Why? @theroane - Tumblr Blog

The previous government proposed changes to the NHS constitution which would mean transgender hospital patients in England may not be treate

Well fucks? Get to it!

hadleysmis-deactivated20260401

41.7k notes and as of 7th April, the signatures are only 14,817.

The deadline is 9 July 2025.

Trans rights are always wavering in safety and are not stable and well protected in the UK. Please sign.

Trans rights in the UK is my rights.

tardisman14

Reblog if, no matter the size of the role, you would agree to work with the Muppets if offered the chance to do so, no questions asked

byz-was-here

THEY WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO FINISH THE PITCH BEFORE I TELL EM I’M IN

mothnem

Recruiter: Hello, I'm with the Muppets and...

Me: Where do I sign?

linguisticparadox

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

ri-writing

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free.

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.

linguisticparadox

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

wanderingchaos

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

athenadark

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

the-haiku-bot

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

elfwreck

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

noswordinourlake

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

stevespookington

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

raevenlywrites

heads up that the libravox may have different narrators from chapter to chapter, since its all volunteer work. I read Phantom of the Opera that way and man it *really* fucked with me. Not a "dont use this service!" but rather a "be prepared for this potentially"

depsidase

theroane

One more time, for the people in the back:

THEY👏 WERE👏 TOLD 👏TO 👏 STAY 👏 QUIET!👏

Why is this so hard to understand? They get paid by the same big corporations as the Republicans.

tim-official

there are two competing sects on this website - one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "neurodivergent" and one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "sexual content." i do not like either of them

anarcho-gamerist

I use spicy to describe food

catgirlforeskin

my food is mentally ill and I’m putting my dick in it

fruitviking

Twilight

s4pph0m3t

theroane

The single best one-sentence summation of Twilight ever.

taraljc

With the release of Vulture magazine's feature (un-paywalled) expanding on the stories of the individuals abused by Neil Gaiman who had previously come forward, now more than ever it's important to continue to keep the PR machine from trying to bury the stories.

LINKS

Firsthand account of abuse by NG and AP of trans man posted with permission by the mods at Redditt's /neilgaimanuncovered sub on 28 March, 2025.

Updated transcript of the Tortoise Media podcast to include episodes 5 & 6.

Am I Broken- Survivor Stories Episode 4-2 Complete Unofficial Transcript

Katherine Kendall's Friends of Calliope post about how you can support her and fellow survivors.

Courtnee Fallon Rex's account of ending their friendship with Neil Gaiman

muccamukk's link round-up of Neil Gaiman Assault Allegations

Reddit's r/neilgaimanuncovered forum

Legal filing from 3 February 2025 naming Gaiman and Palmer defendants in a civil lawsuit for the Human Trafficking, Assault, Battery, Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, Negligence, and Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress against Scarlett Pavlovich.

IMPORTANT REMINDER

Individuals providing testimonies of abuse is evidence.

When people say 'so we are just supposed to take her at her word?' the answer is YES.

If the only reason you take his word over hers is because you want to believe that someone whose work you admire isn't capable of such actions, then this is a reality check. You can never know what is it another person's heart and mind. You cannot judge them solely by their words. You can only truly take their measure by their actions.

Examine your internal biases and ask yourself why would someone come forward and share stories of abuse by someone with significantly more power at great personal risk if they weren't true? They have everything to lose, and yet they came forward anyway to try to prevent Neil Gaiman from harming any other vulnerable women the way that he harmed them.

Only 2-8% of sexual assault allegations are found to be false.

The myth of accusing the innocent of sexual assault as some kind of revenge is exactly that: a myth perpetuated by rape culture that persists because when one cares for or admires the accused, people want it to be true.

That fence that you believe that you are standing on is an invisible line drawn in the sand.

Believe survivors. Amplify their voices. Share their stories. Hold people accountable. Actions have consequences.

THINGS WE CAN DO AS INDIVIDUALS

Repost articles and transcripts as they appear in the trades and the mainstream press, and tag them with the appropriate trigger warnings and content warnings.

Keep amplifying the voices of the survivors, and showing up with compassion and empathy and support for the untold numbers who have yet to come forward.

Keep talking about the allegations of abuse and sexual assault levelled at Neil Gaiman. Do not let it fade into the background, or be drowned out by vigorous promotion of his upcoming works. Boost the signal, particularly to raise awareness across fandoms so fans can do their best to protect themselves from potential abuse in the future.

Make donations to RAINN and The Survivors Trust, and find out what you can do on a local level to support survivors of sexual assault and abuse.

Do not tag fan works such as fanfic, fan art, quotes, gifsets, and meta discussions about Gaiman's work or live-action adaptations of Gaiman's work with #Neil Gaiman so that you are not doing the expensive PR team's work for them by helping to bury the story of Neil Gaiman's abuse of vulnerable women on social media.

Do not bully Neil Gaiman's peers in the industry, friends and family, or actors currently involved in live action adaptations of his work for not immediately making any kind of public statements.

Do not bully fellow fans. Everyone is working through their very complex feelings and relationships with both the text and the man at their own speed. Please give them the space to grieve that loss, but continue to center the stories of the survivors and express sympathy and empathy for all of the survivors who have yet to come forward.

As others have noted, The Tortoise Media Slow News podcast that initially broke the story is run by a group of well-respected journalists, and Ms Johnson is not a full-time member of the staff but was only given a shared byline on the story because one of the survivors contacted her privately which is what kicked off the year long investigation.

Filter out noise such as kink-shaming, anti-BDSM discourse, and other editorial comments and instead focus on the actual words of survivors recounting their experiences.

Remember that despite using the language of BDSM, what the survivors have recounted is in fact examples of coercive control and abuse cloaked in the language of kink. It's very important to note that BDSM nearly always includes extensive negotiation of consent to specific acts and partners check in with one another constantly, establish safe words, and engage in aftercare. That is absolutely not what was described by the survivors thus far.

Sexual assault is not about sex so much as it is about power. In every instance reported thus far, the common thread has been predatory behaviour toward vulnerable individuals. In more than one case, people who were employed in Neil Gaiman's households and were reliant on him for their housing and livelihood.

Do not guilt trip or shame people who are attempting to separate the art from the artist. allow people to love what they love about the novels, comics, and media adaptations, value the friendships that they have made because of them, and keep the joy that those projects brought them. Do not let Neil Gaiman's behaviour rob generations of fans of the stories that meant so much to them. He has already taken so much from so many; don't help him take more from you or others than he already has.

Do not invite him as a guest speaker to your events, a guest of honour at your conventions, or a guest lecturer at your institutions. without jeopardizing the financial future of your institution or theater, do not book speaking tours, book signings, launch parties, etc. as these events have proved to be a fertile hunting ground and provide ongoing income directly to Neil Gaiman.

If you reblog (and I sincerely hope that you will) please keep the tags intact. The goal is to continue centering the voices of survivors and attempt to limit Neil Gaiman's access to vulnerable individuals, particularly those in fandom.

taraljc

Reblogging as the above post has been updated with a new message directly from one of the survivors of abuse on Reddit, and rewording the pinned post to have more inclusive language.

theroane

An important reminder, though it breaks my bloody heart. I wonder if this will ever not hurt.

And louder.

The previous government proposed changes to the NHS constitution which would mean transgender hospital patients in England may not be treate

Well fucks? Get to it!

siriosa

needs uk signatories

decemberwinter

what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

sillybro

SAY NICE THINGS TO PPL

violet-hady

Reblog to tell the person you reblogged it from that they are really cool.

sighed-the-snake

Believing someone when they present themselves as a good person is not putting them on a pedestal. It's just believing what's in front of you.

Continuously saying you shouldn't put someone on a pedestal when said person is revealed to be a liar is blaming people for believing the lie.

We didn't put Gaiman on a pedestal. We were lied to. He lied to us. He put forth an image of being a good person and we believed it because we had no reason not to.

Please stop with the pedestal rhetoric. No one is at fault here for believing the facade Gaiman showed us.

hatterandahare

Thank you OP this is a great perspective

theroane

Thank you for this.

kaestralblades

PSA

The entire city of Richmond, VA (where I live) and some surrounding areas are currently having a water crisis after the city'ss water treatment plant failed.

~300,000 people are without safe drinking water. About half of that are without water at ALL. People can't shower, wash their hands, or flush the toilet. We have three major hospitals all without running water.

No estimates for when water will be restored exist. The city is not communicating with us at all. The governor, WHO LIVES IN THE CITY, hasn't said a word about it. National Guard, FEMA, nobody has been mobilized to support us. It's not getting any media coverage outside of our local news.

If you can, please share the word so there's more attention to this. There's so many people in danger here, especially those in vulnerable condition like patients or the elderly who are at risk of death, and we need some noise to be made about this.

Please share and thank you if you can <3 Also, if you are around Richmond or know anyone in Richmond, please see what you can do to offer water to those in need in the city, or reach out to your Richmond friends to see if there's anything you can do for them. We're having like three hours long water distribution in two locations every day and it's not enough.

Wednesday is the third day of the city of Richmond and surrounding areas encountering water problems.

EDIT Jan 8, 2025: UPDATE!

The neighboring county (henrico county) had their systems contaminated with our water, so now ~600,000 people are without clean and safe drinking water. Potable water trucks have been deployed to hospitals and water distribution centers have been set up, but everything is still scant.

It has been 3 days. This is still going.

PLEASE KEEP SHARING, MAKING NOISE, CHECKING ON YOUR FRIENDS! AND DONATE TO ANY VALID RELIEF FUNDS YOU SEE!