IdeaSmith

I had that feeling after checking it out due to peer pressure. Glad to have it verified by someone I trust.

Google Gemini did this exact thing. Not ChatGPT though. How interesting, even their stock responses are well…stock.

How about the classics of transactional analysis? Games People Play, I’m Ok You’re Ok? I was only a bit older than 12 when I came to these.

A friend suggested doing this. 'Go to ChatGPT and use this prompt: Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me.'

P.S.- I’m not a dog person, don't play D&D, never owned a robot, don't stick post-its on my screen, do not own multiple big screens or a black watch.

I wonder how many cis men have body dysphoria, considering how odd they are about hetero sex. Not to mention, weirdly resentful and also obsessed with the female body.

#TBRuary Day 6: Love is Love

Once again, me knowing nothing about the authors in my TBR comes back to bite me.

Any good recs for ace/aro authors or characters? Self-promotion encouraged, as always, so long as it fits what I'm asking for.

#booksky #readingcommunity
#writesky #writingcommunity

People show you who they are when they don’t think they can get something out of you. The trouble is, in Mumbai everyone’s a hustler who believes kuch toh fayda hoga nahin to is sheher mein hain hi kyon?

#TBRuary Day 6: Love is Love

Sexual identity exploration. Kicking gamergate butt. Learning boundaries. Owning trauma responses. And it’s between 40-somethings. This has to be the best romance I’ve ever read.

I realised this at 15, knew this at 24, watched my peers willingly give their self-esteem away to useless men. Being on dating apps in my 40s only re-confirms it. Women in India will always be wanted, regardless of looks or relationship status. Why worry about this trash gender?

My profile on dating apps sounds very boring but I’m way more interesting than the men I end up meeting. Maybe they really are beer/wine conoisseurs and love collecting stamps on their passports but gawd, where is the person behind the personality?

#TBRuary Day 5: Gender Spectrum - a book by or about someone with a different gender identity than you.

My feminist literary self feels incomplete without this book so this year I’m going to do it! It’s scifi by a woman author and about an alien world without gender.

Done. I did not expect to like this book. I’m glad I read. Books are the only ones that tell me the truth and don’t deny mine.

You know a sign of adulthood? It’s when the things people say to you today don’t hurt you. And it’s because you’re still bleeding from things that were said and done years ago and there’s no nerves left to sting at today.

It might not be the right time to be on dating apps when I’m reading this book. Or maybe it’s perfect as a reminder of the packaged Hollywood-Bollywood love bombing that abusers and predators use to disguise themselves and pass as human.

“There are no bad people. We are all just people who sometimes do bad things.” is the narrative of every liar, manipulator and abuser ever. It’s distancing the self from shame in order to avoid accountability. If you were violent, you are violent. If you lied, you are a liar.

Reading this infuriates me. Because the same people intellectualising about how this trivialises the issue of IPV are the kind gaslighting their friends & family into hiding their wounds so they can preserve the illusion of men being good humans.

The woman in this has much more self-esteem than I thought she would. More than I had when I found myself trapped with a violent man ably babysat by everyone around to convince me that his behaviour was my job to manage and my fault. #Books

harry potter is being attacked by a monster in a dark room while wearing glasses . ALT: harry potter is being attacked by a monster in a dark room while wearing glasses .

Watching Dementors hits different after depression. Movie isn’t scary now because living it is worse. The cold, fatigue, fear. Soul sucked out from you & you’re left a hollow shell so exhausted, an ending would be relief. Whatever you say about JKR, she understood depression with this depiction.

I’ll admit I was tempted by the cover and the luxury of a hardcover in a space starved city like mine.

This one is so much fun to see the linguistic journeys of different readers!

#TBRuary Day 4: Speaking Your Language

I have a few Tamil, Malayalam & Urdu translations but those would be cheating as I speak/understand a little. So here’s one originally in Italian, the most expensive & only hardcover in my 2026 TBR.

Nobody seems to read Milan Kundera or Chuck Palahniuk any more. Once they were the symbols of the cool, quirky nerd. #Books

#TBRuary Day 3: Sri Lanka. My native state Tamil Nadu of my very large country India, is the closest in geography, language and culture to this small country but I’ve never visited. It’s also not safe for me to now for precisely this reason. #Books

Nobody tells you the wounded victor at the end of the day feeling just gets wearying and tiresome with time.

Men pissing everywhere they can, sometimes with literal urination and more often with public screaming because they don’t self-regulate, unnecessarily loud voices for machismo. What a tiresome gender we have to babysit just to survive them.

The passive-aggression of “apko to pata hi hoga” (I’m sure you know) is the desi equivalent of “It’s obvious” as an answer to any question. I just reply “No, I don’t know” or “It’s not obvious to me.” Can’t believe people are still hoarding knowledge like prestige in this age.

Just want to say that this is a great series!

I’d read Roots, Queen, The Color Purple but this book made systemic oppression real for me. It’s written in AAVE and I couldn’t follow much at first. Wikipedia was no help & showed me how white it was. Urban Dictionary was the surprise map through the language of this book. It’s so good.

#TBRuary

Time Loop Romances to Get Stuck In Time loop romances force the love interests to rely on each other to either break the time loop, or come to terms with a life on repeat.

Once in a rare while comes along a target audience planned offering and it doesn’t make me feel like a brainless wallet. I didn’t even know this was a genre and now that I do, I’m thrilled to explore the others. #Books

Time Loop Romances to Get Stuck In

bookriot.com/time-loop-ro...

Completed the second book on my carefully put together 2026 must read list. After the heaviness of my recent reads, this was gentle and lovely. Do Swedish authors/characters bring this vibe often? #Books