Bibliovore on the Loose

Books and other things that bring me delight. Fanfiction and other fannish behavior can be found at mosylufanfic.tumblr.com

[spaceboytoy]

Hello bisexual community

[spaceboytoy]

Begin killing

[tartrazeen]

[errorschacha]

Not to indulge in childish fantasies but what if every time I checked the news it wasn’t worse?

[guerrillatech]

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

idk if it’s the mental illness but sharing literally any information feels like oversharing. i’ll be like “i skipped breakfast this morning” and immediately im like “i might as well have told them where i buried the money”

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

how dare you insult me with something so completely factual

[notreewaits-deactivated20200806]

Toddlers are so pure. She doesn’t understand that we help her with certain things because she’s little. She thinks that everyone just helps each other like that. So she tries to blow on my food and cut it up for me and tries to help me put on my shoes.

[pussysoupforthesoul-deactivated]

i was giving little wagon rides to a baby around the backyard one day and all of a sudden she hops off and slaps the seat of the wagon telling me to get on because it was my turn and i was like no it’s ok im too heavy and she was like NO ITS UR TURN and kept tugging on my hand so i would sit down. eventually i got on and it was just a little 2 year old trying so hard to push me around on a wagon not understanding why it wouldn’t budge but still so determined to let me have my turn lol

[llywela13]

I don’t think I’d realised how many casual compliments we pay to our toddler until she started casually complimenting us back, because experience has taught her that’s How Social Interaction Is Done, and there’s nothing quite like a very earnest three-year-old solemnly and sincerely informing you that you look wonderful and smell nice to make you feel really good about yourself

I tell her she’s my best girl. She tells me I’m her best auntie. Then we both feel good about the world!

[ladyofatraditionalkind]

Teach them kindness.

[banrions]

my little cousin is 3 and she stands there and goes “you’re doing it!” whenever i’m like, making food for us, or doing the laundry, or pushing her in a stroller up a hill. she is the most encouraging sweetheart. 

[memeuplift]

[futuresabove]

“how to read more” “how to read faster” “how to read daily” STOP STOP stop STOP this is not a competition. read slowly, read when you’re in the right state of mind, really savour it, read for pleasure, read for yourself. don’t read for performance, stats or to compare yourself to others

[tuxedodan]

there is no tumblr algorithm except for the fact that if you put 5 hours of work into a post it will get 20 notes but if you put five minutes into a post with no tags that's completely nonsensical it'll get 10k.

[kitstacean]

An algorithm is just a rule that social media sites use to decide what shows up on a user's feed.

On Tumblr, it's a bit of a misnomer to say that there's no algorithm. There is one! Implemented by you! Every time you reblog something you cause it to show up on your followers' feed - you're the algorithm. It's you.

[sigmaleph]

the real algorithm is the friends we made along the way

[lestatfag]

STAY SAFE!! [ID: the Gilbert Baker pride flag with the words “Happy pride to all those who are unable to celebrate openly and safely. You are loved and seen!” in all-caps black text over it. /end ID]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[lyrslair]

THANK YOU

[mugwomps]

Yup.

[ladyknighttime]

@ayeforscotland and @thebibliosphere it’s the ayesphere

[thebibliosphere]

Bahaha.

[jupitersmusings]

good things will happen 🧿

things that are meant to be will fall into place 🧿

[overlord-fire-bubble]

THIS ONE FUCKING WORKS. REBLOG IT.

[tiny-kt]

this for real fucking works

[kitbulls]

me: i really dont get why non-floridians lose their fucking shit when they see a beach. it’s just sand and water. who gives a fuck

also me: *sees one (1) mountain* ohohohoohohohohoh holy SHIT holy fuck that’s a big fuCKING ROCK

[newtgeiszler]

i love this post. i have never related to anything less

[dragontatoes]

me, grown up in the Cascades range: *sees open plains*

me: oohhoh no. no ba.d . where . are teh rocks. wheres the woter. oh god it’s just drit everywhere for a million miles I need TREES dammit where are my lumber guardians

[flippityflapjack]

Me, grew up in Nebraska, the Great Plains: *see a forest*

Me: wHy ar e there s.o man y trEes??? They all g.ott so BiG wher is th skY

[zarohk]

Me: Grows up in Boston, mostly travels to cities and Central America: *travels to the Southwest*

Me: where is everyone? Where is everything? What great calamity flatten this world?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Me: Grows up in rural Australia, travels to Europe: Green? How so much green?? Paddocks aren’t green! Why is it full of green grass like a cartoon??

[bunjywunjy]

Me: Grew up in the American Midwest *arrives on the coastline of any ocean, sprinting up and down the beach very fast* SHARKS? SHARKS?SHARKS? SHARKS? SHARKS? SHARKS?

[gallusrostromegalus]

Monkey very excited about exploring new biome.

[headspace-hotel]

It's so annoying when people act like fantasy and sci-fi are cute offshoots of Literature, because interpreting all other stories through the lens of SFF themes and tropes unlocks a lot of really neat insights

[headspace-hotel]

One of the best classes I've taken in college was Postcolonial Literature. It consistently sparked so many insightful and complex discussions that I left the class with the sense that I'd had at least one meaningful conversation with every person in the class.

I was thinking about "portal fantasy" just now and was suddenly struck by the idea that most "portal fantasy" contains something a little bit like the concepts of "double consciousness" and hybrid identity that are present in postcolonial critical theory.

In a "portal fantasy," a character moves between two (or more) "worlds" that have different rules. This character's identity usually changes on one side of the "portal" vs. another, and this is a core aspect of the narrative. In Narnia, the Pevensies are kings and queens; in the "mundane" world, they are ordinary children in a war-torn country. Characters in stories like this often have an ongoing conflict between their two identities, which are "performed" depending on which "world" they are in.

Something strikingly similar happens in many of the books we read for postcolonial lit. The characters living in a society where they are torn between assimilation with the colonizer and maintaining their cultural identity are passing through a similar kind of "portal" whenever they move from a space that demands one identity vs. a space that celebrates the other. And crucially, the experience of having passed through the "portal" sets you apart from people on both sides of it.

Which made me think: What if "portal" isn't a kind of fantasy, but a kind of story? There are a lot of human experiences that can be considered "worlds" accessible through "portals:" childhood, war, and so on. In this interpretation it would be the doubling of identity and the different rules on both sides of the "portal" that define a story as a portal story, not the literal supernatural portal.

[minovskyy]

this is neat. so i’ll try applying this framework to other categories of fantasy (pulling from Rhetorics of Fantasy):

intrusive fantasy: where forces of the supernatural invade the world familiar to the characters. the unfamiliar clashes with and disrupts the established order. easy one, seems very much like a colonization story.

immersive fantasy: the fantastic world familiar to the characters is threatened by or currently crumbling into decay. less discovery-oriented than portal or intrusive fantasy. the end goal usually being preservation of the world as it is or re-orientating to deal with the thinning of the world. this sounds like the loss of cultural practices and identity, watching your culture die out or be subsumed by another.

liminal fantasy: the fantastic sits on the edge of these stories, dubiously present and often never explicitly confirmed to be supernatural. im not sure about this one, but liminal fantasy stories often require the reader to be familiar with the fantasy genre in order to understand what is being teased or played with. so perhaps its similar to the portal fantasy in that the character is between two worlds, but in a more vague and ill-defined manner, and their identity in relation to these realities (and how they should react to them) is made that much more unclear?

in any case this is one of those things that makes it clear how silly the gap between “real” literature and genre fiction is. whether a story contains only mundane elements or fantastic ones, the underlying structures and how the stories function have more overlap than not. the dressing may be different but the engines are the same. putting an SFF filter over a non-genre story (or, alternatively: viewing genre fiction through a critical lens!) often yields something interesting

[elodieunderglass]

Today’s weirdly specific bugbear: newborn babies in fiction being portrayed with colored eyes. This isn’t the case! Newborn babies have undeveloped eye colors that resolve over infancy, exactly like how a glass of muddy water resolves and clarifies into colors, patterns, and layers.

- people who will grow up to have brown eyes will be born with eyes that can appear brown, black, dark grey, or a sort of muddy navy.

- people who will grow up to have light brown, hazel, green, grey or blue eyes are usually born with the same eye colors as above: black, brown, dark grey or muddy navy (which is a weird bluish cloudy look, like brown with a blue overlay.)

- If you’re two brown-eyed parents whose new baby has a sort of cloudy unfocused blue eye color, don’t worry, they’ll almost certainly be brown-eyed - the melanin is still rearranging itself - and somehow that comes across as this initial bluish brown color.

- if the baby is white it’ll almost certainly go with the classic “muddy navy” to start with. Nobody is born with fantasy eyes, but white babies least of all.

- people whose eyes have distinctive patterns, such as central heterochromia, chips, shards, streaks, rings, etc will not display these while the overall melanin pattern is settling.

- very melanistic human eyes are almost greyish; a portraitist or photographer can explain this better than myself. The lovely clear warm browns that dominate the majority of humanity are still a complex pattern of melanin deposition and reflection, not “default maximised melanin.”

- people who will grow up to have “ice blue” eyes (with very little melanin) can actually be born with “ice blue” eyes that do remain; however, ice blue eyes at birth can also change quite a lot! after all, they’re the ones where a simple melanin rearrangement from week to week will change their whole color and appearance. So “Ice blue” and “indeterminate darkest greyish color” i.e. very little melanin deposition/maximum melanin deposition are two colors that humans can be born with, keep for life and be very happy with; but the average eye color of humanity is brown, so I’m not sure if relevant.

- babies aren’t really born with green or hazel eyes, which require exposure to light, development and ongoing melanin readjustment! You’ll probably see these colors resolve between 3-6 months with the general direction settled at 9 months.

Anyway, I’m sure if you poll a thousand people, you’ll find some of them insisting that they’ve definitely known babies born with Distinctive Family Eyes or Their Father’s Eyes or Violet Eyes or Chosen One Eyes, and when they were born they opened them wide for everyone to admire, but while they’re having fun with that, let’s just be real: newborn babies have muddy eyes of indeterminate color, that are normally shut, and their default state is to Imitate Prawn. Newborn humans look like nothing and nobody. And that’s okay.

[elodieunderglass]

I must say, i delivered baby#3 a week after this post, and while sharing the exact same indescribable muddy navy eyes as their siblings (who are now wildly different phenotypes) they distinguished themselves very early on by having wonky pupils, which are different sizes. This is a very common feature of a newborn eye, and usually means nothing more than “eye not finished cooking yet,” but it does give the baby a very curious boggle. If you want to have your baby described with a realistic boggle, everyone will be tremendously satisfied.

[elodieunderglass]

@boonsweetie don’t leave your genius maneuvers in the tags

Wearing high-contrast patterned clothing (like a top with black and white stripes) is an easy way to gain attention and admiration from humans under four months old.

[wilwheaton]

[sandersstudies]

Pros of having a brain that makes very fast associations: Good comebacks and jokes.

Cons of having a brain that makes very fast associations: that story about how you broke your foot reminded me of a fun fact about lizards.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

Further con: I am constantly being reminded of fun facts during situations where I am Supposed To Be Quiet

[froginakettle]

further con: i can't stop talking even though i can tell everyone wishes i would just shut the fuck up

[greyhairedgeekgirl]

Further con: Sometimes you only remember halfway through the Fun Fact that it is Not Appropriate to the current audience in some way.

[babybluebanshee]

Things I've Had To Deal With As A City Librarian: I'm Just So Tired

Haven't done one of these in a while, and things have just been...they've been a time, let me tell you.

*We caught a guy hiding in one of the bathroom stalls after closing. We check the bathrooms to clean up any messes for the next day, and Julie knocked on the men's room door. No one answered, so she went in and checked the stalls. Didn't see any feet so she starts opening the doors. She gets to the handicap stall, and she tries to open it. It's locked. She mutters something about having to unlock it, and suddenly a voice from inside calls out, "Hey, I'm still in here." Julie nearly shrieks. The guy claims that his fly was stuck, but given the fact he didn't say anything when Julie came in and we couldn't see his feet under the stall door means he was probably crouched on the toilet, hoping we'd think the bathroom was empty and he could spend the night in the library.

*My coworker Allie did a cute little display in the kids area where you can write a letter to Curious George. She even made cardboard mailbox for it and put out a bunch of books and movies for people to check out. The amount of vandalism this thing has seen is unreal. One night a kid poked holes in the mailbox with a colored pencil. I was doing a walkthrough after a particularly rowdy family was in the kids area, only to discover that they have thrown everything on the display into the mailbox - the books, the movies, the postcards, the coloring materials, even one of the book stands. We spent about ten minutes fishing everything out.

*Speaking of displays, I did the Black History Month one this year. I worked on it for three months, and to be honest, I was very proud of it. It took up two tables, full of historical events and famous figures of black history. Needless to say, since black history is so damn expansive and my space was limited, a lot of people ended up getting left off (especially local people I'd never learned about). The amount of times people told me I left out a person they personally believed should be on it drove me to distraction. Two separate people told me I missed Kamala Harris (which I'll be kicking myself forever about). One woman asked me why I didn't redo the whole display to add one local figure she thought needed to be included. One woman asked me why she herself was not included one the poet's wall, because she was a published author. No, she was not kidding. I guess I should be thrilled that people were actually interacting with it, but at least a few people telling me I did a good job would have been fucking nice.

*To branch off from the black history month display - the city has an anti-discrimination policy when it comes to people reserving rooms for events. The only thing we explicitly do not allow is social events like parties and anyone attempting to sell something; everything else is fair game. This means we get a lot of obnoxious groups whose views we really, really do not agree with - homeschoolers, churches, conservative clubs, and, my personal favorite, the Sons of the Confederacy. Or as Rachel and I like to call them, The Sons of a Bunch of Loser Piss Babies. They had a meeting there during February, and Rachel was working that day. One of them, in his stupid little gray hat, was standing talking to someone...right next to my black history month display. Rachel told me she wanted to take a picture because the juxtaposition was...stark, to say the least. We're really not that surprised Failfuck McStank didn't notice the irony.

*We've had a guy coming in with his guitar and just...hanging out in the study rooms to play. We can't really do anything about it unless he's too loud or someone actively complains, but we're all kind of puzzled about the library being his first choice of places for a jam session.

*There's a pair of teenage girls that have been coming in for about four months now and their punk vibe is immaculate. The first time I ever saw them, one of them had a giant bleach blond mohawk, a leather jacket with studs, hot pink and black striped stockings, and the most badass combat boots I've ever seen. Her friend had a bleach blond buzzcut, a black jean jacket covered in patches, teal leggings, and red converse that were falling apart. Sherri stumbled on them chilling in the kids area, and noticed the buzzcut one was bent over something. She got closer and realized the kid was knitting a scarf. Mohawk comes in more often, and always has a thick book with her, just lounging in the chairs and quietly reading for a few hours. They're my second favorite patrons and hope they never change.

*A woman was interested in attended my classic book club meeting back in June. We were reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, so I gave her a copy. She didn't attend the meeting. She returned the book a few days later and said it was "gross". While she was there, she also picked up her inter library loan of a "romance" novel about a woman falling in love with her abusive stepbrother. I'm all for people reading whatever the fuck they want, but I also feel like if you're gonna read stepsibling porn, you don't get to call lesbian comics gross.

*Two women came in with a little boy who was absolutely bouncing off the walls. They did absolutely nothing to control him - one of them was busy talking to someone on her phone (on speaker till someone complained), the other was perusing the shelves - and the kid was just kind of running around being a nuisance. I was walking back from helping someone in the computer lab and saw the kid taking off his shirt. I told him he had to keep his shirt on, and that's when one of the women finally turned to me and said, "He wants to put his Spider-Man costume on." And I'm like, "Lady, that's great, but you're in a public space, not your living room. Have him change in the bathroom." Luckily they didn't hang around long after that, but fucking hell, the entitlement.

*A woman came in to fax a police report to her lawyer, and Sherri and I ended up being privy to the sordid tale of having her car stolen. She was out with a guy she met on Tinder, and they went to a bar in the next town over. They were getting ready to leave, but she wanted to have a cigarette, so they were standing by her car in the parking lot. Suddenly, three police cars come shooting up, right next to them. Turns out the dude she's with has a warrant out for his arrest. He panics, grabs her keys out of her hand, jumps in the car, and fucking peels away. He ended up crashing it into a ditch less than ten miles away, totaling it. She doesn't even know what warrant was for.

*It's very funny whenever I call anyone for reserve reminders or things like that, because people are so used to getting calls from robots and scammers that they're immensely suspicious any time they answer their phone. And it makes the absolute 180 they do into delighted toddlers, excited to get their books, that much funnier. The scenario usually goes like this:

Me: Hi, is this [insert name]?

Patron: *clearly doing the suspicious Fry face* Yeeeees...

Me: This is Blue, at the library! I was just calling to let you know you have a book on reserve ready for pick up!

Patron: *brightening instantly* OMG thank you! Oh, I'm so glad you called! You've made my day, you guys are wonderful!

Never fails to make me chuckle.

*The assistant librarian is in charge of a lot of the teen programs we do, and by far the most popular are her teen book boxes - the kids fill out a form of stuff they enjoy, and she puts together a box of three books, plus crafts and snacks, for them. On average, she does about twenty of them a month. However - because we are located in the heart of Conservative Brainrot Land, where a not insignificant portion of the population thinks if they're a good little conservative who hates what Fox News tells them to, Tucker Carlson will come give them the hug their dad never did - this has also given us great insight into the minds of ultra controlling parents who would encase their kids in wax if that could keep them from learning things they don't want them to. One particularly baffling example started with a mom asking that no "social justice" be included in the box. The next one asked for "no gender identity". This time? No inclusion. Like...I get why she put that. Because inclusivity = woke = liberal = the devil. But like...do these people hear themselves? Do they know what words mean? Also, I told the AL that she should just give the kid an empty box. She did not follow my advice.

*On the flip side of the crazy, controlling parent thing, y'all remember this family from a while ago? The one where the aunt came in and said Pretty Little Liars had opened a satanic portal that drove her niece to a mental hospital? Well, I'm happy to report that I think the mother of that girl might have had a face turn. The same kid just recently returned several books from the Anita Blake series (which are pretty mature as far as sexuality goes), and she's been in talks with the AL to volunteer for us, informing her that she doesn't know her schedule just yet because her mother is letting her start public school. I like to think the mom looked at that whole situation, took a long, hard look at herself in the mirror, and thought, "Ya know what? I don't think I want to be like this anymore. I think this is a problem." And ya know what? Good for her, and good for that girl. I hope it does them both a world of good.