Old Spinster Wants To Be Left Alone!!

she/her, 44, bi/borderline pan, this is my brain (mostly)

[snoopyoftheday]

snoopy of the day

[dsudis]

Maybe... can have shit in Detroit?

Historic wild rice restoration underway in the Detroit River: ‘Living tribute to the First Nations'

Historic wild rice restoration begins in Detroit River as tribal partners work to bring back sacred grain that disappeared from ancestral wa

[tuulikki]

Adding some food shopping links, for those who are interested

Red Lake Nation Cultivated Wild Rice | Indigenous Native Food

Red Lake Nation cultivated wild rice from the Tocabe pantry has a naturally nutty flavor & firm texture and provides exceptional nutriti

Wild Rice - Manoomin

Eat well with the food that grows on the water. Minnesota Wild Rice grows naturally in the lakes of Northern Minnesota, and is hand harveste

[wilwheaton]

Epic diarrhea outbreak has 40% of Americans avoiding fruits and veggies

Kennedy has focused on nutrition but has neglected food safety, critics say.

All of this was entirely avoidable. None of this needed to happen, none of this was inevitable. 

And now look at where we are, because of the dumbest fucking people in the history of the world.

40% of Americans don’t feel safe eating food we buy at the grocery store, and honestly that number is lower than it should be. 

I will never forget and never forgive the people who did this to us. I will despise them for the rest of their lives.

[arte-artem-artibus]

Kenojuak Ashevak - Audacious Owl, 1993, stonecut, 61 x 73.7 cm

[wendicemargo]

Rita Hayworth in Gilda ( 1946)

Director. Charles Vidor

Request for: Spectacular Blog I hope this is what you were looking for.

[huariqueje]

 Karin's Countertop - Sebastian Blanck , 2025.

American, b. 1976 -

Gouache and ink on rag paper , 30 × 22 in.

[merclando]

this is so cute are we kidding

[guccifloralsuits]

If THE modern translator of the OG Odyssey text wrote this about my film adaptation I’d kill myself

Emily Wilson you’re goated

[skopostheorie]

[j-k-i-ng]

“In the last rays of the sun" by | GaL-Lina

[kylieminvogue]

"LEGALLY BLONDE" 2001, dir. Robert Luketic

[image-plus-official]

Untitled, Mark Oliver, Charcoal and pastel on toned Fabriano paper, 2026 [1440 x 1920]

[liberalsarecool]

Capitalism rewards extraction, not creation.

[allthingseurope]

Perast, Montenegro

[myjetpack]

My latest collection of cartoons, PHYSICS FOR CATS, won the Eisner award for Best Humor Publication at the weekend! Get it from good local booksellers or online:

Click here for links to the English editions www.tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2 Click here for links to translations www.tomgauld.com/languages

[russelliv]

hey btw let's not gloss over the fact that 12 is also trying to steer another narrative that George just doesn't know what to do with the car??? why say that to your other colleagues AND in front of live tv knowing full well you don't have a clue on what happened or data to back up your claim?

[finalgirlianthe]

"no one is owed anything, except for me who is owed your money"

[finalgirlianthe]

this might be a bit of a shock for american authors but your right to your intellectual property does not take precedence over our right to read whatever the fuck we want and your shit wouldn't be half as popular as it is if it weren't for piracy

[ssontag]

I don't know this author or her work & also this is going to get me crucified but she is 100% right. The idea that you should be able to use the fruits of someone's labor for free is entitlement. For some reason everyone on this "leftist" site forgets that if someone does not get to reap the (financial) rewards for their own work, that is a form of injustice and will lead to alienation.

Yes, you can make very valid arguments for pirating textbooks, medical texts or other books that are necessary for your survival or the betterment of your life. But as everyones derogatory comments in the notes already show, we all know Booktok books don't fall in that category. If you think you have a right to read because reading will make you more intelligent or empathetic, you still must admit that some books have no such effect. They're just entertainment, and thats fine, but it's also a luxury! It is not something you NEED, let alone something you have some unalienable right to. And honestly I don't even care that much if you pirate a book (some people really cant afford to buy it or have no other way to access it), but to act as if you deserve to read everything you want for free even though you could afford to buy it, is pure entitlement.

Someone being upset that you're significantly undermining their livelihood isnt ridiculous. If you can see why artists deserve to have high rates for their commissions (because they put a lot of skill and time and effort into their work), then why can't you apply that logic to writers? Even if you think their work is bad, they did put in the hours. And so did their editors, the cover illustrators, the marketing team and everyone else at the publishing house. Do none of these people deserve compensation for their work? Do you really believe that no one who pirates a book might otherwise have bought it, or could have borrowed it from a library? What is it about books that makes you feel like you're owed free access to them?

[kinavu]

If you want to talk about exploitation of writers (and their team's) labour here, i suggest you point fingers at the publishing houses that hardly allow these people to have a cut of the profits from book sales, rather than the people who are barred from being able to access knowledge around the world for one reason or another. If you are able and want to support the author financially you are better off finding their social media and checking if they have a patreon you can pledge yourself to, rather than expecting the publishing houses to share a decent cut with them.

Small booktok authors aiming their frustration with the capitalist system that exploits them at the people who are barred access from information is ridiculous, and frankly they only serve the global push right now to cut off our access to the repositories that have copies of ANY of these books, not just the booktok ones.

[hagiomoto]

The fruits of your labor are realized the moment your publisher prints your books and places them on bookstore shelves. That is the product of your work. At that point, your contractual obligation has been fulfilled, and you have been compensated according to the agreement you made with your publisher.

You are not entitled to perpetual "rent" from every person who encounters your work. It is unreasonable to demand payment from people who have no ability to pay. A right to be compensated for creating a work is not the same as a right to extract payment from every possible reader forever.

Once your books leave the publisher's printers, they become physical objects circulating in the world. You no longer have the authority to dictate every use of those objects. People may lend them to friends, donate them to libraries, resell them to used bookstores, or give them away. None of these actions requires additional payment to you because your compensation was tied to the creation and publication of the work, not to every subsequent transfer or use.

The same principle applies to digital copies. If someone uploads your book to the internet and it reaches people who would never have purchased it in the first place, that does not necessarily deprive you of income. Your payment came from the publishing agreement that enabled your work to be printed, distributed, and sold. The existence of a digital copy does not automatically create a new obligation for every recipient to pay you, particularly when they lack the means to do so.

The value created by your labor is the book that enters circulation through publication. That is the tangible product of your work and the basis on which you are compensated. Digital copies shared among people who cannot afford to buy the book do not generate additional value from which further payment can reasonably be demanded.

The fruits of your labor are the books that reach the marketplace through publication—not every digital copy that exists afterward.

[breelandwalker]

And every one of these points falls apart when you consider independent authors. Because we have no publisher's contract, we have no guarantee, and we live or die by every copy that sells, physical or digital. And every uncontrolled copy that circulates for free online DOES take money out of our pockets.

Books that are on library shelves, that are traded or donated, have still been paid for at some point and the range of their circulation is limited. But digital copies have unlimited circulation, because they do not require a physical copy to be transmitted or handed over. Where a few dozen physical copies might circulate through multiple hands, digital copies can reach thousands.

And in a marketplace where digital sales vastly outnumber physical distribution, if one can simply download a free copy of a book, well....why would they bother buying it? To support the author? To pay them for their labor? To support a niche genre or community?

I can tell you personally that it's highly unlikely.

I've been fighting this for ten years now, including Discord servers and entire websites which are dedicated to uploading and circulating niche category works like mine, because people are "entitled" to whatever books they want. And the responses I receive typically boil down to exactly what's posted above - that my intellectual labor has no value, that a stranger's desire for a free book is more important than my living, and that it's Not A Big Deal that I'll never see a penny for hundreds of copies of my work.

Furthermore, even for authors who DO have a publishing contract, their ability to negotiate for further works lives and dies by their sale numbers...including digital ones. So even if they get paid by the publisher, if the sales numbers are poor because of digital theft, good luck seeing more works from small-time authors you enjoy enough to steal their work.

[hagiomoto]

It sucks that you can't make a living from your books, but your inability to do so does not entitle you to take away other people's right to access books through any means. You can complain about it as much as you want, but piracy will continue to exist, and people will continue to find ways to read anyone's work.

Besides, there is no academic consensus that piracy causes large sales losses across all forms of media. The evidence is mixed, with several studies finding little to no measurable effect in many cases and others finding negative effects only in specific contexts.

You're directing your anger at people who don't have the money to buy your books in the first place. If someone can't afford your work or refuses to pay for it, they aren't a lost sale, they were never a paying customer to begin with. Treating every pirated copy as a sale you "deserved" assumes that everyone who pirates would have bought your book otherwise, an assumption the evidence does not consistently support.

You can complain about piracy all you want, but it isn't going away. For as long as digital media exists, people will continue to find ways to access books, music, films, and games without paying. If your response is simply to demand harsher enforcement or fewer consumer rights, you're fighting reality instead of adapting to it.

[breelandwalker]

That's a lot of words for "I don't think intellectual labor has value if I don't personally enjoy the book and I also don't care if writers eat."

Books are a luxury. A luxury, by definition, has nothing to do with wealth. It is, pure and simple, something beyond what you need to survive. It's not about being entitled to sales. It's the simple fact that whether people can afford a book or not, they're more likely to take a free copy than buy one.

By your logic, if I were running a physical store and someone walked in and stole a box of books from my storeroom to copy and hand out for free, I should just shrug and say, "Oh well, they were never going to buy them anyway" and write it off. By your logic, why should I write books at all, if they're just going to be stolen? I've put out thousands of posts' worth of free content, but how dare I "gatekeep" or "paywall" my written works, how selfish of me to want, at any point, to be paid for my work and the product that I put on the literary market.

Furthermore, I don't need a university study to make my point for me. Because I have the date that my work was posted on a server, and I have the data from my digital book sales from the next three months, which took a STEEP fucking downturn and have stayed 30% lower than previous years ever since, even though the copy was (allegedly) removed.

Would I have been able to make a living from my writing? Thanks to a bunch of assholes on Discord, I will never know.

I know piracy isn't going away. I'm not arguing about laws here. I'm talking about my personal livelihood and that of other independent and small-time authors who are in the same boat. I'm asking people to fucking think before they go, "I deserve any and every book for free because I can't/don't want to pay for it," or assuming that authors are rich enough that we don't need or deserve to be paid for our work.

THAT is where I'm directing my anger - at people who think that it's less entitled to think they "deserve" whatever book they want for free than it is for an author to think they deserve payment for their work...and moreover, people who think that "LOL your book is probably mid and wouldn't have sold anyway, you should be grateful somebody thinks it's worth stealing" is a valid point to make to someone who has personally lost much-needed income to digital theft.

If you're going to steal, steal from somebody who can afford the loss.

[dixy]

hi, i see on your webshop where you sell your books that chinese yuan, ukrainian hryvnia, russian rubles, and possibly others im not aware of are not options as a currency. do you have any comment on the lack of availability within these countries and what people that live there should do about it if theyre interested in reading your books? and are the prices in other currencies adjusted for local pricing or just converted? are you aware that piracy is the only option in many countries?

[breelandwalker]

What in the actual....is this a joke?

I am not a publishing house. I am one person with a small business. I ship books worldwide from my shop and I've made my books available on international sites like Amazon for broader distribution. I don't have a big publisher contract. My books aren't in most bookstores. I get paid per copy sold. Am I somehow meant to take on the responsibility for fixing international literature availability shortages?

If commerce infrastructure does not make my work available to purchase in a given location, is it then my job as a small-time independent author to just give my work away for free? Is it my duty then to forgo putting food on my table and keeping a roof over my family's head because someone somewhere can't afford a book? Are smalltime authors just meant to donate their work to whomever says they can't afford the price and never expect to be paid for it?

Why in the blithering blue blazes would anyone in their right mind expect a small business or a smalltime author to have the same capabilities and financial resources as a multinational corporation?

In what world does it make sense to blame individual authors for another country's lack of availability? If Russia decides not to make my book available for purchase because it's queer-positive, is that my responsibility to fix? If China chooses not to distribute my book because it violates a media statute, is that my problem to solve?

Here, let's bring the example closer to home. I'm based in the U.S. Because I'm independently published, the big chain bookstores here won't carry my work. So there's every possibility that a person might ONLY be able to acquire my titles in a library or by buying directly from me or through a site like Amazon or Bookstore. If someone can't afford the cover price, should I just give them the book for nothing? How many copies am I meant to give away before I start telling people to save their pennies or put it on a wishlist?

And let me be perfectly clear - Of the sites and servers that stole my work and redistributed, three were based in the U.S., one in Canada, one in the U.K. and two in Australia, all places where my work is readily available for purchase on multiple platforms. Russia and China aren't the problem. The entitlement call is coming from inside the house.

Do you do your job out of the goodness of your heart without expecting to get paid? Or might you be a bit miffed if your boss decided you weren't getting a check this week because someone didn't want to pay for your services?

Sit down.

[traegorn]

These are the same people who just refuse to tip servers as their "protest of tipping culture." They'll say stuff like "workers should get paid enough where they don't need to be tipped" while only punishing those trapped in the system instead of doing anything to change it.

Bunch of folks cosplaying leftists who think hurting other workers trapped in this system is somehow praxis.

Get a fucking library card, download Libby, and quit whining that authors are asking for you to (checks notes) not steal their books that you don't need to survive when there's literally a free way to get books.