AR

30s | ace | she/her | librarian | multi-fandom | (previously tqtangerine)

[lakecountylibrary]

LIBRARY WRAPPED

You checked out... probably some stuff? Thanks for doing that :)

Used our wifi maybe? For something?

Look we actually don't know what genres you read or how many times you renewed Gender Queer.

We don't want to know.

Our gift to you is privacy.

Take it.

Be free.

[thepromiscuousfinger]

I love very specific cakes

[easily-evi]

I had to redraw this cake 🍰

[sweaterkittensahoy]

A companion:

[moltentundramountain]

Books on Libby have started disappearing.

My friend pointed it out first, and then I started noticing too. Why would books that multiple libraries definitely, 100% had digital access to a couple of months/weeks/days ago disappear?

Amazon is getting exclusive rights to them.

Ebooks that the public library once had digital copies of are now only available through Amazon. Audible boasts on their covers about Audible-exclusive audiobooks that did not used to be Audible-exclusive. Entire series and collections are disappearing overnight.

Keep your eyes on the privatization of media and your libraries.

[moltentundramountain]

According to this article on The Verge, it's been happening since at least 2021, but if I were to make a guess, Amazon has doubled down recently in response to the boycotts: if there are specific books people want, particularly ones only available digitally available, they now have the monopoly, and you are forced to scab, which often also means remaking your account and breaking your boycott altogether.

Now more than ever, support your local libraries, support authors directly when possible, and support your local used bookstores!

[teaboot]

I loved when “Drift Compatible” entered pop lexicon cause we were in DESPERATE need for a way to platonically express “one of us to the other is as a limb to a body; we are a left and right feet of a dancer; we do not need to speak because any one word inspires an exchange of unspoken words that conveys a full conversation in which a mutual conclusion is determined in an instant”. Huge win for the QPRs out here

[fleshengine]

I also really love that the movie explicitly shows that drift compatibility can be any form of relationship. Two brothers, three brothers, husband and wife, father and son, two friends who have lost everything to the same enemy. It isn’t about the way you connect, it’s about the connection itself. And of course, that connection lets you put boots to asses and kill alien monsters together. Because the power of human connection can change the world or something.

[ayeforscotland]

Lol, good stuff.

[sandmandaddy69]

[bunney]

Evanescence: These wounds won’t seem to heal, this pain is just too real, There’s just too much that time cannot erase

12 year old me:

[bemusedlybespectacled]

31-year-old me:

[good-times-with-weapons]

Tumblr on March 15th

🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪

[wisteria-lodge]

Gender and Harry Potter is such a hydra that just keeps revealing more heads the more you try and chop through it. Case in point: Today I just realized Harry Potter might've been originally intended as a book for boys, which if it was *wow*, way to miss the mark Joanne. Do you think it was actually intended for a male audience? To me it kinda makes sense if it was because of the way most women and girls are portrayed in it.

Bloomsbury Publishing definitely requested that JK Rowling publish with her (gender neutral) initials instead of 'Joanne Rowling' because they were concerned boys would not buy a book with a woman's name on the cover.

My guess is that her British publishers slotted it more firmly under 'boy' than her American publishers did. Harry Potter is 100% a school story, a super established British children's book genre. Historically, there are boy school stories (set in all-male posh public schools) and girl school stories (set in all-female posh public schools.) Hogwarts is of course co-ed, but that fact that it comes out of a literary tradition in which all the characters are the same gender... might help explain why in-universe gender politics seem remarkably absent from the wizarding world.

It actually kind of bugs me, when a canon-compliant fic makes a big deal about male-only inheritance or something, because that's just not something we see. There's one line about "Black family tradition" saying that the house goes to the next oldest guy, but since Dumbledore is worried that *Bellatrix* is about to inherit, it clearly isn't that important.

JKR has made a fantasy society where gender doesn't really matter - Augusta Longbottom and Walburga Black are clearly the powerful matriarchs of their respective families, Maxime and McGonagall are headmistresses, no problem. There isn't the boys quidditch team vs girl's quidditch team, the locker rooms and the prefects bathroom seem to be co-ed, "robes" are gender neutral, there isn't a sense that a specific discipline or type of magic is gendered (we see both male and female Transfiguration, Care of Magical creatures, and Defense Against the Dark arts professors...) There is kind of a sense that the boys are supposed to ask the girls to the yule ball... but multiple girls still ask out Harry. Gender comes up a lot in these books yes, but not so much in the actual worldbuilding. We have gendered bathrooms and dorms, and the rule that the girls can go into the boy's dormitory, but not vice-versa. Ron considers lace a girly fabric. Of the top of my head, that's all of the "gendered" rules I can think of.

But, since the main character is a boy, it makes sense that her British publishers would slot it more into the category of "school story (boy)" and market accordingly. I think it's extremely likely that she was asked to lean more heavily into quidditch, an aspect of the world building that JKR is clearly not interested in. She's said multiple times that she dislikes writing quidditch games - which is why she throws in comedy with the commentary, or makes some magical thing go down, or finds ways to cancel quidditch entirely. The mechanics and tension of the game *itself* are not interesting to her. I think it's also possible this is a reason for Hermione's relatively late intro into the friend group during Book 1? Harry can be friends with a girl, but first we need to establish that Ron is his *best* friend.

But then the books hit America, and the whole "school story" thing didn't read as "boy" as much as it just read "British." There was a sense in American advertising, especially in the 90s, that girl's products were for girls, but boy's products were for everyone. Scholastic Publishing seemed less interested in gendering the book, and more interested in making sure it didn't come off as too high-brow to American children - so we get the name change from "Philosopher's Stone" to "Sorcerer's Stone," things like that.

But then right before the publication of Book 4 the series exploded, and JKR could have just self-published the thing if her publishers didn't behave. So I think that you can see the fingerprints of that marketing push on Book 1, which grandfathered in a number of worldbuilding choices that JKR maybe wouldn't have made later. But pretty quickly it just became JKR doing her thing.

[wisteria-lodge]

jkr did try to make a gender-neutral world (for lack of a better term) but only in little pop feminism ways. Like, the women that we see climb the social ladder are still unmarried and matriarchs like Molly are only powerful in a shrill virago kind of way (also they are never the earners in the family). Women still take their husbands' names and it's overwhelmingly women who get fridged to advance the story. idk, just adding my two cents ~ @blorger

One of the maddening things about JKR is that she often, unfortunately, only considers things at the surface level. Like one little detail that gets to me is - okay, she's committed to this pre-electrical, pre industrial world, right? Then why do all the older women have these big feathery hats (which was a late 1800s thing.) Why does Fleur have a white wedding dress? (which was a mid 1800s thing.) I know it's because JKR has a picture in her mind of what a strict older woman looks like, and she looks victorian. She pictures a wedding in her head, the bride is wearing white, and she doesn't question where those images come from.

So that's why she can have a world basically without religion (unless merlin is a religious figure idk)...but still leave in references to Christmas and Easter. She can have a world without gender politics... but women still take their husband's last name, because that's baked in too deep for her to question.

She pays lip service to women working outside the home. Alice Longbottom, Mrs. Granger, Marietta Edgecombe's mother work. and Mrs. Zabini is a serial killer, so that's kind of a job? But of course we spend the most time with Petunia and Molly, who stay at home with the kids while their husbands go to work.

Also, in terms of characters being fridged (so - killed to further the emotional/plot arc of a male character) I'm going to say that her biggest example is actually Cedric. It was surprising to me how much he is given the fridged love interest treatment at the beginning of Book 5. Like dudley teases Harry by calling Cedric his "boyfriend." and I THINK it is the only explicit reference to anything LGBT in the entire series. Makes me wonder why Harry/Cedric was never more of a ship.

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

I've reblogged this before but something you put in the first post really clicked for me now I've been re-examining in closer detail the twin writing elements of a) plagiarism and b) how exactly she put these books together in terms of her writing process -

Is it really as simple as the world she wrote seems incredibly gender-neutral and co-ed BECAUSE she simply uncritically lifted scenarios, setting and group dynamics from source material where all the characters were in a single-sex setting, and didn't update or change any of it to fit a co-ed world because she didn't realize the implications if she didnt???

That is, the co-ed Quidditch team, the co-ed prefects' bathroom with one big tub, the children getting changed into uniform in front of each other in the train carriage are just things she didn't even THINK about because she didn't even invent them in the first place, she just 'borrowed' them from some other source where these were already segregated environments???

I would go as far as to say Hogwarts only even needs to be a co-ed school for one single scene in terms of the overarching plot: Snape's Worst Memory. For all the relevance girl characters have to the plot outside of that, and outside of Hermione - who could easily be a boy plot-wise, if she wasn't Rowling's self-insert - Hogwarts might as well be a boys' only school!

[wisteria-lodge]

I think this is an incredibly good point. Way back in the day when they were first coming out, a British friend of mine said, "It's just Tom Brown's School days with magic," and - yeah.

I absolutely think that the reason we've got co-ed bathrooms, co-ed locker rooms, co-ed sports, they change in the train compartments... is because those are all tropes/scenarios directly imported from British "school-story" books... which are set in all-boys schools. It's a fun thought-experiment - could you gender-flip Hermione into Harry's swotty guy friend, and set the books in an all-boys school? Honestly, yeah. Even stuff surrounding the Yule Ball in book four... well, that could be the girls' school coming to visit for the competition, and all the drama you get from that.

I think the school-story roots could also be another reason why we are so light on on-page romance (not happening in an all-boys school) (in a book written between 1850 and 1930.) And this could also be why we have such a disconnect between the plot and what they're actually learning in their classes. In a classic school-story, the classes the boys are taking are going to be like Latin and Rhetoric (unlikely to come up in the plot very much.) But that's not the case if you're learning magic. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am pretty sure that Harry has never transfigured anything outside of the context of class, and transfiguration seems *super* useful.

(and it's Book 2 before we actually see him cast a spell, on the page.)

And I know that this is a big thing for a lot of people. They're at a magic school they should be... using the magic they learn! I've heard people make comparisons to Avatar, or spitball how you could have a fun plot about magical locks being put on wands that you then have to 'jailbreak' in order to do specific spells outside of class, or just having a main character who more obviously levels up in terms of magical ability.

But I think a big reason all this stuff just... isn't there... is because it's not there in the parent genre.

[lordofmasks]

The Collector | prints

[imamuffin]

Education should be free ✨️💜

[konoko]

[scary-ivy]

[cheddar-baby]

No. 14 (White and Greens on Blue), Mark Rothko, 1998, Oil on Canvas, 90.2 × 69.9 cm

[jbirdoftheriverlands-deactivate]

before it gets bad I'm just gonna tell y'all certain rich people have literally only recently noticed Open Source software availability compromises the bottom line of their proprietary investments so if you see little chickadees on this website talking about the dangers of Open Source software all of a sudden it's cuz they accidentally sipped some koolaid mixed up by the far right yacht people to fuck with peoples software sovereignty and right to repair, modify, and redistribute robust codebases that become a problem when 30% of your portfolio is in, oh, say, adobe or openai.

This is your unfriendly neighborhood computer fucker telling you not to fall for it and to demand your right to digital sovereignty rather than trusting companies to make correct choices about what to do with the parts of your life they would very much like to have in the cloud to continue improving their products.

[20dollarlolita]

WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN HOBBY LOBBY

[amethystviolist]

[mossworth]

Guys, queers. Specifically my fellow queers.

I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.

I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.

My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.

Three years.

No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.

I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.

This isn't a vague post, there's no one person I'm hinting at or calling out. I'm not even talking directly to anyone who's directly in my line of sight. I just want everyone to hear this. Big library, small library, whatever. Doesn't matter. Please, we cannot be losing our shelf visibility like this.

[angryartist]

I made a little zine to help quickly pick out yarn for your projects! This is just a one-pager zine so I couldn't fit much, but if you want to learn about yarn materials in more detail I recommend checking out the yarn guide on the Knit Picks website. I found it super helpful!

In the future I'll be printing this off to sell at zine shows and it'll be a nifty tiny reference to tuck in your pocket or with your craft supplies.

[parkchanwoohoo]

[huffy-the-bicycle-slayer]

My mind reals at the idea that people couldve been playing music like this 4000 years ago

[littlestfallenangel]

Finally

Historically accurate Maurice raving