Zelda is Lovestruck!

[tpfnewsdesk-deactivated20181216]

100 Million Americans Have an Election This November

Get ready to vote!

Are you waiting for next year — the 2018 midterms — to cast your first vote against the Trump/GOP agenda?

You might not have to wait that long.

We researched every election coming up next month, and we found that at least 100 million Americans have a state, city, or district election on November 7. That’s about 1 out of every 3 people nationwide!

We’ve compiled a handy list of these elections. Find out whether you have an election, and make your plan for voting. (If you live in Virginia or Washington state, check out our website for more info about these crucial elections — and donate to help Flippable candidates win.)

Statewide Elections

94 million Americans have statewide elections on November 7. There are lots of seats at stake in New Jersey and Virginia (including the governor and the state legislature), while other states have ballot initiatives on major issues like healthcare and criminal justice:

Maine: Ballot measure to expand Medicaid, plus 4 more

New Jersey: Governor, Lt. Governor, all 120 state legislative seats

New York: Ballot measure to call a state constitutional convention, plus 2 more

Ohio: Ballot measures on criminal justice and drug prices

Pennsylvania: State judicial elections (Supreme, Superior, and Commonwealth Courts)

Texas: Ballot measures (7 total)

Virginia: Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, all 100 seats in the State House

Washington state: Ballot measure on property tax, plus 2 more

City Elections

Some of America’s biggest cities have important elections this year — for mayor, city council, district attorney, & more:

Atlanta (GA): Mayor and city council

Aurora (CO): City council

Boise (ID): City council

Boston (MA): Mayor and city council

Buffalo (NY): Mayor and city court

Charlotte (NC): Mayor and city council

Cincinnati (OH): Mayor and city council

Cleveland (OH): Mayor and city council

Columbus (OH): City council, city attorney, and city auditor

Detroit (MI): Mayor, city clerk, and city council

Durham (NC): Mayor and city council

Greensboro (NC): Mayor and city council

Jersey City (NJ): Mayor and city council

Miami (FL): Mayor and city council

Minneapolis (MN): Mayor and city council

New York City (NY): Mayor, city council, comptroller, public advocate, and borough presidents

Orlando (FL): City council

Philadelphia (PA): District attorney and city controller

Pittsburgh (PA): Mayor and city council

Raleigh (NC): Mayor and city council

Seattle (WA): Mayor and city council

St. Petersburg (FL): Mayor and city council

St. Paul (MN): Mayor

Wichita (KS): City council

Congressional and Legislative Seats

There are 220 state legislative seats up for grabs in New Jersey & Virginia, plus 30 seats in other states across the country. Heads up, Utah: you have a U.S. Congressional election!

Georgia: State Senate districts 6 and 39, State House districts 4, 26, 42, 60, 89, 117, and 119

Maine: State House district 56

Massachusetts: State House districts Berkshire 1 and Essex 3

Michigan: State House districts 1 and 109

Mississippi: State House districts 38 and 54

Missouri: State Senate district 8, State House districts 23 and 151

New Hampshire: State House districts Hillsborough 15 and Sullivan 1

New Jersey: All 120 state legislative seats

South Carolina: State House district 113

Utah: 3rd Congressional district

Virginia: All 100 seats in the State House

Washington: State Senate districts 7, 31, 37, 45, and 48, State House districts 7, 31, and 48.

Make your voting plan

If you don’t see your state or town listed here, don’t assume you can’t vote on November 7. Follow these steps to make sure you’re ready on Election Day:

Check your registration.

Search for your local elections office.

Make a plan to vote (find your polling place, arrange a ride, put Election Day in your calendar).

There are even more elections in the month after Election Day (most notably the U.S. Senate race in Alabama on December 12). If you don’t have an election, you probably know someone who does. Reach out & encourage them to vote!

These off-year elections often see low turnout and razor-thin margins, so every vote is important. We aren’t waiting for 2018 to start winning big — and you don’t have to, either.

UPDATE: Since publishing, we’ve added three more state legislative races to our list: New York Assembly districts 27 and 71, and New York State Senate district 27.

*How did we get to 100 million? We added up the populations of all the states, cities, and districts with elections on Nov. 7, 2017. You can check our math on Statistical Atlas.

[14kgoldupgraded]

ONE WEEK. 

VOTE, AND GET OUT THE VOTE.

[cachorritx]

Get out and vote tomorrow!

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

I’ve decided to tell you guys a story about piracy.

I didn’t think I had much to add to the piracy commentary I made yesterday, but after seeing some of the replies to it, I decided it’s time for this story.

Here are a few things we should get clear before I go on:

1) This is a U.S. centered discussion. Not because I value my non U.S. readers any less, but because I am published with a U.S. publisher first, who then sells my rights elsewhere. This means that the fate of my books, good or bad, is largely decided on U.S. turf, through U.S. sales to readers and libraries.

2) This is not a conversation about whether or not artists deserve to get money for art, or whether or not you think I in particular, as a flawed human, deserve money. It is only about how piracy affects a book’s fate at the publishing house. 

3) It is also not a conversation about book prices, or publishing costs, or what is a fair price for art, though it is worthwhile to remember that every copy of a blockbuster sold means that the publishing house can publish new and niche voices. Publishing can’t afford to publish the new and midlist voices without the James Pattersons selling well. 

It is only about two statements that I saw go by: 

1) piracy doesn’t hurt publishing. 

2) someone who pirates the book was never going to buy it anyway, so it’s not a lost sale.

Now, with those statements in mind, here’s the story.

It’s the story of a novel called The Raven King, the fourth installment in a planned four book series. All three of its predecessors hit the bestseller list. Book three, however, faltered in strange ways. The print copies sold just as well as before, landing it on the list, but the e-copies dropped precipitously. 

Now, series are a strange and dangerous thing in publishing. They’re usually games of diminishing returns, for logical reasons: folks buy the first book, like it, maybe buy the second, lose interest. The number of folks who try the first will always be more than the number of folks who make it to the third or fourth. Sometimes this change in numbers is so extreme that publishers cancel the rest of the series, which you may have experienced as a reader — beginning a series only to have the release date of the next book get pushed off and pushed off again before it merely dies quietly in a corner somewhere by the flies.

So I expected to see a sales drop in book three, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, but as my readers are historically evenly split across the formats, I expected it to see the cut balanced across both formats. This was absolutely not true. Where were all the e-readers going? Articles online had headlines like PEOPLE NO LONGER ENJOY READING EBOOKS IT SEEMS.

Really?

There was another new phenomenon with Blue Lily, Lily Blue, too — one that started before it was published. Like many novels, it was available to early reviewers and booksellers in advanced form (ARCs: advanced reader copies). Traditionally these have been cheaply printed paperback versions of the book. Recently, e-ARCs have become common, available on locked sites from publishers. 

BLLB’s e-arc escaped the site, made it to the internet, and began circulating busily among fans long before the book had even hit shelves. Piracy is a thing authors have been told to live with, it’s not hurting you, it’s like the mites in your pillow, and so I didn’t think too hard about it until I got that royalty statement with BLLB’s e-sales cut in half. 

Strange, I thought. Particularly as it seemed on the internet and at my booming real-life book tours that interest in the Raven Cycle in general was growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile, floating about in the forums and on Tumblr as a creator, it was not difficult to see fans sharing the pdfs of the books back and forth. For awhile, I paid for a service that went through piracy sites and took down illegal pdfs, but it was pointless. There were too many. And as long as even one was left up, that was all that was needed for sharing. 

I asked my publisher to make sure there were no e-ARCs available of book four, the Raven King, explaining that I felt piracy was a real issue with this series in a way it hadn’t been for any of my others. They replied with the old adage that piracy didn’t really do anything, but yes, they’d make sure there was no e-ARCs if that made me happy. 

Then they told me that they were cutting the print run of The Raven King to less than half of the print run for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. No hard feelings, understand, they told me, it’s just that the sales for Blue Lily didn’t justify printing any more copies. The series was in decline, they were so proud of me, it had 19 starred reviews from pro journals and was the most starred YA series ever written, but that just didn’t equal sales. They still loved me.

This, my friends, is a real world consequence.

This is also where people usually step in and say, but that’s not piracy’s fault. You just said series naturally declined, and you just were a victim of bad marketing or bad covers or readers just actually don’t like you that much.

Hold that thought. 

I was intent on proving that piracy had affected the Raven Cycle, and so I began to work with one of my brothers on a plan. It was impossible to take down every illegal pdf; I’d already seen that. So we were going to do the opposite. We created a pdf of the Raven King. It was the same length as the real book, but it was just the first four chapters over and over again. At the end, my brother wrote a small note about the ways piracy hurt your favorite books. I knew we wouldn’t be able to hold the fort for long — real versions would slowly get passed around by hand through forum messaging — but I told my brother: I want to hold the fort for one week. Enough to prove that a point. Enough to show everyone that this is no longer 2004. This is the smart phone generation, and a pirated book sometimes is a lost sale.

Then, on midnight of my book release, my brother put it up everywhere on every pirate site. He uploaded dozens and dozens and dozens of these pdfs of The Raven King. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one of his pdfs. We sailed those epub seas with our own flag shredding the sky.

The effects were instant. The forums and sites exploded with bewildered activity. Fans asked if anyone had managed to find a link to a legit pdf. Dozens of posts appeared saying that since they hadn’t been able to find a pdf, they’d been forced to hit up Amazon and buy the book.

And we sold out of the first printing in two days.

Two days.

I was on tour for it, and the bookstores I went to didn’t have enough copies to sell to people coming, because online orders had emptied the warehouse. My publisher scrambled to print more, and then print more again. Print sales and e-sales became once more evenly matched.

Then the pdfs hit the forums and e-sales sagged and it was business as usual, but it didn’t matter: I’d proven the point. Piracy has consequences.

That’s the end of the story, but there’s an epilogue. I’m now writing three more books set in that world, books that I’m absolutely delighted to be able to write. They’re an absolute blast. My publisher bought this trilogy because the numbers on the previous series supported them buying more books in that world. But the numbers almost didn’t. Because even as I knew I had more readers than ever, on paper, the Raven Cycle was petering out. 

The Ronan trilogy nearly didn’t exist because of piracy. And already I can see in the tags how Tumblr users are talking about how they intend to pirate book one of the new trilogy for any number of reasons, because I am terrible or because they would ‘rather die than pay for a book’. As an author, I can’t stop that. But pirating book one means that publishing cancels book two. This ain’t 2004 anymore. A pirated copy isn’t ‘good advertising’ or ‘great word of mouth’ or ‘not really a lost sale.’

That’s my long piracy story. 

[zeldaislovestruck]

IF YOU WANT MORE CONTENT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT. WHY IS THAT SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND???

[textonly]

[miabicicletta]

jesus, this is spot on

[geekdawson]

one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life as a survivor of a mentally unstable parent is that it is likely that no one has thought through it as much as you have. 

no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation. 

no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying. 

no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.

no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.  

a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age. 

Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse. 

I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships. 

The best thing I ever did for myself and my relationships was insist upon frank communication and a categorical denial of subtext. For some people this is a moral stance. For survivors of mentally unstable parents this is a requirement of recovery. 

[lysikan]

If it wasn’t stated outright - it wasn’t said.

[wilwheaton]

[romancingthebookworm-deactivate]

Forget Escapism: I Read Romance for the Badass Heroines

The genre's light-reading reputation can undermine the importance of the multi-dimensional characters romance writers are adding to the fictional landscape.

Believing that romance can only serve as escapist entertainment, though, and ignoring the connection that readers can find with the stories and characters does a disservice to the writers who are telling the stories, often of people who are under-represented in fiction. Even worse, it dismisses the experiences of readers who have a hard time finding their stories and happy endings represented outside the romance genre.

YES. Because THIS is what bothers me about the “everyone has a right to their own brand of escapism” claim that follows the Stop Shaming Readers argument wielded by non-romance readers to defend romance. Now, I appreciate their support, of course! But romance is MORE than just escapism. Romance novels are intelligent. They have emotional depth. They provide active commentary on society and the world.

Romance is deliberate. 

[zeldaislovestruck]

yes. yes. yes.

[thebibliosphere]

People adding Nazi apologist shit onto my posts like “but nazis invented cell phones and space rockets so without them we’d be less technologically advanced VuV” like buddy, if you think for one second we wouldn’t have eventually made it to the moon or made instant communication devices without mass genocide then I dunno what to tell you except to get the fuck away from me.

Your kind aren’t welcome here.

[thebibliosphere]

Also would I “trade” my cell phone for a world with no Nazis?

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?!?!

I’d trade my own life for a world without nazis. Fuck my phone. Fuck going to the moon. Human life should not be the cost of societal and technological progress.

What the fuck is wrong with you.

[firespirited]

??? We’d have probably had cellphones sooner given the amount of inventors, theorists and artists the nazis killed. We’d have been to the moon sooner if we didn’t have segregation. God only knows where we’d be if women were given the opportunity to invent sooner. Disabled people come up with cool stuff too. It’s a whole new world of creation if you value human life equally!

[badscienceshenanigans-deactivat]

*the sound of a thousand nuclear physicists laughing* Buckle up kids, today we’re talking about why the Nazis never invented the atom bomb. We’re gonna do this

to white supremacist minds. Ok. So the Nazis were all about physics … as long as it was with things you could see & touch. Rockets, improved motors, even radio tech (which gives tangible audio and/or visual results) were awesome and very good careers for good German boys. Theoretical physics, on the other hand, was viewed as made-up Jewish bullshit. The German scientific old guard did NOT like little punks like Einstein. Who did they think they were, running around with their “time is relative” and “the interstellar ether doesn’t exist” and who the shit even cares what’s INSIDE an atom, Albert, it’s not like the INSIDE does anything. JESUS. The Nazis saw modern physics as being the same thing as Freud’s psychology, Klimt’s modern art, and Kafka’s stories: a decadent waste of time, way too Jewish, and definitely not cool or manly. So to combat uncool Jewish science, pro-Nazi German scientists founded an actual movement– “Deutsche Physik/Aryan Physics”– all about real stuff like engines and bombs and it was gonna serve the SHIT out of the fatherland. No Jews allowed.

“Ugh, GROSS.” -Nazis Jewish nerds who wanted to study physics & engineering had to settle for theoretical physics. And boy did they ever. Niels Bohr, Hermann Minkowski, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Epstein, James Franck, Rudolf Kompfner, Otto Stern, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf , Eugene Wigner, Frank and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and some dude named Albert Einstein among others were all turning their lemons into sweet, sticky theoretical physics lemonade in 1920s Germany. Every single one of them, and more, emigrated to the US in the 1930s. Jewish colleagues from Axis Italy, like Emilio Segrè and Enrico Fermi– aka the guy who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, and married to a Jewish woman– joined the brain drain as Europe hemorrhaged nuclear physicists right into America’s warm, heaving, bloodthirsty bosom. 

*artist’s rendition 

Albert Einstein’s application to become a US citizen. Dated Jan 18th, 1936. The few Gentile nuclear physicists Germany had managed to produce– Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Arnold Sommerfeld– were persecuted just for being into Jewish stuff. Like, “were called out in the official SS newspaper for being ‘White Jews’” and “Heisenberg’s mom called Himmler’s mom and told her to tell Himmler to make the Nazis stop being mean to her boy”-level persecuted. That’s right, these badass Reich science dudes couldn’t even do their job without their moms running interference. THAT’s how fucking great the Nazis were at science. Meanwhile the bright lights over in Deutsche Physik were talking about how there’s actually been a bunch of moons and when of the last ones fell down it buried Atlantis and also the sun’s gravity suddenly stops at 3x the orbital radius of Neptune. Like… thank God for those Nazi scientific advances, amirite?

Nationalist German scientists cheerfully joined the persecution of their Jewish colleagues, because Nazi scientists just really wanted Jewish physicists’ jobs. But the bummer was, the Nazi scientists couldn’t handle the mathematics that made relativity work. They were too dumb to do that science. Look– we’ve all been there. But the nationalist German scientists’ approach was– instead of leveling up their game, just discredit everything their rivals did. Declare it dumb, and made-up, and all the good parts of this stuff we just said was dumb and made-up were already invented by Aryans anyway, so why keep Jewish scientists around? Just forget about this atomic physics crap and keep giving us money to talk shit about Neptune, it’ll be great.

“Hahaha wut?” -Nazis Eventually the Third Reich figured out that atom bombs were a thing and they should probably make one. They put Heisenberg– who, if you’ll recall, just had to have his mom call in an anti-bullying PSA to the Fuhrer’s secretary three short paragraphs ago– in charge. With every single other person who knew about nuclear fission having left Germany years ago, Heisenberg was pretty much on his own. The Nazi bomb project went nowhere. A Nazi Germany with nuclear weapons would been able to do whatever the fuck they wanted. The only thing that stood in their way? Their own. goddamn. antisemitism.

Director of Los Alamos weapons lab and Jewish American, J. Robert Oppenheimer, seen in profile as he oversees final assembly of the Trinity test bomb. Trinity was the first test detonation in the US nuclear weapons program. (x) Is this a post in support of atom bombs? No. This is a post about how being so high on your own inferiority complex that you’re down to murder people smarter than you, will fuck you in assholes you didn’t even know you had. 

[drst]

Thank you, Science Tumblr, for that deconstruction of Nazi bullshit.

[clockworkcanary]

This is excellent as is, but, I need to point out that the USA political situation is in many ways falling into this same hole now. We are becoming xenophobic and anti science at our top political level. The GOP is practically anti reality at this point. We need to fix this.

[thebibliosphere]

Holy shit, this is the best addition to any of my posts. 

[zeldaislovestruck]

This is amazing.

[icedsoras]

bunch of lovestruck doodles ( ・ ̫・) ..

[zeldaislovestruck]

I love all of this!

[fionacreates]

A Knight and her Squire

Aprils’s Illustration! I design so many lady knights I thought it was time one got some special treatment in Illustration form. Enjoy!

[vicjungjre]

I LOVE HER

[rivetedbyromance]

When the heroine is trying to investigate a woman, and she ends up getting gently rejected by probably the sweetest regency lesbian ever.

WE NEED MORE OF THIS. MORE HAPPY HISTORICAL LESBIANS LIVING THEIR LIVES, BEING AWESOME, AND PROVING THAT YES, THEY HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED.

(Tessa Dare’s “Do You Want to Start a Scandal”, bee tee dubs.)

[lovestruckvoltage]

New Lovestruck Pilot Series: Havenfall is for Lovers, Coming Soon!

[fawnposts]

Voltage isn’t pulling any punches in this one holy shit

[otome-life]

Me when driving

[fatallyblonde]

there is no heterosexual explanation for this.

[r0rschach]

What happens!!?? I want this romance…. so cute

[decaflesbian]

Ummm im here for vintage lesbians

[weirddyke]

i’m sure someone probably commented on this post already but this is calamity jane, they eventually move into a tiny cabin together and sing a song about how “a woman’s touch” can fix anything. i watched this movie daily when i was about 7 and now i’m a dyke

[tsoki]

my butch lesbian professor who is well into her sixties had told me that this was her first real exposure to the concept that a woman could not only be attracted to other women, but be butch while doing it. she said this movie propelled her into her sexuality with a sense of pride and remains a cornerstone of her coming-out journey. in short, representation matters and always has. 

[wlwellbutrin]

@bunnyfemme

[zhanael]

@fairymascot

[idiopathicsmile]

yeah for reference, here’s the “fixing up the cabin” song

i really want to believe that at least one person in the production knew precisely what they were doing

[lesbianshepard]

honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible

[lesbianshepard]

i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”

[celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725]

[key--lime--pie]

I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.

[notaflippinmermaid]

No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.

…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.

[midnightmindcave]

mai nam is jane and wen i dig i fynde some roks both smol and big i put my tung upon the stone for science yes i lik the bone

[zeldaislovestruck]

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