and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.
Guy there are books on magic on there.
There’s books on EVERYTHING there!
Wouldn’t this be bad for authors though? or is this like a normal library where they get /some/ money?
It’s like a normal library. Libraries can upload ebooks there and let people check them out through openlibrary if you have an openlibrary account, or it can point you to nearby libraries that have physical copies of the book for you to go and check out. If you check out books via openlibrary it counts towards the count of books checked out from the library that uploaded the ebook, and they can use it in their reporting and funding and stuff.
There’s like 150 libraries partnered with openlibrary so far.
They also have copies that you can check out if you are print-disabled.
You can also ‘sponsor a book’, which means you pay the cost of the ebook you want openlibrary to acquire, and then they can add it to their collection and let people check it out.
And click on a title even if it says ‘no ebook available’ and scroll down, ‘cause sometimes that just means “all of the copies of ebooks are checked out right now but you can get on the waitlist when it’s back in”
This is part of the Internet Archive! I’ve posted about this before. Please go, it’s amazing.
Sherlock Holmes looked up from his book. “My dear Watson, the only thing I love more than respecting women and having feelings is being in a gay triad with you and Winnie the Pooh. Let’s hook up with the Great Gatsby,” he said, 100% legally
course, all the best people are <3 (a stede simp that is)
This show got you with the aesthetics and kept you with the interpersonal relationships. Found family dynamics are your jam. It’s about the fantasy of finding a group of people who turn out to be yours completely by accident, isn’t it.
The way this show handles the homophobia inherent in the setting is balm on your soul. You notice details I wouldn’t even think to look for.
If you could marry Stede’s party coat from ep5, you would.
#is one of the noticed details the fact that in the slow pan across the kneeling crew during the chain sequence #it’s all those most in danger from english law #pete roach frenchie olu and lucius so. all the black crew members and the confirmed sodomites (and then obvs stede and ed) #is this on purpose? probably not #but yeah on myyyy maybe second or third watch probably i found that shot abruptly TERRIFYING #like not to embody the worst kind of hermeneutics of suspicion and only finding victims in historical queer rep #(Felski; Bruhm; YES i went and dug through my old thesis notes to remember who those authors were lol) #but there’s something so implicitly menacing about that line up that just FLOORED me on rewatch #not swede. not john. not buttons. barely pete. then very clearly: roach. frenchie. olu. lucius. #SHIVERS i tell you!!! shivers down my spine! #just. knowing what the empire would do to black men. what the navy would do to sodomites. centre stage. absolutely horrifying. #ANYWAY OKAY thank you for the excuse for THAT rant that’s been building in my chest for about six months XD #and STEDE SIMPS UNITE UVU
I wrote a public blog post that goes through the process of formatting your art to post online safely by reducing the DPI and file size without losing overall visual quality. Read it now here!
The BBC is doing an audio play of The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper’s amazing novel. They’re dropping daily episodes as the events of the novel progress day by day through late December.
“wow i never would have guessed you’re autistic” thanks! i traumatized myself throughout my developmental years learning maladaptive masking skills that have harmed me body and soul
Following up on the ghost thing, I know that it was a tradition to tell spooky scary stories on Christmas for a while in the UK (Christmas Carol, obviously, it's mentioned in A Child's Christmas in Wales, and I wanna throw in a Gawain and the Green Knight reference in here as well just to sound smart and stuff), but I feel like the Americans never really got into it, and I'm not sure if it's still done in the UK either. Where do you stand with respect to spooky tales on Christmas?
See, my immediate response to this question was, “All Christmas stories are ghost stories.” And then I had to sit down and think about what I actually meant by that and whether it is actually true.
In the field of Renaissance studies for a while there has been this debate going on about “enchantment.” Often the focus is the question of whether Shakespeare’s audiences actually believed in magic/witches/the fairies, or whether they saw these things as entertaining fictions. But more broadly, you have some scholars arguing that Shakepeare and his contemporaries were still living in an enchanted world, where the magical/mystical/marvelous was an accepted and expected part of daily experience, and some arguing that Shakespeare’s era was the time when people began to become disenchanted.
This debate will never be resolved, but I’ll tell you one thing for certain: whether that enchanted world ever actually existed or not, we have been missing it for a very long time. So when we find enchantment in fiction or in song or story or whatever, there’s joy, but there’s also melancholy; we’re glad to have it in fiction but we miss that enchanted reality that may or may not have ever existed but is definitely not what we’re living in now.
So, focusing just on Anglophone Christmas stories (I know little of Christmas stories in other languages or climes), I would say one of the definitive features of that genre is the rediscovery of enchantment. No matter how commercialized and comedified and formulaic a Christmas story gets, it’s always about enchantment. In Hallmark Christmas movies, we rediscover enchantment through romance and True Love. In “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and the Peanuts Christmas special, enchantment is rediscovered in the everyday–and this is somehow made possible by the failure of commercialism. But then there is the genre of movies that focus on the secular mythology generated around Santa Clause–the elves, the reindeer, etc.–where either we are transported to the magical world of Santa’s workshop at the North Pole and just sort of snuggle up inside it, or we discover that Santa is actually embedded in our own reality and to unlock the enchantment he represents we just have to adjust our own perceptions. Even Christmas stories where neither Santa nor the infant Jesus (who is typically left out of American Christmas stories except in the context of Christmas pageants) appears offer enchantment through its depiction of home and family, where Christmas is magically able to resolve conflicts and restore love to people who have almost lost it.
You can only rediscover something after you’ve lost it. So behind every story of the triumphant re-emergence of enchantment is our sense of having become estranged from it. All of these stories, even things like the Santa Clause franchise, acknowledge the deadening effects of disenchantment and celebrate the discovery that the world still contains magic and miracles.
So, “A Christmas Carol” is a ghost story in that it contains ghosts and is about haunting. But I guess I’m saying that Christmas stories are haunted by the loss (to most of us; those of you for whom the world is still enchanted, never change!) of things like ghosts, elves, and magic in general. And I would argue you can see that even in the way Christians tell the Nativity story to each other. There are four gospels and Jesus is in all of them but the story everyone knows is the one with the most enchantment: angels, a traveling star, and wise men bearing gifts which seem entirely fabulous to twenty-first century Americans. I mean I actually bought a bar of soap claiming to be scented with myrrh and frankincense the other day. It exists, and I bought it, and I don’t know which thing to be more worried about.
