Currently Reading.... @usreadersshouldalsowrite - Tumblr Blog

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

rostekhorn

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

trambrosia

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

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

rostekhorn

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

trambrosia

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

dycefic

The Statues That Do Not Weather

For Sas, another story about helping.

#

There is a statue on the cliffs overlooking the harbour, of a man shading his eyes with one hand and looking out over the sea.

They say that when invaders came, a man went up to the cliffs, and prayed to the gods. He offered them his own life to save his people. The gods accepted his sacrifice, and a great fire burned across the water, sinking all the ships. The man became stone, and ever since then he has stood on the cliffs, looking out at ships that sank long ago.

There is a statue that stands in the center of the town, of an old woman with both hands held up before her, palm out.

They say that when invaders came again, a woman stood in the middle of the square, and ordered them to halt. She reminded them of the great fire that sank the ships years before, and called on the gods to strike down any man who took one more step, though it cost her life. The gods accepted her sacrifice, and the invaders who stepped forward became water, running back down the hill towards the sea and soaking the boots of the men behind them. The survivors fled in fear, and the woman became stone, her feet set among the cobbles, her hands raised to stop invaders long gone.

There is a statue that stands by the road that runs past our village, of a young woman holding a basket.

They say that when brigands came upon the village in the teeth of a hard winter, starving and desperate, a woman saw them coming and offered them the food in her basket. They mocked her, saying that so little would not feed them for a day. She, too, called on the gods, and she, too, was answered. She made a bargain with their leader, that every man would turn back when he had all the food he could carry. From that one basket, she filled every bandit’s hands and sacks with food until he could carry no more. When she had filled even the leader’s hands, she bowed her head and became stone, her basket empty at last. The bandits kept to their bargain, and never troubled the village again.

We all know these stories. We all know why those people became stone, stone that does not weather.

Keep reading

forfuckssakejim

I wish I could just. Take all this grief and depression and shove it into a literary masterpiece that somehow makes everyone else feel better.

forfuckssakejim

I did my best I guess.

The Color Yellow

I borrowed Yellow — from a Flower —

That leaned against the Sun —

As if the Day were not enough —

It needed — One more One —

I pinned it to my Winter Heart —

A counterfeit of June —

The Frost did not acknowledge it —

Nor did the solemn Room —

The Windows wore their usual Gray —

The Clock — its patient Ache —

And Sorrow sat beside the Fire —

A Guest that would not break —

Yet somewhere in a painted Field —

A Dutchman fed the Light —

With Petals large as little Suns —

To keep away the Night —

I gathered Fragments of his Gold —

And pressed them to my Eyes —

Expecting Cheer — to bloom at once —

Like Dandelions rise —

But Happiness — is not a Bird —

That settles when one calls —

Nor is it hidden in a Hue —

Upon the Garden Walls —

The Yellow lingered — all the same —

Along the Ragged Air —

A timid Tint — that seemed to say —

“I notice — you are there.”

And so I wore it — not for Joy —

Which proved too vast to keep —

But for the Thread it loosely cast —

Across the Well of Deep —

Some Mornings — I could scarcely lift —

The Weight of Being — Through —

Yet on the Table — Sunflowers stood —

Insisting on the Blue —

Their Faces — reckless toward the Day —

Though Rooted fast in Earth —

A Lesson neither loud nor kind —

But stubborn in its Worth —

I never conquered Sorrow’s Sea —

Nor drained its darker Wells —

Yet Yellow floated at the Edge —

A Bell no Silence quells —

And if the Sun refused to stay —

And if the Light withdrew —

The Memory of its Golden Hand —

Still reached the Darkness through —

For Hope — perhaps — is not the Sun —

But one persistent Ray —

A Color carried through the Storm —

Until another Day.

forfuckssakejim

Another one I wrote

The Taste of Happiness

There are few pursuits more universally admired than happiness; and yet, for all the attention it receives, it remains remarkably difficult to identify when seated directly before us.

I spent many years imagining it must possess a particular flavour—a sweetness, perhaps, delicate and unmistakable, like the first strawberry of June or the sugared crust of a warm tart served in good company.

Instead, I found my days seasoned chiefly with disappointment.

There were mornings when the tea cooled untouched beside me, afternoons that stretched themselves into tedious lengths, and evenings that arrived with such certainty of melancholy that one could almost set a clock by their appearance.

It seemed to me that happiness was forever expected but never invited.

Others appeared to discover it with enviable ease. They spoke of contentment as though it were an acquaintance frequently encountered during walks or introduced at dinner parties. I began to suspect that either they possessed superior discernment, or I had somehow missed an essential lesson in its recognition.

In consequence, I devoted myself to the search.

I looked for happiness in accomplishments and found satisfaction.

I looked for it in admiration and found embarrassment.

I looked for it in solitude and discovered loneliness wearing solitude’s coat.

The distinction was not immediately apparent.

Years passed in this manner.

Then one autumn afternoon, while occupied with no particularly noteworthy activity, I became aware of a curious sensation. A friend was speaking. Rain tapped gently against the windows. The fire required tending. Nothing extraordinary had occurred.

Yet the moment possessed a certain flavour.

Not sweet.

Not triumphant.

Not dazzling.

Merely warm.

It lingered quietly, like cinnamon in tea.

Had I been younger, I might have dismissed it as insignificant. Happiness, I believed, ought to announce itself with greater ceremony. It ought to arrive in splendour and remain indefinitely.

Instead, it behaved with astonishing modesty.

It appeared in conversations that wandered nowhere important.

In books read a second time.

In familiar hands.

In laughter interrupted by tears.

In surviving difficult seasons long enough to witness the first crocus return to the garden.

The discovery altered me.

Not because sorrow departed. It did not.

Sorrow remained a frequent visitor, inclined to overstay its welcome and entirely indifferent to social convention.

But happiness ceased to be a destination.

It became a taste.

A subtle thing.

A flavour carried unexpectedly upon the tongue.

And once I learned to recognise it, I found traces of it everywhere.

In fresh bread.

In rain.

In music drifting through an open window.

In the relief of being understood.

In the simple privilege of remaining.

Indeed, if happiness has any fault, it is not its rarity but its shyness.

One expects a feast and overlooks the biscuit.

One desires fireworks and ignores the candle.

One waits for life to become perfect and misses the pleasantness of life as it is.

Thus I no longer pursue happiness with the desperation of a hunter.

I receive it as a guest.

Sometimes it stays only a moment.

Sometimes an evening.

Occasionally longer.

But whenever it departs, it leaves behind its unmistakable taste—

faint,

warm,

and wonderfully familiar.

ghosthorse-tracks

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

brawlite

honestly sometimes there's no better feeling than rereading a fic you've written and coming out of it going, "yeah that actually this DOES slap. exactly what i wanted to read. fucking nailed it."

charlesoberonn

"The curse of the Pharaoh" trope is born from modern Egyptology and not part of ancient Egyptian beliefs, but I think the Pharaohs would really dig it.

"Fuck yeah I'm gonna curse whoever disturbs my afterlife! How fucking dare they?!"

oh-look-car-horns

"This is a historical mischaracterization but I think the figures I'm mischaracterizing would be into it" is a really funny take actually I support it

charlesoberonn

Shakespeare would probably be flattered by classist people thinking his plays are so good that a common-born person like him couldn't have possibly written them and the real author must be an aristocrat.

roach-works

shakespeare would be fucking *insufferable* that millions of students have been forced to read and analyze his plays for centuries. and not even to debate if they're any good. but like write essays on the themes. in school. for grades. shakespeare would be so fucking smug about this his dick would explode.

stupidjewishwhiteboy

“Oh people have actual Shakespeare festivals where they put on my works every year? Suck it Marlowe!”

I also bet he’d think it was cool that people either set his plays in non-contemporary time periods or adapt his plays into entirely new works of fiction, given that was the basis of his own playwrighting (and largely of playwrights in his era)

arctic-hands

When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".

So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.

evilsoup

gilliagandy

Truly thrilled to finally find this post on my dash.

kurhanchyk

my preemptive answer is that because people refuse to commit main characters to it but i'm sure there are many reasons

monstrousgourmandizingcats

#i think it's also because many people write about them from an atheist's perspective#i.e. they write like they can't believe a character would take a religion and its tenets seriously#without being a caricature of fundamentalism

(from @lilybarthes)

fivekoboldsinacoat

It's a good video! I highly recommend it. Watched it a few hours after it dropped and was thinking about it again this morning.

OP isn't wrong, exactly (saying this for everyone else reading, not at you, OP) and the pasted tags are excellent & about a real issue, but actually further from the thesis of the video.

That thesis boils down to fiction that creates religions, like fantasy novels or RPGs, is very prone to only really depicting the religion's myths and sacred texts. The creation stories, the pantheon melodramas, that kind of thing. Adjacent to this is a big focus on belief. Both of these, ReligionForBreakfast (RFB) suggests, are due at least in part to (unexamined or deliberate) Christocentrism.

The thing that's missing, that RFB proposes as what he thinks would make a big difference and be good to see in fictional worlds, is action. ("Ritual", for certain definitions of the word.) What do followers of a religion, or people within that religion's culture, actually do? How does it appear in daily life, in art and architecture, customs and food, etc.? And not just the Official Approved actions or activities, either.

It's a really solid video, just under 20 minutes long, link here for the interested.

amnesiaguy

fantasy is when currency is referred to as "gold" and sci fi is when currency is referred to as "credits"

necromancelena

Die temu ad die

necromancelena

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

chef-boy-ar-girl

It accidentally is latin

saanah

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

santapau

Found this in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

qqueenofhades

This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think "temu" is identical to "timor" (infinitive, "to fear"), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as "timeo" ("I fear"). "Temu" is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate's part to turn gibberish into... something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Not to mention, it would be weird to put one "die" at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.

nudistcat

@theshitpostcalligrapher

sekkitsune

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

qqueenofhades

Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)

So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the "die"-s up that far, though "timeo" (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway ("die ad die timeo," "day to day I fear" if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don't super-hard quote me on this.

sekkitsune

I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.

But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.

qqueenofhades

....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

laurenthemself

how dare you say we error on the scribes

jtimu

this is what happens when you buy your latin on temu

afeelgoodblog

Fantastic idea

durnesque-esque

Article about it here.

nougatto-archived

what’s important to note and missing from the “headline” tweet is that they simultaneously constructed additional good public transit to the public transit already in the city (bus rapid transit, train stations). Just removing highway alone isn’t going to make traffic better, the bigger part of the story is that they improved public transportation. And the current mayor wants to do more - cyclist lanes and reinstate a tram system

prismatic-bell

So this happened a couple of years ago but sometimes it's nice to share when people are good.

I was sending a box of stuff to France, and it included a signed and authenticated N64 game cartridge. I didn't want to take THE SLIGHTEST REMOTEST chance that it would be damaged in transit, so I wrapped it in multiple layers of felt and plastic bags and tied it all in place with twine. Through the twine I stuck an addressed letter in both English and French, basically saying "Dear customs people, I realize the odds are extremely good that you'll have to open this but it's really fragile and very literally irreplaceable so if you do can you please rewrap it, all my thanks", and then I boxed the whole thing up with some other stuff and sent it on its way.

While it was in transit, I mentioned this to the recipient, who told me she appreciated the thought but it could never work because French officials were notorious for careless handling. I'd already been anxious about sending it, and the possibility that they'd just be zipping through stuff at the speed of light and leave it susceptible to damage--now that anxiety was ratcheted up to high.

And then it arrived. The recipient sent me a pic and said "they didn't open it after all." The thing is.

When I'd wrapped it, the last layer on the outside was plastic. When it arrived the letter had been opened and set elsewhere in the box, and the carefully-wrapped layer on the outside was felt.

They had indeed opened it. And then, just as I'd asked, hoped, had very neatly wrapped it again. All seven or eight layers. The twine hadn't been retied, but it didn't matter--there were enough layers to hold it together.

One day a few years ago, some civil servant in French Customs saw this letter carefully written in the clearest possible handwriting in two languages, and the care with which everything in the box had been packed, and took a couple of minutes out of their day to say "I can be someone's hero today" and helped to protect a treasure for the last few miles with as much care as if it were their own package going to their own dear friend.

(It arrived in perfect shape.)

Anyway I know that official will never know how happy they made me, to know that they saw and cared that it mattered to me. But I hope that somewhere, sometime, someone pays forward to them the kindness they showed not just to a pair of strangers, but a pair of strangers they could never possibly hope to meet, and I hope it inspires you to remember you never know when a little thing will mean a lot to someone.

Merci beaucoup, Customs.

ach-sss-no

when brandon sanderson talks about villains in his famous free youtube writing class video lectures he'll say 'what's the difference between gollum and sauron' and of course he means the villain that's present in the narrative and characterized in a way the audience can potentially relate to or sympathize with vs. the looming threatening anonymous far-off force (among other things). but every time he asks that i think 'well one of those guys tracked down frodo and got his ring back'

mysteryteacup

Brandon Sanderson: What's the difference between Gollum and Sauron?

OP: Skill issue.

the-haiku-bot

Brandon Sanderson:

What’s the difference between

Gollum and Sauron?

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

caffeinatedopossum

"I'm still kicking" is such a funny way to say "I'm still alive". Like lol. I'm still thrashing. Flailing. Writhing even. The violence remains.

kinschi

Huntrix on the hunt

daisyfairy1

Ok, so I now want to read fics in all the fandoms based on this.

(Found on twitter https://twitter.com/WholesomeMeme/status/1632788134856474624?s=19)

deehellcat

omg, yes please. this would translate so well into so many fandoms :D

copperbadge

What impresses me most is the attention to design. There's formatting and layout involved.

Did this bouncer like, bring this person home, put them to bed, start the laundry, and then sit down to make a little Drunk Guest zine? Does he do this regularly so he had a template ready? Is that cool or a little weird? Was he attracted to his guest and hoping to make a great first impression? Was he just super anxious that they weren't waking up before he'd have to leave for presumably his day job, so he poured it all into this little gem the following morning? Is his day job in typesetting?

It manages to inspire even more questions than it answers, which is quite the feat.

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