ancientreader

i'm sure you'd feel the same if you were arrested for something you hadn't done, right?

anyway blocking you for maga-worthy stupidity

dammit. dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit dammit

it was so beautiful to see that hoagie land

really. even sonia sotomayor and ketanji brown jackson?

🙄

some of us do this while listening to the mountain goats alone at home too

also, instant follow for that rainbow tweet

i mean, to be fair i never met an animal who wanted to execute anyone for sodomy, so you were clearly in the wrong

6 days after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, a Prague paper published these “10 Commandments”:
‘When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU:
1. Don’t know
2. Don’t care
3. Don’t tell
4. Don’t have
5. Don’t know how to
6. Don’t give
7. Can’t do
8. Don’t sell
9. Don’t show
10. Do nothing’

one other thing -- behavior characterized as destructive often arises from boredom, anxiety, and/or pent-up energy. so before resorting to aversive responses, it's always best to consider what behavioral needs aren't being met or could be better addressed ❤️

retired dog trainer here: the trouble with this suggestion is at least 2fold: 1. dogs, esp teething puppies, need to chew, & it's generally not hard to teach them to stick to appropriate chew toys; 2. bittering agents aren't reliable deterrents - lots of determined chewers out there

Speaking as a nice, respectable cis gay, I've been expecting Obergefell to fall ever since November 2016. The Gross Old Pedo party fucking hates queer people, all of us, and when they started on trans people it was just predators pulling the most vulnerable out of the herd first. God I hate them.

Dude, you're dreaming. Obergefell will be dead in a year.

Certainly. An issue w/r/t any marginalized identity. Assessment is tricky, isn't it? At least on an individual level, I have straight friends whose judgment of queer romance I trust, which is only to say that identity is a lot but it isn't everything. How banal of me; shutting up now.

Sorry to blather on -- it's not something I've ever thought through before; just, like I said, I've noticed those GR reviews, they've niggled at me, and here you are right on exactly that topic. Feel free to ignore me obviously!

and is that necessarily pernicious? Well, you're arguing that it is, I guess, and while my first inclination is to agree I do still wonder what the response to those (for shorthand) total-wish-fulfillment readers can be. Would you want to persuade them that they're wrong?

Like, those small-town romances that make me run screaming -- those are a kind of wish fulfillment, right? As a reader I'm with you because my wish fulfillment includes the kind of grounding you're advocating for here. But other readers' wish fulfillment leads them elsewhere,

I think what I'm getting at is that I see a tension here, between the escapist fantasy of the love story with an HEA (since in real life the happiest, longest love story must end in a death), and the wish to ground one's storytelling in the world as it is.

... in the first place (dyed-in-the-wool NYer). But truly, I do see plenty of commentary on Goodreads complaining when a romance includes any reference at all to what we might call real-world conditions, so that seems like a genuine preference some queer readers have.

Sure, agreed. And I'd probably have lost my mind over the book where the MCs go on vacation to Country Where Our Existence Isn't Even Legal; honestly, I can't stand most of those small-town romances set in certain US states anymore, not that I was ever a fan of small-town romance ...

Also, I snort-laughed at a couple of the plots you called out later in the essay: I think I recognize at least one of those books and wrote a ranty review of it.

Oh, and I almost entirely agree with you, in case that's not clear.

What would you say to queer readers who don't want to see any queerphobia in their romances? FWIW I'm queer & I love those realistic touches, also triumph-over-queerphobia narrative, but if I can go by what I see on Goodreads from reviewers who i.d. as some flavor of queer, a lot of people hate it.

this is tempting tbh. "hello i am a fat old queer! hire me! i will do my level best to deport aliens! the ones from flying saucers, super scary amirite!"

TFW you post your feedback on NetGalley and then get, all enthusiastic, "Share your review! We've already copied it to your clipboard" with buttons going to the retailer pages

and you're like

Nooooooooo I don't think the publisher really wants me to do that this time okay

#BookSky

this dc situation looks pretty horrible. i wish i had more to say except that autocracy is always mundane and petty and vicious and encourages you to look away and be safe. and you can live quite normally under it until you're a direct target

Please don't caricature environmental concerns. Suburban sprawl, car culture, hostility toward cities -- those are real villains. Green space, tree canopy, preservation of topsoil -- those things are valuable for all people.

"Old hippies yelling about trees" -- those would be the trees that, here in NYC, are in short supply in neighborhoods with a lot of POC and poor people, neighborhoods that are hotter than, for example, my well-canopied middle-class neighborhood?

You would think, or at least I would think, that annoying reviewers is antithetical to the goal of getting favorable reviews. I try not to let my irritation over formatting influence my review, but it seems likely to spill over into my response to any flaws I find in the book.

#BookSky

More typically I see chapter headings randomly inserted into the text, or wOrDS OdDLy capitalized like sarcastic comments on social media.

And why? Why? It's not as if epub ARCs can be shared anyway, or if they can be I sure don't know how and I wager most other reviewers don't, either.

Someone explain to me what on earth the point is of issuing ARCs as PDFs. The formatting is always wonky on Kindle, which let's face it is the e-reader most of us use.

I just finished up with a real stinker of a file, with common letter combinations replaced by random characters.

he's not even new rich! he comes from a rich family in apartheid south africa. they were part owners of some emerald mines. the dirtiest money you can imagine, ugh.

light the movies, shoot the movies, scare the living shit out of the audiences: it makes my blood run cold even to think about night of the hunter, & it's been at least a decade since i last watched it