"Either that Wall Paper goes, or I do" @mmm-donut-seeds - Tumblr Blog

do me a favor and reblog this and put in the tags what time it is for you and what you're currently doing/thinking about

#Listening to Between the Buttons by French 79 #Thinking about how I'm not satisfied with a repair and how I might improve it

were--ralph

the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists

were--ralph

we're going to try again witha little but minimal casting

IT will happen in August of 2026. like to charge and reblog to cast but cast sparingly

were--ralph

Wait stop. everyone +like now and spread it a little but cast on the same day in August. lets try August 6th or something.

were--ralph

CAST NOW

pangur-and-grim

I won't publish the ask (they asked me not to), but I thought I'd still answer it publicly!

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

this isn't meant to discourage anyone from seeking out writing as a career! however, there is a reason that many authors have alternate jobs with writing on the side. or, you know, rich spouses.

pangur-and-grim

this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!

buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....

if I can offer one alternative to pirating: asking your library to stock the book also helps authors, and doesn't cost anything. the only downside is the patience required.

pangur-and-grim

OOPS yes, @stjohnstarling makes a good point! everything I'm saying is from the perspective of traditional publishing, but it's a very different game if you're a self-published author

gollancz

I will also add that this is why pre-orders can make a HUGE difference to authors - because if there's enough hype, publishers can pull more levers to build that momentum and reach more readers to help authors earn out their advance faster.

gudgercollege

Trad publishing contracts person here to co-sign everything in this post. If you want to support an author you really like but are broke as hell, then you can buy their book when it's discounted, buy it used, borrow it from a friend, or use the library. The first step as an author is to get your book read, not to get it bought. The important thing for you as a reader is to spread the word about how good the book is so the publisher knows the audience is there even if sales aren't spectacular. Piracy of books, especially books from small/indie publishers, means the publisher will print fewer copies of their next book, and sometimes if it's an ongoing series the next books in the series will be canceled, either to be replaced by a book with a different premise or they'll cancel the contract for the next books entirely. The "hack" where you buy the ebook or audiobook and then return it for a credit also takes money directly out of the author's pocket since those payment/royalty systems are set up differently than if you were to buy a book from a bookstore and return it. In that situation the bookstore absorbs that loss, but returning the ebook means the money gets clawed back from the author's advance or royalties and they'll have to earn that back.

Pre-orders and Amazon/Goodreads reviews are used as a gauge by publishers to predict how many copies they are likely to sell and therefore how many copies they want to print. They want to sell most of what they print rather than print too many and end up with a bunch of copies no one wants that they'll have to pay to store or sell at a huge discount or recycle, which is what happens to unsold books. Most publishers have a limited amount of money and manpower to dedicate to any particular book, so if there's a book building up a lot of buzz, that'll give them reason to put their resources towards promoting that book to get a better return on their investment. If the publisher can't make money off a book or author they'll dump them.

Generally, every aspect of the publishing and book industries, including writers, agents, publishing employees, librarians, and booksellers are overworked and underpaid. Unless you're Stephen King or already famous, you don't make money off of books. We do it for sheer love of the game.

Use your library! Publishers have a whole department dedicated to selling their books to libraries and the author gets part of those sales. Increasing circulation of library resources means the libraries can make a better case to get more money from the government to buy more books that you want to read and they're a place to hang out for free. Libraries are the best gift humanity gave itself, use yours as often as possible.

omtai

Man I miss free the nipple. Its getting warmer and we don’t even have free the nipple anymore

gramarye

feminism has backslid so hard in recent years people don't even know what free the nipple means anymore

briwhosaysni

To clarify for those who don't know, "free the nipple" isn't about going braless, it's about going topless

No shirt, no bra, completely bare torso, just like cis men are allowed to

It's about desexualizing breasts and "female presenting nipples" and not being criminalized for our bodies if we want to go topless because it's a million damn degrees out. This was a popular growing movement that was still widely known a decade ago!

And the fact that not wearing a bra is so discouraged and stigmatized that people think the movement was about being able to go braless under your shirt in public rather than about being able to not wear a shirt at all says a lot about how far we've backslid in the past decade

creaturelingart

FINALLY got good photos of my sculpture final. This is my dog his name is Sock.

creaturelingart

Look at my fish.

sweetfirebird

So I saw some people remarking that they didn't understand why "liberals" are focusing on the disaster of the Reflecting Pool paint job, and ok so when you see stuff like that, I need you to remember we are dealing with a wannabe strongman. Anything that makes him look ineffectual, wasteful, and incredibly stupid-- you get that between your teeth and you don't let go. Especially *especially* when it involves laughing at him.

Also... it is funny. Except for the poor ducks, it's funny. Man lost a war to algae. His "American Flag Blue" is green and slimy and the paint is peeling off, and all before his big 4th of July show that no musicians want to play. It's funny. Point and laugh. That is fighting fascism, actually.

espanolbot2

Like, this is the same guy who is trying to hide that a judge made him take his name off the Kennedy Centre by hiding the building with a great big tarp to obscure where his name used to be.

Any public slight, no matter now petty, no matter now little it matters to everyone else, gets under his skin like those screwworms he accidentally let Musk reintroduce to Texas (causing the government to call a state of emergency as it's trashing their beef industry).

elalmadelmar

Mocking the Reflecting Pool is Springtime for Hitler.

Many neonazis and their ilk are okay with their icons being portrayed negatively as long as that negativity takes the form of a powerful and threatening figure. They like identifying themselves with Big Scary Destroyer. It's a power fantasy for them.

That's why, for instance, Trump's incoherence when speaking doesn't bother them. His incoherence is taken, by and large, very seriously. The man opens his mouth and drops a bunch of verbal turds - and the world panics, or at the least gets very, very nervous. Not unjustifiedly, it's true, but the power fantasy of being able to say whatever they want and get taken seriously is still vicariously fulfilled.

But the Reflecting Pool? The Reflecting Pool wasn't supposed to be broken. It's not something Trump destroyed for the sheer pleasure of destruction, which is how Trump's base experienced his gutting of the government via Musk. The Reflecting Pool is something that was supposed to be improved, which he boasted about improving, and instead it's clearly turned to muck. There's no power fantasy there. There's nothing to gloat over; it's just a damp gross failure. It isn't even a catastrophic failure! Tearing down the East Wing of the White House was dramatic, and had the value of making a big, indelible change to a national icon. No matter what happens, the East Wing as we knew it is gone. Power fantasy. By contrast, the Reflecting Pool? It's just fuckin dirty. It's gross. It's your neighbor's neglected cheap pool that's full of dead leaves and slime. An entirely pedestrian, grody, pathetic failure. It would literally be more salvageable as a PR thing for Trump if it got hit by a meteor and turned into a smoking crater.

And that's why we're riding that fucker so hard. This is what's under the power fantasy. Deep down, he's just pathetic. And that's what Mel Brooks understood with Springtime for Hitler. You don't fight the Nazis by making them big bad scary evil guys. You fight the Nazis (when actual weapons aren't a present option) by making them a laughingstock. There is no way to derive a power fantasy from being the object of derision.

nongunktional

i do think the negative interpretations of "im probably nonbinary but i have a job right now" are kind of reaching. it's obviously a waste of time to theorize the op's intended meaning, so instead i think it's better to recognize how the phrase can be a useful framing device to criticize how much of a fucking hassle it is to get gendered correctly. "but i have a job" e.g. will face discrimination that could threaten livelihood; e.g. don't have the mental bandwidth to explain gender to others; e.g. don't have the time and energy for the soul-searching necessary to confirm. all three of these are labor issues. yes you could interpret it as "but being nonbinary isn't important enough to worry about", despite that being a blatantly bad-faith read. it's more useful to interpret it as "but being publicly nonbinary requires a lot of social effort that, in many cultural contexts, will create more problems that you can't afford to deal with". like cmon it's a really good jumping off point for productive conversations about queer labor rights

oysters-aint-for-me

btw i’ve never seen pacific rim but i had a dream last night that there was a new pacific rim movie and the kaiju and the big robots were fighting and there were all these gratuitous shots of them stepping directly on cybertrucks with the drivers still inside them and in an interview guillermo del toro said that those were his favorite shots in the entire movie

legendaryvermin

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

acorviart

hey. hey u. do u like stickers. if you donate any amount to The Trevor Project (www.thetrevorproject.org) and then email me timestamped proof + your shipping address, I'll mail you some miscellaneous stickers that are leftover from the past year+ of my sticker club

email: [email protected]

whenever my box of leftover stickers starts to get too full, I'll do a lil donation motivation like this. orgs get direct donations, I get my sticker stash reduced, win win

no minimum donation to qualify for stickers, although The Trevor Project's payment processor has a built-in minimum of $5!

offer will end whenever I run out of stickers, at which point I'll post an update

recoverr-deactivated20250621

i don't know who needs to hear this, but guilt, self-hatred and shame are not sustainable sources of growth and healing. you can't hate yourself into feeling better, or being better. you can't repeatedly punish yourself for your flawed humanity and expect wholesome results.

beemovieerotica

sashayed

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

boomstab-papa

daysleftofsecondterm

Beautiful, you don’t HAVE to forgive them. You just can’t ridicule them after leaving for being “tainted” or “evil” or whatever the acceptable word is now. Do not punish the behaviour you want to see.

“But they should’ve known sooner” and we should’ve known sooner that Destiel was never gonna meaningfully happen outside of queerbaiting, what’s your point?

“I never want them near me” that’s fine, but you do realize to insult them, YOU have to get near THEM, right? Wouldn’t it be more conducive to what you want to just leave each other alone?

“What if one of them tries to approach me?” Then you block them online, or you keep the conversation clinical and polite irl. You do NOT take time out of your day to berate them for their old views. Your mother raised you better than that.

pavilarg0

Preserving these tags, they're very correct

llamaking

I would reblog this one million times if I could

daysleftofsecondterm

As a matter of fact you can!

ink-in-hand

This is fundamentally how cults WORK, btw

Villainize outsiders, which can look different depending on the cult, make everything an us vs them situation. And then when those outsiders show themselves to be hostile (doesn't matter why) the cult is proven right all along on one of their foundational messages

existentialterror

That food delivery app developer whistleblower AMA was a hoax.

Suspected in the comments but confirmed by journalist Casey Newton. The story and various supporting evidence provided to him was AI generated.

For most of my career up until this point, the document shared with me by the whistleblower would have seemed highly credible in large part because it would have taken so long to put together. Who would take the time to put together a detailed, 18-page technical document about market dynamics just to troll a reporter? Who would go to the trouble of creating a fake badge? Today, though, the report can be generated within minutes, and the badge within seconds. And while no good reporter would ever have published a story based on a single document and an unknown source, plenty would take the time to investigate the document’s contents and see whether human sources would back it up.

[from Casey Newton's article]

Stay skeptical out there, especially for stuff that seems like 100% confirmation of "these people are evil" kinda stances that you already believe.

doctorprofessorsong

As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.