Probably Fiction

Books, comics, shows, etc, so long as it's fiction.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[coldboreshooter]

[baygeethefirst]

I love this SO MUCH

[eisenkrahe]

Last year JK Rowling personally funded a group called Sex Matters to amend UK law so that trans women *overnight* went from legally women to legally men. This has resulted in mass exclusion of the trans community from numerous organizations, along with ongoing violent assaults on both trans and cis women alike.

With the new Harry Potter series she will be making a reported $20 million per-season renewal + other performance dependent royalties. She has been open across multiple interviews regarding her intentions to use said funds to push forth even more trans targeted legislation in the years to come.

This isn’t a “she gets paid no matter what” situation. The more eyeballs on this show the more money she has to actively harm vulnerable communities. By engaging with it you are directly supporting this and otherwise making a conscious choice to consume HP over doing the literal very least possible to not destroy the lives of trans people across the world.

If my stating the objective facts above upsets you then feel free to unfriend and move along. Your nostalgia-goggles feelings for a tired, problematic franchise mean nothing to me compared to the welfare of my trans friends and loved ones."

If you care more about badly written children's books and imaginary wizards more than you do about real people in the real world do it far the fuck away from me.

Don't try to be in my life.

In fact, you are cordially invited to eat shit and die.

[crookedbluebirdkingdom]

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.

[crookedbluebirdkingdom]

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!

[willow-wanderings]

how fast can we lobby for new laws that exempt libraries from any kind of exclusive access like this? "Amazon exclusive!" no, fuck you, libraries still have it you scum sucking snot gremlin because that's what libraries are FOR

[gingerhaze]

Some character designs with some…atypical color choices? I guess. I don’t know what’s going on in that area.

This is Nimona and her supervillain friend (He doesn’t have a name yet, I’m working on that). Nimona is his sidekick/squire, they’re like the Batman and Robin of slightly Medieval villains, but she’s actually way more evil than him. He does what he does to make a point, and he doesn’t really want anyone get hurt - Nimona just gets a kick out of destroying stuff.

I’m going to attempt to make a two page comic with them? We’ll see how this goes.

[trans-ballister-blackheart]

This was tagged #homework and posted in December 2011.

[sadieb798]

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

The linked article

[lastweekseyeliner]

so ive worked in childcare for a bit now. during the pandemic, the place i worked started a day program for kids whose parents needed to return to work. turns out the school district uses memorization and cueing, and when combined with online learning that read all the instructions to them, overwhelmingly the kids aged 5-9 just... couldnt read.

i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!

if you are a parent or teacher or childcare worker, PLEASE check to see what your kid is being taught. ask to see examples of lesson materials. raise concerns about the importance of phonics over any other reading strategy. join the pta, go to school board meetings, send emails- just make sure your kid is actually learning to read.

[studentofetherium]

[dandelionwyn-o]

Booksmith sells online! They even have book mystery boxes based on other books you love. Let's show them (and others) that they made a good business AND moral choice.

[dibabeebees]

Please give these people money

[utopians]

stepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot) it was on the driveway got out of the car and accidentally (didn't know it was there) stepped on the plum (warm) (on the ground) (it had fallen from the tree) barefoot (no shoes) wearing long pants (too long) (need to hem them) plum viscera got on them (the pants) unexpected plum on the driveway (hot plum) (97 degrees out) already super hungover (throwing up all morning) (should not have been driving at all) and I stepped out of the car (black car) (97 degrees out) and onto the plum (unexpected) (didn't know the plum was there) and it burst (plum nightmare on my only good pair of sweatpants) still we find ways to keep ourselves going from day to day

[utopians]

guess what post just got read aloud in poetry club tonite by an unknowing club member as I watched on in terror

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[incidentalcomics]

From my collaboration with author Jon Acuff, here are some insights on how to finish a creative project:

How To Finish

A Visual Guide

[thekenobee]

the funniest man on the planet

[fictionadventurer]

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

[datasnake]

Other examples of “blamed for things their copycats did” include Watchmen (blamed for the gritty antihero comics of the 90s) and Madoka Magica (blamed for excessively edgy and grimdark magical girl shows).

[fictionadventurer]

Four years on, and I think you might be the first person to add this type of comment to this post. After receiving so many comments that are like “THG is nowhere near on the level of LotR” or “THG didn’t invent YA dystopia”, it’s so refreshing to see someone understand exactly what I meant by framing THG as “a work blamed for its copycats”, and expand on it with examples that I didn’t know about.

It’s so rare to get an original comment on this post. Thank you so much.

[kelseyuum]

… he claimed to be genuinely surprised when, in March 1956, he received a letter from one Sam Gamgee, who had heard that his name was in The Lord of the Rings but had not read the book. Tolkien replied on March 18:

“Dear Mr. Gamgee,

It was very kind of you to write. You can imagine my astonishment when I saw your signature! I can only say, for your comfort, I hope, that the ‘Sam Gamgee’ of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic. So that perhaps you will not be displeased at the coincidence of the name of this imaginary character of supposedly many centuries ago being the same as yours.”

― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Letter 184

He proceeded to send Mr Gamgee a signed copy of all three volumes of the book. However, the incident sparked a nagging worry in Tolkien’s mind, as he recorded in his journal:

“For some time I lived in fear of receiving a letter signed ’S. Gollum’. That would have been more difficult to deal with.“― J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

[http-tempted]

[calmdowngorgeous]

Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.

[parsstuff]

I go to the library almost every week and it’s awesome

[depsidase]

[softest-punk]

I know I periodically preach the gospel of Scrivener but I do want to say that like, as a professional author who derives 90% of my income from writing novels, it is sincerely the best solution on the market.

This is because it is fundamentally local to your device. Everything is saved on your device. It CAN also be synced to the cloud (only with Dropbox) but a) these are not naked plaintext files, so they cannot be scraped and b) you still have a local copy so if the servers burn down or are shut down or whatever, you will still have a copy.

Its backups and redundancies are so robust that if I ever have a problem with them it is in the direction of having so many backups that it slows down file loading (fixable by manually deleting them).

When you buy it (for a small initial outlay), you own it. This is so unusual in today's software market that I think it bears explaining: you buy a licence to Scrivener once, and it is yours forever. No subscription. It's like buying a real paper notebook.

It's also purpose-built for longform writing and has a load of features of which I probably use 10%. You could use it exactly like a Word or GDoc if you wanted to. Previously the purpose built bit had been the big selling point for me but in today's environment it's being in complete control of my files.

There is no version of a live online document service that will not be subject to AI scraping in the current climate. If you are serious about writing at all, you should be keeping your files local and transferring them, as necessary, in ways that are at least not the equivalent of printing them in the newspaper.

This is inconvenient but you can either have convenience or security. Your writing is your voice, your voice is valuable. It is worth protecting at the cost of a slight change in system, imho. I would not, as a professional, use an online service now.

[calaisreno]

I have used Scrivener since 2009. I currently have 700k words of my WIP folder (drafts and notes) organised and stored in one document that still loads quickly. I don't know how I'd write without this.

[animentality]