Random Stuff

Maki || 28 || He/him || ♋ || INFP || 🏳️‍🌈

[what-even-is-thiss]

As an adult you must cultivate the skill of “Gross! Oh, well. Not my business.”

[what-even-is-thiss]

Applies to everything from BDSM parties to your sister’s godawful interior design choices to weird bachelor pad meals eaten over a sink.

Gross! Oh, well. Not my business.

[autumngracy]

[maki-makenshi]

Suddenly decided to rewatch Bouei-bu and got reminded of why i love this show so much, so I started browsing the tag aaaaaaand there'll be a new movie????? In a few months??????

I never got around to watching Happy Kiss, guess now's the time for it...

[wolfythewitch]

This too shall pass but like holy fuck

[jaded-stag]

I keep seeing people making fun of using growled, hissed, roared, snarled etc in writing and it’s like.

have you never heard someone speak with the gravel in their voice when they get angry? Because that’s what a growl is.

Have you never heard someone sharply whisper something through the thin space of their teeth? Or when your mother sharply told you to stop it in public as a kid when you were acting up/being too loud? Because that’s what a hiss is.

Have you never heard a man get so blackout angry that their voice BOOMS through the house? Because that’s what a roar is.

Have you never seen someone bare their teeth while talking to accentuate their frustration or anger while speaking with a vicious tone? Because that’s what snarling is.

It’s not meant to be a literal animal noise. For the love of god, not every description is literal. I get some people are genuinely confused, but also some of these people are genuinely unimaginative as fuck.

[kiramartinauthor]

[butchamy]

Story idea when you try to actually write it:

[calamitycons]

Story idea when you first rewrite it:

Getting closer to what you saw in your head, eh? Keep at it!

[snurtle]

Your story when somebody else sees it:

[starspangledscarf]

hhhhhHHHHHHH

[thatincompetentperson]

(⚪д⚪)

[servicek9s-deactivated20180617]

This is a lovely post. It goes to show that when we percieve our own work, most of us have some type of insecurities about our own talents. 

[roadhogsbigbelly]

it's extremely frustrating how many people can't talk about incels or terfs or zionists or neo nazi's or any particular group of people with horrifying beliefs without insisting every one of these people are also fat and balding and ugly due to their evilness and vice versa, when like no a good chunk of mra's and terfs and zionists are straight up supermodels, your political beliefs just can't be "the people i agree with all are hot ladies and giga chads" and "all the people i disagree with the are ugly women and fat neckbeards" cause that's not how that's works, it's not how it ever worked and i am extremely tired of it.

[obscureanimeoftheday]

Obscure Anime of The Day:

Cute High Earth Defense Club Love! Love!

Aired: 2015

Genres: Comedy, Magic, School, Shoujo, Slice of Life

[boimann]

ATTENTION ARTISTS OF TUMBLR

since tumblr is going to start scraping blogs to train ai be sure to glaze and nightshade your art!! Not only will both of these programs protect your art from being copied but nightshade also poisons any ai that tries to steal it

here is some more info on these tools and where you can download them:

Nightshade: Protecting Copyright (uchicago.edu)

Nightshade: Downloads (uchicago.edu)

Glaze - What is Glaze (uchicago.edu)

Glaze - Downloads (uchicago.edu)

[zuko-always-lies]

Are You Opting Out of Tumblr Allowing Third Party AI Model's to Train on Your Data?

Yes

No

I hadn't heard of this before, but now I'll opt out

Show me the results!

I'm planning on abandoning tumblr and deleting my blogs

Other (please explain in the tags)

Voting ended onMar 5, 2024

From instructions on how to opt out, look at the official staff post on the topic. It also gives more information on Tumblr's new policies. If you are opting out, remember to opt out each separate blog individually.

Please reblog this post, so it will get more votes!

[zuko-always-lies]

And again, please reblog this post!

[crashstanding]

Reblog to give the person you reblogged from the ability to finish their WIPs

[ao3-crack]

(x)

[fatmasc]

FreeSewing

We are a community of makers. We provide made-to-measure sewing patterns

This website is full of free sewing patterns that will automatically alter to ur measurements

https://freesewing.org

[hieronymus-bush]

WHAT.

[seluvian]

@roboticchibitan

[solvatochrome]

this is the post that started me off making my own clothes, i never actually used a pattern from this site bc i learned how to make my own too quickly but this is where the jump from wishing to doing happened

now im making money doing sewing commissions so lmfao i guess tumblr did do something for me after 10 fucking years

[lytefoot]

Hey, so they’re making a Netflix Harry Potter.

With that in mind, we’re all gonna remember that JKR is a terf who has literally been cited by legislators engaged in legislation that actively harms trans people, and we’re not gonna give her any more money.

That means not streaming the new show on Netflix, because regardless of how much influence she has on the production, she gets paid for it.

We’re gonna make the show flop. We’re gonna show Warner Brothers that we don’t forget (of course, how would we forget, it isn’t as if she’s stopped), and that their business association with terfs is no longer profitable.

It is NOT like Lovecraft, because Lovecraft is very dead and his works are in the public domain. By consuming Lovecraft media, you are not giving any money to old Howard.

[howelljenkins]

“you act like we should all live our lives centered around not causing harm” uh yeah exactly..

[howelljenkins]

yeah im being overly simplistic but if we all loved each other and operated on the assumption that everyone around us is working in a way that uplifts others in every way possible.. things would be good

[elsinore-snores]

Help an ace trans autistic person out!

Hey guys! I have sold NO books in 11 days, and I am desperately out of money, so I would really appreciate if you can reblog this posts with summaries of each of my six books about queer autistic people of color! They are all $5 and my only source of income, so if you don’t want to read them – no problem – but please consider reblogging them, because this might be just the representation someone out there needs right now.

Where the Wind Runs Down the Gap:  Aponivi is a changeling, blessed by the fae. He lives in a secret library within the walled city of Ore Bell, under the thumb of witch-hunting martials called The Survivors of the Woods. He lays his shoes down for hanged men, hoping his footprints will guide them home. Something inside him burns. His heartbeat is not his own.

Haunted House and How to Tame Them:  Pax works at a magical Home Depot in a world where houses are alive and people try and make them happy with constant redecorating. Magical realism modern Regency-etiquette witch story.

Dim Light, Goodnight: Survival horror comedy about a queer couple stuck in a straight people filled medical nightmare in Christmas 1989.

Liminal People: Two gay scientists and a dog get stranded in the Alaskan wilderness in 1982 and all they do with their solitude is write Magnum P.I. fanfiction, make LSD, and try and find aliens to fuck. Oh, and also not die. They try not to die. My mom lived in the Alaskan wilderness in 1982 and she fact-checked this. 

The Star Caregiver:  The world exists on islands that orbit each other, and you can only jump from island to island during brief “conjunctions” where they basically crash together. Coby, a low IQ autistic agender Jewish Indian person, has decided to become independent from their caregivers and make their own life on a neighboring island, ingratiating themselves in a world of art-based magic and good friendships – both human and star.

The View Down:  Local gay uncle does not realize his nephew’s suitors are in love with him. But seriously, this book is about gay disabled men of color falling in love in Regency England. There is no homophobia, racism, sexism, or transphobia. It is just gay Regency people of color written in an authentic Regency style.

All of them are relatively short and light on plot and happy, all designed to be read by disabled people who have a hard time reading typical books!

Please reblog if you can, thank you!

[elsinore-snores]

I have been getting attacked by TERFs for the last 24 hours and would really appreciate any boost I can get! It hasn’t been an easy day. :(

[munchcookie93]

I really can’t wait for happy kiss~☆

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story.