where good characters go to die

Since we started this tumblr in 2014, we’ve brought you news of literally thousands of anti-fascist actions around the world.  Yet one of the most common questions we get asked is “what can I do?”  To help celebrate our 4th anniversary month, everyday in June we’re posting at least one real-life example of anti-fascist action that we’ve reported on in the last four years that you could replicate or take inspiration from! 30) Read And Share! OK, every day in June we’ve re-blogged an antifa action that we reported on at some point in our collective’s four-year history.  We hope it inspired you & gave you some ideas for stuff you can pull off where you live.  Now, here’s a list of more resources to tap into (many of which you can download, print, and distribute!):

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

aro & ace books: Jewish authors

authors; not necessarily all of the books/characters are Jewish.

The Sins on Their Bones - dark fantasy duology, gay demisexual MC, aroace & aroallo SCs

The Siren The Song and The Spy - YA fantasy sequel, 2 aroace MCs (of cast, book 2)

Pluralities - scifi/contemp novella, aro-coded MC

Two Dark Moons - YA fantasy trilogy, arospec MC, acespec MC (2/3)

This Dark Descent - YA fantasy duology, demi-aroace MC, aroacespec MC

(also Ravenfall (MG, aroace), and The Library of Amorlin (A, demi) by the same author)

The Lighthouse At The Edge of the World - historical urban fantasy, ace lesbian MC (1/2)

Sargassa - speculative trilogy, demi-coded MC (1/5)

The Spy With The Red Balloon - YA historical fantasy, gay demisexual MC (1/2)

The Deep - speculative novella, demi-coded love interest

(An Unkindness of Ghosts by Solomon has an aroace SC)

The Liars Guide To The Night Sky - YA contemporary, aro 'love interest'

#aspec books / aspec database / tumblr masterpost

Get to know Shea Sullivan, a creator who has been working with Duck Prints Press since our first anthology! Shea is an author and artist, a member of the Press staff, an editor, and helps with guest blog posts and other similar projects.

Biography: Shea Sullivan is a middle-aged, life-long creative living in upstate New York. As a late-blooming queer person, she enjoys writing about complex characters coming into themselves and finding comfort in being exactly who they are. Shea’s day jobs in computer programming and middle management have molded her into the patient, sarcastic, big-hearted, frustrated human she is today, but it’s what she does outside the 9-5 that really excites her. When she’s not writing, she can be found painting, napping, making quilts, roller skating, supporting local businesses (especially allllll the coffee shops), or waxing philosophical with friends.

Link: Personal Website

Projects:

The Tangled Threads of Our Hearts (on Patreon and in our forthcoming anthology Duxxx in a Row)

Taken at Sea (on Patreon)

The Riddle (available as a postcard-sized and 8-by-10 art print)

Add Magic to Taste (contributing author)

Aim For The Heart: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers” (contributing author)

A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (contributing author)

Scholarly Pursuits: A Queer Anthology of Cozy Academia Stories (editor)

Wild and Full of Marvels: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Folklore and Fairy Tales (contributing artist and editor) (forthcoming)

Beyond the Galactic Tide (editor) (forthcoming)

An Interview with Shea Sullivan!

HAPPY PRIDE 2025! For Pride this year, we’re changing up our usual rec lists. Instead of doing books with specific identities or themes, we’re focused this time on cover color! Throughout the month of June, we’ll be doing 8 rec lists, each with covers inspired by one of the colors of the original Gilbert Baker Pride Flag. We drew a little additional inspiration from the meaning behind the color and why it was included in the original LGBTQIA+ flag (in this case, yellow = sunlight), but we prioritized color over meaning. The contributors to this list are: May Barros, Rascal Hartley, polls, Shadaras, Tris Lawrence, Shannon, Nina Waters, and Alex.

Golden Hue by May Barros

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

She Gets the Girl by Alyson Derrick & Rachael Lippincott

The Honey Witch by Sydney J. Shields

Burning Roses by S.L. Huang

Given by Natsuki Kizu

The Ruin of Angels by Max Gladstone

The Persian Boy by Mary Renault

Crumbs by Danie Stirling

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

Exordia by Seth Dickinson

Snapdragon by Kat Leyh

King Cheer by Molly Horton Booth & Stephanie Kate Strohm

The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer

Hitorijime My Hero by Memeko Arii

Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker

Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier

Find these and many other queer books on our Goodreads book shelf or buy them through the Duck Prints Press Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Emboss touts itself as a sort of insurance against false accusations of AI usage. It's marketed to authors as "here, you can use this if anyone questions your writing!" and advertised to readers as a sort of "If your favorite author can't share their Emboss with you, you can definitely assume they used AI. ONLY accept books written in Ellipsus with the Emboss feature enabled! We PROMISE you our software is more reliable than any other at catching CHEATERS!" Yeah, it comes across a bit like extortion! It claims to track your keystrokes and use some (non-AI) algorithms to determine if you write like a "natural" and "normal" human. Who decides what is natural? Who determined what the benchmark is for normal? None of that is explained in their documentation. But they promise you that their Emboss metrics can definitely tell you if someone used AI.

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These people then demand that the artist record their screens and themselves during the entire process. They want artists to be livestreaming--one camera focused on their screen, one on their body. Artists must expose everything about themselves or be deemed AI. And some artists are keeping their privacy and saying, "Fuck you, I owe you nothing." But beginner artists? Who are just getting started? Who don't have a decade of proof on DeviantArt already? They are feeling coerced, even if they don't want to, into sharing their lives for fear that not doing so will ruin their ability to pay rent. This Emboss feature? It's saying that not only is it right and fair that people demand this of artists, but it should be done to writers, too. It should be done to nobody. This is cop mentality. This is putting people in a panopticon; this is assuming people are liars until they can prove they aren't.

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A second feature of Emboss is the metrics and statistics it collects. If your metrics meet certain parameters, you can get a Human Authorship Badge. This feature tracks your keystrokes and uses some sort of algorithm to determine if your WPM (words per minute) are "Normal" and your typing flow is "Natural." It measures how often and how long you pause, it looks at how much a sentence changes between revisions, and calculates if you spent either too long or not long enough writing something. Nowhere in Ellipsus' help documents can I find a source for how they determine what is a "natural" number of "thinking pauses" and what is "unnatural." Nowhere can I find how they determined that 30 - 70 is a human WPM (especially when touch-typists, like myself, can easily and accurately do more than 120 words per minute, and when some people with mobility and join issues can struggle to do five words per minute unless they have adaptative technologies). None of their metrics have sources for how they determined what is human and what is not. But it is especially obvious that they never considered that people with disabilities write.

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... it's really kinda convenient that the marketing for Emboss kinda makes it seem like anyone who doesn't draft, revise, and edit in Ellipsus in a very mechanical way isn't really an author and shouldn't be trusted and probably is a devious monster using AI. Just when they come out with a paid plan. ... ...right now Ellipsus' marketing is positing itself as the only ethical writing software and I think that's gross. They aren't saying "Don't like us, don't use us." They are saying, "Don't like us? Enjoy your justly earned AI accusations."

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The Ellipsus Emboss feature accepts and is preparing for a future that techbros want: one where genAI is the default, it is the standard, it is what should be expected when opening a book. The Emboss feature and its stamp--as well as the Author Guilds badge--presuppose a future where humans are the marked category. We are what needs to be called out. I refuse to accept this as the inevitable future. We humans should not be marking ourselves; we should not be accepting the premise that AI is the new standard just because billionaires might lose money otherwise.

found this article and this related thread, both by Dax Murray, really interesting. That doesn't mean I agree with everything in it, but I thought it worth sharing.

A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell

World Running Down by AL Hess

Coffee Boy by Austin Chant

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Chef’s Choice by T.J. Alexander (& others, ex. Second Chances in New Port Stephen)

The Chromatic Fantasy by H.A.

𝐄𝟑𝟑 𝐓𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐝 — 𝐕𝐨𝐥 𝟒: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐫

NEW BOOOOKKKKKSSSSS

IT IS SO FREAKING HARD TO PICK JUST A FEW, but here are some new additions in June that we are HYPED about

Herculine by Grace Byron (all trans girl commune, rural indiana, demons personal or otherwise)

The Open Era by Edward Schmit (debut, tennis romance)

Bloom Town by Ally North (1850’s western, outlaws, kidnapping, conspiracies)

No God But Us by Bobuq Sayed (“a story of borders and boundaries transgressed")

The Unravelling by Benjamin Rosenbaum (“a chaotic romp of gender deconstruction” + sci-fi, neopronouns)

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (poetry, (pandemic) grief, survival, healing)

Saturn Returning by Kim Narby (queer friendship, connection, early adulthood)

Summerhouse by Yigit Karaahmet (“gay wrongs” & “shockingly lovable antiheroes”)

The other ‘A’ in LGBTQIA+ by AUREA (Aromantics stand up!!)

Love’s Not Color Blind: race and representation in polyamorous and other alternative communities by Kevin A. Patterson

Liberating Lawrence: Gay Activism in the 1970’s at the University of Kansas by Katherine Rose-Mockry

Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity ed. Lee Mandelo (spec-fic & sci-fi, queer fiction as protest)

you can find these & many more in our ‘just added’ list on libby

It’s here !! The guide for two-legged people who don’t know how to draw wheelchairs !!! 7 pages of infodump ! Disclaimer : I don’t know everything, I have one (1) experience of wheelchair user who used both bad and good chairs, and I share what I learned.

Image description :

1) Calvin in his wheelchair saying “yo” under a huge title “how to draw manual wheelchairs properly by Calvin Arium, a wheelchair user comic artist”.

2) A character says “my character self propels in a chair that was outdated in 1970 lol” Calvin says “so it looks like you two legged people don’t know the difference between an hospital chair and a chair made to be independant” an arrow point the crapppy chair, saying “we never want to see this again”

a bubble says “the hospital chair is extremely unpractical, tough considering it’s cheaper than a good custom chair a lot of us have only this”

3) a character hurt himself trying to reach the wheels of the hospital chair. Several arrows point why the chair is unpractical : “high backrest restrain shoulders movement” “huge armrest restrains wheel access” “separated footrest : amovible, cheap, bulky” “x structure, foldable but heavy” “huge front casters for stability” “heavy wheels”

4) Several arrows point an active wheelchair (the KSL by Küshall) : “usually no armrest” “a low backrest allow more movement” “light, design, ferning expersive” “special cushion to avoind injuries” “knee angle is usually 90°” “one single piece of frame, sometimes entirely welded” “weight : from 4 to 10kg” “often rigid” “center of the wheel is the center of gravity” “higher quality wheels : less spikes”

5) A hand grab different parts of the wheel, pushing harder in the second half. Bubbles says “some have gloves, some don’t. The hand must grab the biggest area possible. Less movement = more energy. This is a common but not only way to push.Calvin is on his back wheels, rolling on grass and dirt bubble says “popping a wheelie is when a wheelchair user rolls on their back wheels to roll on every complicated surface.

6) several drawings illustrate the folding frame, the ergonomic but rigid and expensive backrest, the separated footrest (only for folding frame), the handles, the folding handles, athe amovibles handles, or no handles, the cool fancy loopwheels, the pretty custom colors 

7) More Features ! The fancy rigid-foldable frame, the anti tippers (sometimes used by beginners), the motorization (wheels, smart drive) when propelling yourself is difficult Calvin says “and now vroom vroom motherfuckers”

Consider also supporting me by buying me a coffee on ko-fi : ko-fi.com/calvinarium 

Thanks !