For When I Want To Escape

Hey you know how I said I was going to make a workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies? I actually did that.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH LOTS OF SWEARING AT THE USELESS, SHITTY SITUATION YOU’RE IN.

HERE IS THE VERSION WITH A FAIR AMOUNT OF BLACK HUMOR BUT NO CURSEWORDS.

Featuring Helpful Sections such as:

Death Certificates – What you need, why you need them, and how to get them

Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone

What the Everloving Fuck is Probate

Some Simple Dos and Don’ts

Shitty Mad Libs – Templates for writing Obituaries and Memorials

How to plan a non-religious death party

So you suddenly have to become some sort of hacker or some shit

This is an eighteen page book that you can print out, download, share, and give away; it is meant to be used to collect information about funeral planning and account management after a death OR you can use it BEFORE you die and give people information so they’re not stuck playing Nancy Fucking Drew while trying to keep seventeen cousins who crawled out of the woodwork from gutting each other in front of the fucking casket as they argue about who’s inheriting grandma’s favorite dentures.

It’s not exactly cheerful and it’s full of things that are probably going to feel really fucking raw if you’re processing a fresh death.

I’m sorry! I love you! Death is shitty! I’m trying to laugh about it a little and I hope you can laugh a little too because otherwise we’re all just going to cry together.

Good luck!

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

don’t wanna read about two people falling in love and fuckin’

just wanna read more about some specific characters

good news! this post is not about you. here are some posts i have seen with great regularity on this site:

no one who writes original fiction is capable of writing good sex

no one who writes original fiction understands tropes

original fiction doesn’t understand kinks

too many books are about high-stakes things and not enough books focus on character development and interaction

all of which is blatantly and on the face of it absurd to anyone who reads a lot of romance and which is what this post is about. it downplays and devalues the good work being done, especially by marginalized authors, in the romance space. authors should get paid! authors should get rewarded for originality! if you read a shitty romance novel once, i don’t care! so have i! i’ve read a lot of shitty books in a lot of perfectly good genres. if you can spend three hours sifting through pairing tags on ao3 to find the one fic that doesn’t suck, you can look through ebook previews to find something that looks good.

‘books are expensive’ is almost a compelling argument, except that romances and mysteries are two genres where ebooks go on sale for $1-2 with startling regularity. my bookbub emails regularly get ebook boxed sets with tons of different books by different authors going on sale for a buck, which is a great way to find new authors. most authors have newsletters where they let you know about sales and send out freebies. and if your library has overdrive, you can request books. you don’t have to just… see they don’t have it and give up.

anyway, here’s books:

will i ever stop recommending courtney milan’s brothers sinister series? literally never. if you prefer contemporary and don’t mind first person there’s also the cyclone series. if your local library does not have at least one courtney milan book i will be shocked. don’t worry about it if they’re not the first in a series. you can read it out of order. that’s how romance novels work. lots of her books also go on sale for the low price of free on the regular, especially the novellas.

alisha rai’s forbidden hearts series also rules.it’s got starcrossed lovers, it’s got feuding families, it’s got hatefucking, what more could you want

alyssa cole has never written anything bad in her entire life, i’m pretty sure. you want historicals? you want contemporary? contemporary but there’s still sexy dukes? post-apocalyptic? pick your poison, enjoy.

i just read this one recently and now i need to read all the other cat sebastian books i’ve acquired over the years because whenever a book is a dollar and looks like this i buy it immediately (it’s literally a dollar right now). this graphic was very helpful and i wish more authors had ones like it. it’s 2019, bring back web banners for link pages.

i discovered six de los reyes when courtney milan recced beginner’s guide: love and other chemical reactions and i’m really interested to read more of her books. also it made me realize i’d never read a book that took place in the philippines before? no one fucks in this but it’s really cute and sweet and involves a hyper-logical lady scientist, an artist/barista/bad boy, a coffee shop, and Making Out For Entirely Scientific Reasons.

bound with honor is the only book i’ve read from the regency reimagined series. the reimagining seems to be that it’s very bisexual and polyamorous and everyone fucks a lot and also there’s bondage. i am cool with this. i actually bought the whole series at some point?? i… should read these.

i haven’t gotten around to reading tess bowery’s treading the boards series (i have bought so many books) (i was not kidding about the one dollar sales) but i’ve got high hopes because look at them

kj charles is… prolific. and another author whose books i haven’t gotten around to despite owning a lot of them. i actually just bought that one on the right, just now, because i saw that it was a dollar when taking this screenshot.

As a quick ref to my Treading the Boards series - the setting is 1811, the characters all work in or adjacent to the London performing arts scene. 

Rite of Summer is about escaping the thing you thought was forever – what happens after the grand romantic gestures. (m/m, then m/m/m, back to m/m again.) 

She Whom I Love’s main characters are an actress, a staymaker and a lady’s maid. Honestly, my favourite way to solve a love triangle is polyamoury. (f/f/m) 

(Short-listed for two Bisexual Book Awards - best erotic romance and best romance.) 

That Potent Alchemy stars a dancer and a backstage effects expert. A tagline I regret not using: ‘gender is also a kind of performance.’ (m/nb)

Aang: I recall yes

Sokka: can I have it

Aang: …what?

Sokka: can I have his firebending. just for like ten minutes

Aang: what no

Sokka: why not I wanna prank zuko

Aang:

Aang:

Katara: you thought the avatar’s brother was a non-bender?

Zuko: …excuse me?

Toph: sure am. by the way did you change your hair? it looks nice

▷   and    if we’re made of  d u s t ,   then

                            what  makes  us

The EU’s on-again/off-again Copyright Directive keeps sinking under its own weight: on the one side, you have German politicians who felt that it was politically impossible to force every online platform to spend hundreds of millions of euros to buy copyright filters to prevent a user from infringing copyright, even for an instant, and so proposed tiny, largely cosmetic changes to keep German small businesses happy; on the other side, you have French politicians who understand that the CEOs of multinational entertainment companies won’t stand for any compromise, or even the appearance of compromise, and so the process fell apart.

That is until Chancellor Merkel and President Macron sat down to broker a deal, in which Merkel caved on every single measure that even looked like it might protect small businesses, co-operatives, nonprofits, and individuals, ending up with a deal that guarantees that every existing small platform will be destroyed and no new ones can be started, leaving Europe in the hands of US Big Tech – forever.

Under the new deal, any platform where the public can communicate will have to buy copyright filters to intercept all public communications and compare them to a database of so-called “copyrighted works” (which anyone, anywhere, can add anything to), and then block anything that appears to be a match. Not only will these cost hundreds of millions of euros to develop and maintain, they will also block mountains of legitimate speech – speech that uses copyrighted works but falls under fair dealing, speech that is incorrectly identified as containing copyrighted works, speech that is deliberately suppressed by trolls, censors and frauds who deliberately claim ownership over works in the public domain, or works that other people hold the copyright to.

The “compromise” that Merkel has agreed to is this: platforms don’t have to add the filters until they have been in business for three years, or until they make €10m in a single year. That means that every single existing online forum that has been in operation for three years or more must immediately buy filters, even if it’s a small online community run by volunteers, or a commercial site with a tiny niche – like this little, longstanding community for people who like to fish. Even Patreon – which exists solely to get artists paid! – would have to buy filters or pull out of Europe.

But it gets even worse: under the terms of this deal, once a platform makes €5,000,000 in a year, it will be obligated to implement “notice and staydown” – that is, copyright filters by another name.

And it gets even worse: the new deal requires that every site, no matter how small, noncommercial, or public spirited, must demonstrate that it has taken ‘best efforts’ to license anything their users might conceivably upload, which means that any time a rightsholder offers you a license for content your users might use, you are obliged to buy it from them, at whatever price they name.

This is the end of the internet as we know it, and the beginning of an era in which all our communications, all our familial relations, political engagements, educational activities, employment-related work, romantic questing, everything, is subordinated to turning the internet into a cable TV system, where the only materials available are those that multinational entertainment corporations approve of. Remember when cable operators promised a digital future where “500 channel universe” of entertainment options were on tap? It’s arrived. We just had to kill the web – the “two billion channel universe” – to get it.

All is not lost: the next step will be a rubber-stamp where national negotiators for EU member states approve the deal, and then it will go for a vote in the European Parliament, who will have the final say, right before they stand for re-election in European elections this May.

In other words, of all the times that a catastrophic plan could come before Parliament, this is the best (or the least-worst): the moment at which Parliamentarians are most sensitive to their constituents’ wishes.

What’s more, Europeans hate this: so much so that the petition opposing it is now the the largest petition in European history, and within spitting distance of being the largest petition in the history of the human race.

There’s lots more to come on this, getting people to contact their MEPs ahead of the vote. This is a terrible state of affairs, but at least it is now so obviously, visibly terrible that it’s gotten a lot easier to explain to people on the sidelines. Mobilise your friends and family now: the future of our planetary-scale, species-wide electronic nervous system is at stake.

Article 13 is back on – and it got worse, not better [Julia Reda]

Aang: the best revenge is letting go and living well

Katara:…

Katara: Zuko tricked me into letting go and living well.

Y'all: Oh no how will we tag our nsfw work!?

Intellectuals:

Aro laughed. “Ha ha ha,” he giggled.

“I feel the color in my cheeks rising again. I must be the color of the Communist Manifesto.”

“His erection springs free. Holy cow!”

“Holy crap! He’s wearing a white shirt.”