A note for those who have trouble measuring butter with a spoon as I do: one cup I am sixteen tablespoons. Butter/margarine bricks are usually a half a cup, so just cut one eighth of that amount
These are really good! And yes, for the love of god, if you have it use white sugar and brown sugar, add just a pinch of salt, and as many chocolate chips as you darn well please. Great with icecream, whipped cream on top, or a tall glass of milk (keep in mind you gotta eat it with a spoon, you can’t dip it in milk)
I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by Danny O'Brien, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:
https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt
While we were all devoted to sharing tips and tricks from our own lives, many of us converged on an outside expert, David Allen, and his bestselling book "Getting Things Done" (GTD, to those in the know):
https://gettingthingsdone.com/
GTD is a collection of relatively simple tactics for coping with, prioritizing, and organizing the things you want to do. Many of the methods relate to organizing your own projects, using a handful of context-based to-do lists (e.g. a list of things to do at the office, at home, while waiting in line, etc). These lists consist of simple tasks. Those tasks are, in turn, derived from another list, of "projects" – things that require more than one task, which can be anything from planning dinner to writing a novel to helping your kid apply to university.
The point of all this list-making isn't to do everything on the lists. While these lists do help you remember what to do next, what they're really good for is deciding what not to do – at all. The promise of GTD is that it will help you consciously choose not to do some of the things you set out to accomplish. This is in contrast to how most of us operate: we have a bunch of things we want to do, and we end up doing the things that are easiest, or at top of mind, even if they're not the most important things.
GTD recognizes that you can be very "productive" (in the sense of getting many things done) and still not do the things that you really wanted to do. You know what this is like: you finish a Sunday with an organized sock-drawer, all your pennies neatly rolled, the trash-can in your car emptied…and no work at all on that novel you're hoping to write.
You can't do everything, but you can control what you don't do, rather than just defaulting into completing a string of trivial, meaningless tasks and leaving the big stuff on the sidelines. Organizing your own tasks and projects is a hugely powerful habit, and one that's made a world of difference to my personal and professional life.
But while good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else's contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.
That's where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you're waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they're sometimes called "suspense files") made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I'd just gone back to this habit earlier.
My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well. Here's some sample entries from my suspense file:
WAITING EMAIL Sean about ENSHITTIIFCATION manuscript deadline 10/24/24
WAITING EMAIL Russ about missing royalty statement 10/12/24
WAITING EMAIL Alice about Christmas vacation hotel 10/8/24 10/20/24
WAITING EMAIL Ted about Sacramento event 8/12/24 9/5/24 10/5/24 10/20/24
WAITING CALL LA County about mosquito abatement 10/25/24
WAITING CALL School attendance officer about London trip 10/18/24
WAITING MONEY EFF reimbusement for taxi to staff retreat $34.98 10/7/24
WAITING SHIPMENT New Neal Stephenson novel from Bookshop.org 10/23/24
This is as simple as things could possibly be! I literally just type "WAITING," then a space, then the category of thing I'm waiting for, then a few specifics, then the date. When I follow up on an item, I add the date of the followup to the end of the line. If I get some details that I might need to reference later (say, a tracking code for a shipment, or a date for an event I'm trying to organize), I'll add that, too, as it comes up. Creating a new entry on this list takes 10-25 seconds. When someone gets back to me, I just delete that line.
That is literally it.
Every day, or sometimes a couple of times a day, I will just run my eyes up and down this list and see if there's anything that's unreasonably overdue, and then I'll send a reminder or make a followup call. In the example above, you can see that I've been chasing Ted about Sacramento for months now (this is a fake entry – no plans to go to Sacto at the moment, sorry):
WAITING EMAIL Ted about Sacramento event 8/12/24 9/5/24 10/5/24 10/20/24
So now I've emailed Ted four times. Maybe my email's going to his spam, and so I could try emailing a friend of Ted and ask them to check whether he's getting my messages. But maybe Ted's trying to send me a message here – he's just not interested in doing the event after all. Or maybe Ted is available, but he's so snowed under that he's in danger of fumbling it, and I need to bring in some help if I want it to happen.
All of these are possibilities, and the fact that I'm tracking this means that I now get to make an active decision: cancel the gig or double down on making sure it happens. Without this list, the gig would just die by default, forgotten by both of us. Maybe that's OK, but I can't tell you how many times I've run into someone who said, "Dammit, I just remembered I was supposed to email you about getting that thing done and I dropped the ball. Shit! I really was looking forward to that. Is it too late now?" Often it is too late. Even if it's not, the work of picking up the pieces and starting over is much more than just following through on the original plan.
Restarting my suspense file made me realize how many of the (often expensive or painful) fumbles I've had since the pandemic were the result of me not noticing that someone else hadn't gotten back to me. In essence, a suspense file is a way for me to manage other people's to-do lists.
Let me unpack that. By "managing other people's to-do lists," I don't mean that I'm deciding for other people what they will and won't do (that would be both weird and gross). I mean that I'm making sure that if someone else fails to do something we were planning together, it's because they decided not to do it, not because they forgot. As GTD teaches us, the real point of a to-do list isn't just helping us remember what to do – it's helping us choose what we're not going to do.
This is not an imposition, it's a kindness. The point of a suspense file isn't to nag others into living up to their commitments, it's to form a network of support among collaborators where we all help one another make those conscious choices about what we're not going to do, rather than having the stuff we really value slip away because we forgot about it.
I have frequent collaborators whom I know to be incapable of juggling too many things at once, and my suspense file has helped me hone my sense of when it would be appropriate to ask them if they want to do something together and when to leave them be. The suspense file helps me dial in how much I rely on each person in my life (relying on someone isn't the same as valuing them – and indeed, one way to value someone is to only rely on them for things they're able to do, rather than putting them in a position of feeling bad for failing you).
Lifehacking gets a bad rap, and justifiably so. Many of the tips that traffick as "lifehacks" are trivial or stupid or both. What's more, too much lifehacking can paint you into a corner where you've hacked any flexibility out of your life:
But ever since Danny coined the term "lifehack," back in 2004, I've been cultivating daily habits that have let me live the life I wanted to live, accomplishing the things I wanted to accomplish. I figured out how to turn daily writing into a habit and now I've written more than 30 books:
A daily habit of opening a huge, ever-tweaked collection of tabs has made me smarter about the news, helped me keep tabs on my friends, helped me find fraudsters who were trying to steal my identity, and ensured that all those Kickstarter rewards and other long-delayed, erratic shipments didn't slip through the cracks:
Daily habits are superpowers. Once something is a habit, you get it for free. GTD turns on decomposing big, daunting projects into bite-sized, trackable tasks. I have a bunch of spaces around the house – my office, my closet, the junk sheds down the side of the house, our tiki bar – that I used to clean out once or twice a year. Each one was all-day, sweaty, dirty job, and for most of the year, all of those spaces were a dusty, disorganized mess.
A month ago, I added a new daily task: spend five minutes cleaning one space. I did the bar first, and after two weeks, I'd taken down every tchotchke and bottle and polished it, reorganizing the undercounter spaces where things pile up:
Now I'm working through my office. Ever day, I'm dusting a bookshelf and combing through it for discards to stick in our Little Free Library. Takes less than five minutes most day, and I'll be done in about three weeks, when I'll move on to my closet, then the side of the house, and then back to the bar. A daily short break where I get away from my computer and make my living and working environments nicer is a wonderful habit to cultivate.
I'm 53 years old now. I was 33 when I started following Getting Things Done. In that time, I've gotten a lot done, but what's even more relevant is that I didn't get a ton of things done – things that I consciously chose not to abandon. Figuring out what you want to do, and then keeping it on track – in manageable, healthy, daily rhythms that bring along the other people you rely on – may not be the whole secret to a fulfilled life, but it's certainly a part of it.
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A resident of Hamnavoe, Shetland Islands in Scotland, Anne Eunson decided to knit herself a beautiful lace fence using twine. The fence is fashioned from strong black twine - the same kind that is used to make fishing nets - and Anne knitted it on specially adapted curtain rods. It took her about three weeks to knit enough lace to surround her front garden, using a 23 stitch repeat of a familiar Shetland lace pattern.
“Four years ago today a doctor in Wuhan reported a mystery pneumonia, whose origin was an unknown virus. Today, transmission of that virus is as high as it has ever been since that point. Millions of people a day. This is total, utter and astounding failure
That virus has killed about 25 million people in four years, and disabled millions more. It is now the leading cause of infectious disease death, in adults and children. It is the biggest mass death event in US history
It is routinely downplayed by a media and political class for whom thousands of deaths a day are the price of business-as-usual. A class that won't even call for protection measures for the most vulnerable in hospitals, despite it being almost fully preventable in those places
The virus continues to mutate at a rate unlike any other virus in global circulation. In the US, vaccines that can help protect against the worst outcomes of this virus now cost hundreds of dollars. In the UK and much of Europe, under 65s can't even be vaccinated against it
Millions of vulnerable people mount no immune response through vaccination or infection. These people have been sacrificed, fully sacrificed, for capitalist business-as-usual, as shown by the dropping of all airborne virus protection measures in hospitals
The absurdity of herd immunity, the mocking of masks, the labelling of covid as a cold or flu, once only far-right mantras, have been entirely absorbed by a liberal political, media and corporate class who saw the adoptions of these ideas as the route back to recreational liberty
The willingness to make the smallest material sacrifice, was, for most people, strictly timebound. I'm not talking about lockdowns. I'm talking about sticking a swab up your nose who putting on a mask while you do your shopping or visit the hospital. This became too much
There was a fear in internalising the idea that everything had changed. That it wasn't 2019. If it wasn't over with vaccines, then maybe it would never be over. And so maybe that means I have to change forever. That fear was overcome with normalisation and denial
Many people's lives have been profoundly changed in last 4 years. Through the death and disease of the illness itself, and by witnessing the great return to normal, a return, which signalled for many, the mass abandonment of principles and ideals. By allies, friends, family
All the love to those who never gave up and who make their belief in solidarity material every day”
The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems.
But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First":
Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance.
Worried your kid is being made miserable through targeted ads? No surveillance, no targeting.
Worried your uncle was turned into a Qanon by targeted disinformation? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that racialized people are being targeted for discriminatory hiring or lending by algorithms? No surveillance, no targeting.
Worried that nation-state actors are exploiting surveillance data to attack elections, politicians, or civil servants? No surveillance, no surveillance data.
Worried that AI is being trained on your personal data? No surveillance, no training data.
Worried that the news is being killed by monopolists who exploit the advantage conferred by surveillance ads to cream 51% off every ad-dollar? No surveillance, no surveillance ads.
Worried that social media giants maintain their monopolies by filling up commercial moats with surveillance data? No surveillance, no surveillance moat.
The fact that commercial surveillance hurts so many groups of people in so many ways is terrible, of course, but it's also an amazing opportunity. Thus far, the individual constituencies for, say, saving the news or protecting kids have not been sufficient to change the way these big platforms work. But when you add up all the groups whose most urgent cause would be significantly improved by comprehensive federal privacy law, vigorously enforced, you get an unstoppable coalition.
America is decades behind on privacy. The last really big, broadly applicable privacy law we passed was a law banning video-store clerks from leaking your porn-rental habits to the press (Congress was worried about their own rental histories after a Supreme Court nominee's movie habits were published in the Washington City Paper):
In the decades since, we've gotten laws that poke around the edges of privacy, like HIPAA (for health) and COPPA (data on under-13s). Both laws are riddled with loopholes and neither is vigorously enforced:
Privacy First starts with the idea of passing a fit-for-purpose, 21st century privacy law with real enforcement teeth (a private right of action, which lets contingency lawyers sue on your behalf for a share of the winnings):
Data minimization: a prohibition on collecting or processing your data beyond what is strictly necessary to deliver the service you're seeking.
Strong opt-in: None of the consent theater click-throughs we suffer through today. If you don't give informed, voluntary, specific opt-in consent, the service can't collect your data. Ignoring a cookie click-through is not consent, so you can just bypass popups and know you won't be spied on.
No preemption. The commercial surveillance industry hates strong state privacy laws like the Illinois biometrics law, and they are hoping that a federal law will pre-empt all those state laws. Federal privacy law should be the floor on privacy nationwide – not the ceiling:
No "pay for privacy." Privacy is not a luxury good. Everyone deserves privacy, and the people who can least afford to buy private alternatives are most vulnerable to privacy abuses:
A Privacy First approach doesn't merely help all the people harmed by surveillance, it also prevents the collateral damage that today's leading proposals create. For example, laws requiring services to force their users to prove their age ("to protect the kids") are a privacy nightmare. They're also unconstitutional and keep getting struck down.
A better way to improve the kid safety of the internet is to ban surveillance. A surveillance ban doesn't have the foreseeable abuses of a law like KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), like bans on information about trans healthcare, medication abortions, or banned books:
When it comes to the news, banning surveillance advertising would pave the way for a shift to contextual ads (ads based on what you're looking at, not who you are). That switch would change the balance of power between news organizations and tech platforms – no media company will ever know as much about their readers as Google or Facebook do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a news outlet's content as the publisher does:
This is a much better approach than the profit-sharing arrangements that are being trialed in Australia, Canada and France (these are sometimes called "News Bargaining Codes" or "Link Taxes"). Funding the news by guaranteeing it a share of Big Tech's profits makes the news into partisans for that profit – not the Big Tech watchdogs we need them to be. When Torstar, Canada's largest news publisher, struck a profit-sharing deal with Google, they killed their longrunning, excellent investigative "Defanging Big Tech" series.
A privacy law would also protect access to healthcare, especially in the post-Roe era, when Big Tech surveillance data is being used to target people who visit abortion clinics or secure medication abortions. It would end the practice of employers forcing workers to wear health-monitoring gadget. This is characterized as a "voluntary" way to get a "discount" on health insurance – but in practice, it's a way of punishing workers who refuse to let their bosses know about their sleep, fertility, and movements.
A privacy law would protect marginalized people from all kinds of digital discrimination, from unfair hiring to unfair lending to unfair renting. The commercial surveillance industry shovels endless quantities of our personal information into the furnaces that fuel these practices. A privacy law shuts off the fuel supply:
There are plenty of ways that AI will make our lives worse, but copyright won't fix it. For issues of labor exploitation (especially by creative workers), the answer lies in labor law:
Meanwhile, if you're worried about foreign governments targeting Americans – officials, military, or just plain folks – a privacy law would cut off one of their most prolific and damaging source of information. All those lawmakers trying to ban Tiktok because it's a surveillance tool? What about banning surveillance, instead?
Monopolies and surveillance go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Some of the biggest tech empires were built on mountains of nonconsensually harvested private data – and they use that data to defend their monopolies. Legal privacy guarantees are a necessary precursor to data portability and interoperability:
Once we are guaranteed a right to privacy, lawmakers and regulators can order tech giants to tear down their walled gardens, rather than relying on tech companies to (selectively) defend our privacy:
The point here isn't that privacy fixes all the internet's woes. The policy is "privacy first," not "just privacy." When it comes to making a new, good internet, there's plenty of room for labor law, civil rights legislation, antitrust, and other legal regimes. But privacy has the biggest constituency, gets us the most bang for the buck, and has the fewest harmful side-effects. It's a policy we can all agree on, even if we don't agree on much else. It's a coalition in potentia that would be unstoppable in reality. Privacy first! Then – everything else!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
im crying every time i vulcan salute someone i wanna say “live fast and get fucked or whatever” but i know i cant because the other person probably wont know what im referencing 😕
the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire
icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down
cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)
feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated
Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.
Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about.
(2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.
orphic task: circumstances beyond your control force you to go some place you really really don't wanna go. nobody in that place wants you to be there either. come back changed forever without the one thing that sent you there in the first place.
You'll be able to make a custom feed to follow blogs, webcomics, social media feeds, podcasts, news, and other stuff on the web all in one place. To follow something, find its "feed URL"-- often marked by an icon that looks like this ↓-- and paste it into your reader of choice as a new feed.
Some feed URLs for social media:
Twitter: Feedbro can use Twitter profile URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, use nitter.net/username/rss (or other Nitter instance) (You can get a CSV file of all the accounts you follow using "Download a user's friends list" on Tweetbeaver)
Tumblr: Use username.tumblr.com/rss or username.tumblr.com/tagged/my%20art/rss to follow a blog's "my art" tag (as an example)
Cohost: Use username.cohost.org/rss/public (WIP feature)
Mastodon: Use instance.url/@username.rss
Deviantart: Info here
Spacehey: Info here
Youtube: Go to a channel in a web browser, view page source, and use Ctrl-F/Command-F to find a link that starts with "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id="
Instagram: Feedbro can use Instagram profile and hashtag URLs as feed URLs. Otherwise, Instagram doesn't have RSS feeds, and due to aggressive rate limiting on their part, it's not so simple to generate a feed URL.
Facebook: Feedbro can use public Facebook group/page URLs as feed URLs.
(If you know an artist who exclusively posts to Instagram, you may want to gently suggest that they crosspost elsewhere...)
Also see how to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site. Try using public RSS-Bridge instances or Happyou Final Scraper to generate feeds for sites that don't have them (Pillowfort, Patreon, etc).
*You can set up your subscriptions in one reader and import them into another by exporting an OPML file.
Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped
listen I ended up regretting saying anything about this on my old blog because people will interpret literally any and every statement maliciously on this hellsite but I want to start like. a helpline for people who are like “hey I pretty much only read YA but I’m like 22 now and don’t relate to teenagers as much, it’s such a shame that there are no fun books written for adults :(” because boy HOWDY are there some fun books for adults
maybe I’ll start a big google doc or something one day but for now *deep breath*
The Beautiful Ones (Silvia Moreno-Garcia) - absolutely BUCKWILD romance with a dash of telekinesis; nonstop high society drama and misunderstanding from start to finish, happy ending guaranteed. STRONGLY recommend if you, like me, are a basic bitch who enjoys a bit of Pride and Prejudice.
Binti (Nnedi Okorafor) - a math prodigy runs away from Earth to become the first of her people to attend a prestigious university in space, but shit gets real when a crew of hostile jellyfish aliens attack her ship.
Chilling Effect (Valerie Valdes) - a spaceship captain and her crew take on a series of convoluted missions in order to rescue the captain’s sister, who’s been frozen and held for ransom.
The City of Brass (S.A. Chakraborty) - an 18th century conwoman and a mysterious djinn team up to go looking for a legendary hidden city.
The City We Became (N.K. Jemisin) - a scrappy bunch of Chosen Ones have to band together to defend New York City (which is very much alive) from a huge ass monster.
The Empress of Forever (Max Gladstone) - a lady supervillain gets blasted into space and meets an even bigger, planet-destroying evil space empress. literally WHAT is not to like?
The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo) - high fantasy royal drama about a woman making her way to power in the wake of a political marriage that left without friends or allies.
Escaping Exodus (Nicky Drayden) - a space-faring clan are creating their latest spaceship from the insides of a giant monster when absolutely everything goes to shit (as things are wont to do in science fiction stories).
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars (Kai Cheng Thom) - a trans girl runs away to the big city, where she uses her martial arts skills to team up with other trans woman and form a vigilante gang to defend their own when police look the other way. a fascinating blend of poetry and prose and magical realism.
Finna (Nino Cipri) - two exes working at an IKEA have to team up to save a customer who disappeared through one of those interdimensional portals that all IKEAs have laying around. you know how it is.
Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) - come on, you’ve heard about this one. it’s the one with the lesbian space necromancers? yeah, that’s the one. you got it.
In the Vanishers’ Palace (Aliette de Bodard) - a Beauty and the Beast retelling based in science fiction and Vietnamese fantasy, featuring a young woman falling in love with a “beast” who’s actually a motherly dragon after becoming a tutor to the dragon’s two powerful children.
Jade City (Fonda Lee) - urban fantasy gang wars, pitting one magically enhanced family against rivals and a new drug that lets anyone mimic their abilities.
The Library of the Unwritten (A.J. Hackwith) - hell’s librarian gets sent on a quest to find a runaway soul.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Becky Chambers) - aka one of my favorite books ever, essentially slice of life science fiction following an interspecies crew of deep space truckers making the longest and most complicated delivery of their lives. very warm and fuzzy.
Mort (Terry Pratchett) - one of many MANY Discworld books, but a very good one to start with, following the adventures of a boy named Mort after he’s taken on as Death’s apprentice. you know, like the Grim Reaper? that Death.
River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey) - historical AU in which the United States imported and domesticated hippos in the Mississippi River; follows a crew of hippo-riding crooks and hooligans as they plan one heck of a caper.
Space Opera (Catherynne Valente) - a washed up rock star and his old bandmate get roped into performing in an intergalactic singing competition that will determine the fate of the entire planet Earth. full of aliens, attempted assassination, art, and emotional turmoil.
This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) - time-travelling assassins from rival factions fall in love in a poetic and breathless story that spans centuries and reality.
Under the Pendulum Sun (Jeannette Ng) - fairyland is real, and Victorian England is sending missionaries. a woman and her brother attempt to bring the good word to the fair folk, but start to suspect the queen might just be screwing with their heads. PEAK gothic horror with a creepy fairy twist.
Witchmark (C.L. Polk) - a doctor and former soldier with magical powers of healing is trying to live a quiet life and avoid his controlling, aristocratic family’s plans for him, only to get tangled up in a massive political conspiracy when one of his patients mysterious dies. accompanying him in his investigation is a mysterious and gorgeous faerie man. romance ensues.
The First Sister by Linden A Lewis. Three protagonists and all of them queer, a fun space opera. It’s not out yet, but I can tell you it’s really, really good. I highly recommend
Gods of Jade and Shadow another Silvia Moreno-Garcia book. It takes place in 1920s Mexico and has Mayan gods. A fun breezy book.
Kill the Queen by Jennifer Estep. If you like YA fantasy but want a little more swearing, violence and sex then this novel is for you.
The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle Jensen. This one I really enjoyed. If you like the winner’s curse then you’ll like this book.
Books I haven’t read but I’ve heard good things about
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson. This one isn’t out it but I believe it’s got a black protagonist.
Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri. An Indian inspired fantasy novel. I haven’t read this one but I’ve heard good things about it.
Rage of Dragons by Evan Winters. A black fantasy novel.
The Unspoken Name by AK Larkwood. I haven’t read it but I know it’s got a lesbian protagonist.
Song of Blood and Stone by L. Penelope. Just started this book but I believe it’s for adults.
Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera. Lesbian protagonists and it’s still on my tbr.
“It’s a shame there aren’t any books for….” yes there are. “It’s a shame there aren’t any books that….” yes there are. “It’s a shame there aren’t any books like….” yes there are.
It’s an obstacle that you don’t know where to find those books. One that can be overcome.
It’s a shame to assume they don’t exist, and a shameful act to perpetuate the myth that they don’t exist without bothering to look.
I don’t understand how on TV, people can break into homes and immediately find bank statements, passports and super important documents. If someone tried that at my place it would be “I’m sure she keeps her important stuff in her desk. No, wait, this draw is full of pens that don’t work. Aha! This box looks important! Oh, never mind. It’s full of cigarette lighters. She doesn’t even smoke!”
Robber, standing in the middle of the room: Now, if I were an anxious, possibly undiagnosed ADHD, bisexual disaster with a really bad memory, where would I put the documents?
Client: OK, this is the target. The back door will be unlocked. The place is a mess, the person there has ADHD off the walls. Find these documents and bring them to me.
Professional Thief: Right. What do I do if they come home and find me there, how you want me to handle that?
Client: Nah, won’t happen. I’m gonna sit at the coffeeshop until you call me, I won’t be home.
note the reason you don't admit to buying in cash is because the salesperson makes commission off the amount of money you'd be expected to pay over the life of the loan, including the gargantuan interest amount, so they're incentivized to give you a much better price on the car knowing that the interest will more than make up the difference and help clinch the sale. if you say "I'm buying cash", no discount.
keep in mind that some purchase contracts are canny to this tactic and will make the discount only apply if you're financing, and the financing will renege on the discount if you pay off your loan within six months or some other fixed timeframe. read contracts carefully. you can still make out like a bandit if you time it carefully and never tell the salesperson what you're planning on doing
I was today years old when I learned that when you type "otp: true" in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship
