluate how well it does it. and this is how to judge everything from critical essays to romance novels to snack packaging to theory tracts.
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
Share the knowledge
Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.
Level 1: browser extensions
This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.
Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.
Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).
uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.
Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.
FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.
Level 2: leaving enshittified services
The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.
Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.
Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery
DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.
Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.
Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.
With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.
Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery
Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.
To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.
Level 5: automated media piracy
The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.
The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.
Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.
Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.
Level 6: fucking with Android
Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.
Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.
Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.
You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.
Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.
Level 7: fucking with Windows
This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.
Level 8: switching to Linux
I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.
And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!
Something I want to add:
You don't even need a pihole for it anymore. You can throw "dns.adguard-dns.com" into your android phone under Network (or Connections) > Private DNS > Private DNS Provider Hostname in your Settings app. You can also set your router up to use it via the IPs:
94.140.14.14
94.140.14.15
Link to to source for that:
Create your ad-blocking DNS server that will protect your personal data, prevent tracking and allow you to control access to specific conten
That will depend on your router, just search "How to set up custom DNS for (router name & model)". You can usually find that info on a sticker on the router itself. The model name is often nonsense like CM1000.
For switching to Linux:
If you're worried about software not working, and the software isn't something with work-related requirements attached, you can usually find alternatives. Alternativeto.net is a good place to start with that.
AlternativeTo lets you find apps and software for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android Tablets, Web Apps, Online, Windows Tab
If you're a gamer, protondb.com will let you see how well your specific game runs on Linux. Ranks are from:
Borked - Does Not Work At All, or works so poorly that you cannot play the game at all
Bronze - Sort of works, but with glitches that don't exist on Windows that affect gameplay
Silver - Works, but requires tinkering, and has glitches that don't affect gameplay, or requires heavy tinkering to get running
Gold - Works, requires mild tinkering (usually just selecting another proton version from the drop down)
Platinum - Works out of the box
Native - Is made for Linux
Other common alternatives:
Spotify: I've heard good things about Tidal, but haven't personally used it (I use a cloud storage service and local files for music)
Google drive: Nextcloud. You can find free servers on their website
Google office: OnlyOffice has a desktop/mobile app, and most of the features
Gmail: Free providers aren't common, but disroot is one of them. They also offer quite a few services. Personally I use mailbox.org, but they do cost $36 a year minimum
Google search: Disroot has a searx instance, startpage.com exists, and you'd be surprised at how far you can get by setting your default search engine to Wikipedia. Marginalia's also good, but selective about what they index (mostly indieweb stuff)
I, admittedly, run almost everything through Emacs nowadays, so there may be better alternatives now.
(Directed generally) Also remember that in most cases the problems are Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. If you find a small project that isn't perfect, remember that those five companies are probably worse in every way imaginable. Look for an alternative, but for the love of whatever you hold dear, Google is *not* a better alternative.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
i stopped giving a shit about "legit" purchases of digital products after i spent $80 on the entire Dark Horse collection of Trigun/Trigun Maximum ebook mangas, learning that I only got access to reading them through a proprietary website ereader function, couldn't download them, and couldn't get a refund, and then literally only a year later, getting an e-mail stating that Dark Horse was shutting down that part of their company and I wouldn't even be able to read them anymore. Fuck that
Pirate shit. Don't feel bad for it. It's not "your fault" that artists, independent or otherwise, can't make a living. You downloading an album or ebook for free isn't the cause of the problem. The cause is capitalism, plain and simple, and pirating is a lucky loophole that companies are still trying to stomp out.
When it comes to ebooks, that is just not true. Publishers do not look at how many times your book was pirated as part of gauging its success--it's not like streaming giants. Every single pirated book hurts authors and makes it more difficult for them to get published again. Author Maggie Stiefvater has a great post on here detailing how much piracy hurt her books, her income, and her ability to keep writing.
Pirating books can end authors' careers. Especially new or smaller authors.
Book piracy is NOT a victimless crime. It IS hurting authors.
It IS "your fault" just like stealing from someone's small business run out of their garage makes it "your fault" when the business/person struggles to recover financially from your theft.
Particularly given that you have free alternatives in libraries. Which DO actually contribute to the author's income, as well as to the library's funding justification.
Textbooks are a different matter. I'm chiefly talking about fiction here because it's my area of expertise. Point is.
Pirating novels and graphic novels is not like pirating visual media from media giants. You are not denying money to a faceless corporation. You are stealing from people who can't afford to lose income.
I'm literally stealing something out of my neighbor's house whenever I download a PDF
...yeah. You are literally stealing something out of a working class person's bank account as well as their career future.
Stating the obvious while rolling your eyes at it doesn't make it any less true. Just makes you an ass admitting your selfish carelessness with no shame.
So, what is your solution to this issue of me and people like me (usually poor people that can't afford books) "stealing something out of (their) neighbors house"? You want to be judge jury and executioner? Send us to the free slavery industrial complex prison? Or maybe you want to make us your personal slaves, like Nintendo did with Gary Bowser?
And you say "working class person's" bank account. are we to assume you don't see us as working class people?
(this is of course assuming that in this entire pointless exercise, the issue is your book(s) specifically being pirated. As far as i'm aware, unless you want to enlighten us non-published charlatans, you have no way of actually knowing whether your book has been pirated or by how many people)
Libraries, which cost you nothing, like I explained immediately. Ebooks that cost less than a coffee.
I'm poor too, dude, I'm not telling you to buy every book ever. That's not an excuse.
Yes, this is something that authors can and do put together data on. Such as the Maggie Stiefvater post I was talking about, which goes into detail about how she knew her book was being pirated.
more people need to give themselves permission to write and draw pornography
it is virtuous and necessary that you write, draw, and distribute pornography
can we start with not conflating "erotic/sexual art or writing" with pornography
no lmao
so I keep getting told my smut writing skills need to be shared. But I don't do fanfiction. Where might one go to post original fiction pornography for sharing or publishing?
Wut. Ao3 hosts original works? Do people actually go to Ao3 for original fiction? 👀
i stopped giving a shit about "legit" purchases of digital products after i spent $80 on the entire Dark Horse collection of Trigun/Trigun Maximum ebook mangas, learning that I only got access to reading them through a proprietary website ereader function, couldn't download them, and couldn't get a refund, and then literally only a year later, getting an e-mail stating that Dark Horse was shutting down that part of their company and I wouldn't even be able to read them anymore. Fuck that
Pirate shit. Don't feel bad for it. It's not "your fault" that artists, independent or otherwise, can't make a living. You downloading an album or ebook for free isn't the cause of the problem. The cause is capitalism, plain and simple, and pirating is a lucky loophole that companies are still trying to stomp out.
When it comes to ebooks, that is just not true. Publishers do not look at how many times your book was pirated as part of gauging its success--it's not like streaming giants. Every single pirated book hurts authors and makes it more difficult for them to get published again. Author Maggie Stiefvater has a great post on here detailing how much piracy hurt her books, her income, and her ability to keep writing.
Pirating books can end authors' careers. Especially new or smaller authors.
Book piracy is NOT a victimless crime. It IS hurting authors.
It IS "your fault" just like stealing from someone's small business run out of their garage makes it "your fault" when the business/person struggles to recover financially from your theft.
Particularly given that you have free alternatives in libraries. Which DO actually contribute to the author's income, as well as to the library's funding justification.
Textbooks are a different matter. I'm chiefly talking about fiction here because it's my area of expertise. Point is.
Pirating novels and graphic novels is not like pirating visual media from media giants. You are not denying money to a faceless corporation. You are stealing from people who can't afford to lose income.
I'm literally stealing something out of my neighbor's house whenever I download a PDF
...yeah. You are literally stealing something out of a working class person's bank account as well as their career future.
Stating the obvious while rolling your eyes at it doesn't make it any less true. Just makes you an ass admitting your selfish carelessness with no shame.
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"
More from the notes:
I love this post
The horse thinks as it scratches an itch
good morning exclusively to the atlantic’s science editor, or whoever it is that titles their animal biology articles
fellas, they’ve done it again
me, weeping openly: potato
DEFECTOR HAS TAKEN UP THE MANTLE
🎉🎆🍾🎊 my manuscript just hit ✨✨✨100k words!✨✨✨
Only a few more chapters and I'm on to editing and book 2!!
My brain:
