"Words are Life."

A tale as old as time, a bibliophile picks up the first book of a series on recommendation from several of his buddies, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, or other similar categories of people. He opens it, blinks, and it is suddenly two weeks later, he’s halfway through the eighth book, and his other obligations are mysteriously two weeks behind. These events are certainly not related in a causative manner.

MONGO IS APPALLED

⚠️Non-HP Universe Post⚠️

My favourite book series! This is Carl and Princess Donut from the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. Amazing books and amazing audio books because the narrator is so insanely talented you completely forget it’s just one guy!

Information about the painting

References used:

Carl - based very loosely on Tom Hanks from Saving Private Ryan

Donut - Google image search for tortoiseshell Persian cats helped me figure out the coat pattern and smushed face look

Tiara - Google image search for plastic tiara, and then I combined a few of the results for something a little more unique

Glasses - Google image search for rhinestone sunglasses, and then combined for a gaudy look

Butterfly charm - couldn’t find anything I really liked so it’s more of a sort of fairy wing look than anything else 🤷🏻‍♀️

Leather jacket - Google image search

Brushes used (procreate):

Lilydale

Winkleigh

Lichen

Agrarian

Forester

Mintbrush

Canva used to add signature

Native Apple photos app used for post-processing colour balance

How to Defend Books and Why

Danny Caine

Listen on Audiobook

You're invited to the book revolution!

Fight back against censorship and empower your community with this close look at the book banning movement.

In a moving, compulsively readable call to arms for readers everywhere, Danny Caine, bestselling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why, offers an expertly-crafted confrontation of far-right, Christian nationalist attempts to reshape American culture through ban campaigns targeting schools, libraries, bookstores, and prisons, with the aim to silence marginalized identities in life and in literature.

From the first-ever banned books display at San Francisco's City Lights in the 1950s to the rapid rise of so-called Moms For Liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic to attempts to silence Palestinian authors, Caine charts the course of repressive censorship campaigns, along with the creative and sometimes unlikely activists who've stood up against them.

Each chapter is based on a particular book banning episode, bolstered by research and legal precedent, and concludes with helpful takeaways for further reading or resistance.

Throughout, Caine approaches these heated issues with gentle openness harkening back to his work as a public school teacher and a bookseller.

He emphasizes our collective responsibility towards art, free speech, and each other.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

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