Confessions of a Broken Kindle

32 | Library Assistant | Artist | Writer | Dork | Occasional Ferret | British | They/She/He | Ace/Demi

[nervous-hyena]

Stickers for @thebrokenkindle!! Their characters Buzz the space ferret and Jax the stabby kitty! Thanks so much for commissioning me!

[thebrokenkindle]

Look at this amazing art!!

[memeuplift]

[bitchesgetriches]

The Library Is a Magical Place and You Should Fucking Go There

[cyko-tik-tabaxi]

Every library I've ever been to also has free wifi that won't track you like the corporate wifi spots at restaurants do

[teaboot]

My local library has an online movie and audiobook catalogue that you can access from home with your membership! And it’s free!!!

[thebrokenkindle]

I never tire of seeing and hearing birds of prey. Coming face to face with a sparrowhawk or hearing the screech of a peregrine, seeing a buzzard circling or a kestrel hovering. Nothing quite like it.

I hope I always feel a thrill when I see them out in the wild.

[wizardarchetypes]

The production value here is off the charts but this is also literally just what it feels like to play Uno.

legendaryjay_ on TikTok

[wizardarchetypes]

What’s really killing me is the storyline here. One of the friends is delighted to absolutely eviscerate him, whereas the other one looks pained. And there is a subtle overlay of Thanos’ line, “I’m sorry, Little One.”

While one member of the game revels in the destruction of his opponent, the other regrets it.  But only for a moment. Just as quickly, he begins to smile. Was the regret mocking? Or did his mask slip…. What is their history? What are their bonds? And why is one of them so gleeful to sever them? What brought them to this moment…

[hashtagloveloses]

I’ve never been so taken out by a response

[terulakimban]

I got to see mom do this once. It was… terrifying. I was moving into my first apartment, and my buddy had just moved into a place about half a mile away, and he was almost crying with rage because of some of the safety issues the apartment had with the wiring. There were a whole host of other problems, but that one was about safety and it should not have been a thing. Mom gathered us up, and drove to the leasing office. When we got there, she informed him (not asked. She’d walked his apartment, noted everything she disliked (she had much higher standards than he did) and she was PISSED) that he was to keep his mouth shut, make whatever expressions she cued him on, and pretend he understood whenever she and I switched languages and we’d fill him in afterwards. (I have been used as a complainant prop before. I know what my job is when she’s on this warpath; thankfully she does not use her powers for evil.) It took her all of twenty minutes to have a promise in writing from the son of the owner for everything to be fixed by a specific date and also to install a ceiling fan at no cost to my friend. In that meeting, she managed to leverage his church, his family, his reputation, the concept of a gentleman, the biblical concept of how to treat the poor, how people would treat his children, once they were grown, and the concept of a self-made man (which my friend is trying very hard to be), Christian morality, what it means to be a community institution, real estate law, and honestly, I forget what else. She’d never met him before. She does not live in our city -or state, for that matter. We’re not Christian. She did a cold-read of him based on his office, face, clothing, and posture (he didn’t give us his last name -the ‘related to the owner’ was a guess that turned out to be lucky), and hit every point of pride or insecurity she could find. When some things still hadn’t been taken care of a week later, she *called his father* and implied that he’d failed as a man and a parent since his son hadn’t yet honored his word. My friend had the fan that day, and the remaining safety issues were taken care of on top of it. No yelling, no threats, it was just a calm, ‘friendly’ conversation. My friend does not do subtext; he knew the social chess game was going on, but not how it worked.  tl;dr: I’ve seen my mother do this and holy shit this really should be a thing.

[sunshine-tattoo]

my momma is a retired union lawyer. you should see her tear into landlords and rich people. it’s like watching a lion devour a zebra.

[lily-orchard]

Comrade Karen

[headspace-hotel]

I see now…“Karen” is a power that can be used for evil or good…

[fightingbadger]

Listen you are all gonna lose your shit once you find out where there’s a company where that is literally their whole business model. They are called “Karens for Hire” and their whole thing is helping out exploited people get justice - essentially complaining to the right people and making themselves heard.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/12/26/karens-for-hire-customer-service-complaints/

[greek-orthodox-priest]

went to miami to recover father sotirios. and made some new friends.

these animals... they are wise. I recruited them to avenge my dear brother. I was then escorted out of the sea world.

[a-book-of-creatures]

Better than the 1596 Marseille dolphin exorcism I suppose.

[maxkowski]

[a-book-of-creatures]

In 1596 dolphins were infesting the port of Marseille. Back in those days, y’see, dolphins didn’t have the cuddly image they enjoy today. They were pests and were causing damage.

So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.

Still not as dramatic as Saint Bernard excommunicating the flies though.

[melononthefloor]

What happened to the flies?

[a-book-of-creatures]

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux built a monastery in 1124, but it was plagued by flies. So the good saint promptly excommunicated them. By the next day the flied had died in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out.

Still not as nutty as the Basel rooster trial though.

[fatefulfindings]

*everyone in unison* um what rooster trial?

[a-book-of-creatures]

In 1474, a rooster in Basel did the heinous and unspeakable act of laying an egg. As everyone knows, an egg laid by a rooster will hatch into a basilisk (or cockatrice).

So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.

The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).

Still not as properly legal as the Savigny pig trial though.

[bonnettbee]

Ok, clearly you want an excuse to talk about the pig thing, and I now DESPERATELY want to hear about the pig thing, so PLEASE tell us about the Pig Thing.

[a-book-of-creatures]

In 1457 a sow killed Jehan Martin, a five-year-old boy in Savigny. For that crime she was put on trial and judged guilty, and sentenced to be hanged from a tree.

Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.

Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.

I won’t mention the 1454 excommunication of eels in Lake Geneva then.

[hemipelagicdredger]

OK what did the eels do, and more pressingly why were they in communion with the church in the first place

[a-book-of-creatures]

Animals are expected to be part of the Church by default, that’s why they take excommunication so badly.

Felix Hemmerlin’s treatise on exorcism, cited by e.g. Wagner’s Historia Naturalis Helvetiae (1680), informs us that around 1221-1229, eels once infested Lake Geneva in huge numbers. So Saint William, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicated them and banned them from the lake, forcing them to live in only one part of it.

Plot twist: as far as we know, Saint William was never bishop of Lausanne.

[redheadedhypocrite]

There’s no way you have historical Christianity nonsense more silly than this to share

[a-book-of-creatures]

I’ve been trying to stay on brand and talk about animals only, but sure, few intersections of Christianity and the legal system get sillier than…

… the Cadaver Synod.

Pope Formosus (“Good-looking”) was pope from 891 to 896, and apparently accumulated a few enemies. After his successor Boniface VI enjoyed all of a 15-day papacy, the next pope elected was Stephen VI.

And he hated Formosus.

How much? He had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial for his failings as a pope.

End result? Formosus was found guilty of papal fail. The corpse was stripped of its clothes, three fingers on its right hand were severed (no blessings for u), and it was tied to weights and dumped in the Tiber.

Needless to say Stephen VI came to a sticky end. An angry mob deposed him, he was strangled in prison, and Formosus’s corpse was fished up and reburied with honors. And the later popes passed edicts ensuring this kind of silliness would not happen again.

Tune in next time when I tell you about how a lawyer defended a city’s entire rat population.

[strawberriandromeda]

Please, the rats, give us the rats, i beg....

[a-book-of-creatures]

The story of the rats of Autun is also the story of Barthelémy de Chasseneuz (or Chassenée, etc.), a highly original and highly talented defense lawyer. That’s him here.

When the town of Autun was infested by rats in the early 1500s, they were accused of eating the province’s barley crop and were duly summoned to be judged in an ecclesiastical court of law. Chasseneuz was the defense attorney.

How do you defend an entire swarm of rats? You don’t, is the answer. You delay. Chasseneuz’s original defense was “my clients live all over the place, one summons won’t be enough”. So he got a court summons to be posted in all the infested parishes.

When the rats didn’t show up after the elapsed time delay, Chasseneuz proceeded to explain at length why. The rats didn’t come to court, he said, because of their enemies the cats, which are everywhere and always vigilant and hungry. “You cannot expect my clients to undertake a journey which would put them in mortal danger”, he argued in complete seriousness. “Thus they have the legal right to turn down a summons that endangers them”.

As far as we know, the rats never did appear in court, and remained unprosecuted.

Chasseneuz went on to have a distinguished career as a lawyer and was allegedly killed by a poisoned bouquet of flowers.

[libraryogre]

Anyone else picturing @a-book-of-creatures sitting in a tavern, significantly tapping their glass every time someone begs for a story, noting that telling stories sure is thirsty work...

[theculturedmarxist]

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

[monitor-offist-deactivated20250]

fastest reblog in the west

[dduane]

Yeppers. :)

[the-original-sineater]

reblogging for study later AND to spread the info.

[them-faetale]

Seriously, get and run PiHole if you can. It changes your internet experience so much for the better. I get shocked when I visit a website when I'm someone else's network, by just how many ads the internet is flooded with now. Take back control.

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

[neil-gaiman]

On the list of things ABSOLUTELY NOBODY HAS EVER ASKED ME FOR. Here’s the dialogue from the TV show that the Young family are watching in Episode 3, before Adam heads off for an early night.

[neil-gaiman]

From 2019. I just ran across this on the hard drive looking for something else, and wondered if it had ever been posted anywhere…

[icedsodapop]

The devil works hard but the Hollywood propaganda machine and the White liberals who take part in it work harder.

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

Oh but hold on, it gets worse:

I cannot stress how utterly disgusting it is that a White man literally possesses the rights to MLK's speeches.

White liberals ain't shit.

- mod sodapop

[jv]

If you didn't hear, Substack is now officially a Nazi site. Officially as in "the CEO has said they wouldn't ban Nazis, and that they are welcome to monetize their content on Substack". I think this is the first time a major web platform has openly say they are ok with making money out of open Nazis and white nationalists.

Substack CEO reasoning is "we don't like nazis, but we defend their right to be nazis". But, of course, at the same time, substack bans sex workers from using their platform.

So yeah, if you have a Substack account, maybe it's time to move somewhere else. As they say, if there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.

Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content

“We don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away.”

[thesefallenembers]

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

[verylostpenguin]

It’s my grandpa’s birthday next week and he said “I don’t want to be 85” and my grandmother, his wife of 59 and a half years, said “well your only alternative is to die”, I can’t believe how affectionate they are

[verylostpenguin]

I was having lunch with them today and my grandpa started throwing napkins at my grandmother, and she balled it up and looked all set to throw it back but then she put it down and said “I will not throw it because I was brought up properly, you were dragged” she has spent ¾ of her life with this man

[verylostpenguin]

I thought I’d let you know how they’ve been getting on during lockdown, so here’s some of the FaceTime conversation from today:

“My goodness, the way technology is advancing - in 20 years we’ll be able to shake hands through the screen!”

“Rex, I don’t think we’ll be here in 20 years.”

“Well you can make your own plans, I shall only be 109.”

[verylostpenguin]

What’s up friends, it’s been 3 years, grandpa has made it to 88 and they’ve been married 62.5 years! Please enjoy another instalment:

Grandpa: the new packs are.. it’s.. what is it. It self destructs

Grandma : biodegradable, Rex.

[nativenews]

[nativenews]

[silverquillsideas]

translation in bengali

translation in hindi

translation in japapnese

translation in Filipino

translation in greek

translation in korean

translation in tamil

translation in bahasa malaysia

translation in nepali

translation in somali

link to the original tweet.

[nativenews]

[localspacefaggot]

Come here, baby gays, and let me tell you the story about how James Somerton made me so fucking angry with a single line that I had to make this post.

As I now know, most of his audience is young queers and there are things we NEED you to know.

The fight for marriage equality was a massive fucking deal and I will tell you why with a very personal story.

My mom was a nurse during the AIDS crisis. And I mean she started working as a nurse out of school in 85. My mom was on the front lines. She worked with so many AIDS patients that it genuinely altered her brain chemistry. My mother was a homophobe before her nursing career. She was a massive supporter of gay rights until she died in July because of what she saw during her career.

And what did she see?

She saw people who had been abandoned by their families dying with their partners at their side.

And then suddenly…the family would materialize, ban the partner from the room, kick them out of their homes they had lived in with their dying partners for decades, and then watched them ban their partners from even attending the funerals or visiting the graves. Imagine being denied your right to grieve.

And why was this possible? Oh simple. They weren’t married. They weren’t legally bound, the partners weren’t considered next of kin because they weren’t fucking married.

I watched my mom pass. It was horrible and painful and traumatic and terrifying. But it was closure. And I wouldn’t have it any other way because I know…that who my mom wanted by her when she passed was my dad. Because she was scared, she wanted her partner by her side and she was terrified she was going to die. My dad couldn’t be there. He had to work, which sounds cold but understand he had been off work for a month by that point and he was the only one who had health insurance. He wanted to be there, we had made plans to take her off the life support when he came back (we were 4 hours from him) but there was a freak accident and she passed the night after he left to return to work.

Why am I telling you this? Because I need you to understand how important this is to some people. So you can understand how big a slap to the face it is to have people say “marriage equality isn’t that important”. You can understand why someone like James Somerton rolling his eyes at marriage equality and implying we weren’t focused on job equality and discrimination (information that is WHOLEY untrue) would make me see red.

It’s not trivial. It’s not meaningless. It wasn’t about “assimilating” or “appearing normal” (we’re already normal).

It’s about people who had their children taken from them because they weren’t the biological parent. It’s about people who never got to comfort their loved ones in their final days. It’s about people who weren’t able to comforted by their partners in their final days.

So the next time you think “why waste your time on something as trivial as marriage?” Remember my mother. Look up testimony from victims of the AIDS crisis. Remember the people who advocated for marriage equality were the survivors who were torn from the love of their life.

Remember that we advocated so damn hard to give you the right to grieve.

[opencommunion]

seeing Palestinian men having to expose their own stories of surviving sexual abuse to combat the flood of atrocity propaganda painting Palestinian men as barbaric sexual abusers should make every white western “feminist” ashamed of themselves but I know the suffering of Palestinians has never moved them