#justgravythings

are we the baddies: SFF subgenre focused on agents of an imperial power realizing that and grappling with what to do next, in contrast to stories focusing on the scrappy rebels resisting said imperial power

I could fix him (the empire): SFF subgenre where the colonized subject being nice and/or sexy enough Ends Colonialism, frequently tied to the John President of Racism problem

librarian bait: books centered on the transformative life-changing power of books and libraries, cousin to books focused on the transformative life-changing power of storytelling and narrative in general

college brochure fiction: stories where the protagonist has an artfully arranged group of diverse friends who are as flat as paper and whose cultural backgrounds never come up meaningfully

It hails from an immortal tumblr post by penultimate-step, except not immortal apparently because I get 'not found' when I try to go back to the original. So here's the text:

BONUS:

“We haven’t seen a lot of stories like Bertie’s before,” Robinson told LGBTQ Nation. “Someone who is a person of color and non-binary, we don’t see those stories in history often. History has been whitewashed and straightwashed but these characters existed. These people existed. I felt so honored to be a part of telling these stories and telling a story similar to mine for a person like Bertie.”

“That’s extremely selfish of you have you considered that maybe you deserve to be abused?”

The good news is that I've completed the full manuscript for John Rich & The Big Picture, formatted it and killed some darlings, and have sent it to my agent. What started out as a practice novel has become, truly, A Regular Novel. That practice worked—I learned so much! You guys taught me so much. With your gasps, groans, and laughter, you showed me what hit and what didn't. Thank you.

The inconvenient news—I will be closing this Tumblr in the next few days. This is, yes, for #publishing reasons. You will only be able to read John Rich & The Big Picture at the dedicated website for the foreseeable future.

Tumblr is where I got my start sharing stories. I love how I can, like, post 400 words of smut and have that up for 48 hours. I can type up a random thought on the current chapter I'm working on. I can rant. Or drop a poll about whether or not you think John is inspired by John Mulaney. (For legal reasons, he's not. Why would you even think that?) Tumblr is a great place to build community, but not the ideal place potential publishers wants certain stories to exist. (That gay hockey comic is an anomaly.)

Chapter 19 and all subsequent chapters will be up on okjohnrich.site. You'll read the ending there. That site, too, will have to be taken down at some point, but I'll let the finale breathe before putting it under lock and key. This means your friends should start reading now before they have to buy the eBook for the price of two Manhattan lattes.

look at this thing

it already has the right colors and everything! this should be everywhere! we already have the lesbian violets and the gay green carnations, so why not the bisexual hydrangea?

so far I have scoured etsy and found one pair of socks with a nice hydrangea gradient (and it has bees, 10/10), an enamel pin with hydrangeas and a bi flag (not terribly subtle, 7/10) and a sticker that says "bi-drangea" (I am SO MAD that I didn't think of that pun myself, 11/10) AND THAT'S IT.

I REQUEST, NAY, DEMAND MORE BI-DRANGEA MERCH. COME ON, PEOPLE.

this is so good this is SO good this is SO SO SO GOOD. languagehat you remain undefeated linksource. absolutely beautiful descriptions of arabic typography, calligraphy, etc, with technical details both scriptologically and in terms of the problems with the code. sorry for a long-ass pullquote that isn't even especially representative but this section made me SO happy

The first book printed in movable Arabic type was a book of hours, Kitāb Ṣalāt al-Sawāʿī, produced in 1514 in Fano, in the Papal States, by the Venetian printer Gregorio de' Gregori. It was set by craftsmen who could not read a word of what they were setting, and you can tell: letters detach at the joints, dots drift away from their letters, final forms turn up in the middle of words.

Two decades later the Paganini press in Venice printed the first Qurʾān in movable type, a commercial venture aimed at the Ottoman market, and it failed so completely (typographic errors compounded by textual ones, in the one book whose point is textual fidelity) that every copy vanished and scholars spent four centuries politely doubting the edition had ever existed. Then in 1987 a single copy surfaced in the library of a Venetian friary, where it had been sitting the whole time.