Mello🫧🧭

he introduced himself as "Oliver Garden, because when you're queer you're family"

His persona was a blond elvis impersonator/church preacher? (ironic because he's jewish). With the iconic line of "in this church LGBTQ stands for 'LET GOD BLESS THESE QUEERS'"

DID NOT LIP SYNC HIS SONG HE SANG AND ROCKED THAT ELVIS VIBE HARD

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

Fellow stars have reached out to see if she’s OK. Charli XCX was one of the first to do so (..). Eilish has been keeping tabs on Roan (...). Hayley Williams DM’d her, offering to chat with Roan anytime. Katy Perry told her to never read the comments. Lorde gave her a helpful list of things to do at an airport to fly under the radar. The band Muna hosted her for dinner. Miley Cyrus invited her to a party. Lady Gaga has passed along her phone number (...). Roan went on walks and grabbed coffees with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. Their boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers came over to Roan’s just to hang, commiserating on how fandom behavior has become increasingly “abusive and violent.” Sabrina Carpenter, who’s also had a shockingly massive year, suggested they meet up and unpack their summers. “We’re both going through something so fucking hard … she just feels like everything is flying, and she’s just barely hanging on,” Roan says. “It was just good to know someone else feels that way.” Backstage at the Vic Theatre in Chicago, Roan flashes her phone to show a lengthy email from Mitski she received that morning. “I just wanted to humbly welcome you to the shittiest exclusive club in the world, the club where strangers think you belong to them and they find and harass your family members,” it reads.

The second time I quilted Joan of Ark.

And then I guess tofu had a moment and brands got scared of losing people to trial-and-error and started manufacturing extra-firm tofu you could use to break a window and escape a house fire with.

And the more Americanized brands went that direction while the traditional brands said “no that’s fucking stupid we’re not changing anything” and SOME brands said “what if we do like the middle of that?”

Asking you to grate the tofu on a cheese grater and bake it? Westernized. You want that red brick tofu. You want Whole Foods amount of extra firm or SUPER firm because if that thing has any amount of moisture left in it it’ll disintegrate like Tubby Custard on the grater.

Tofu scrambled eggs? You want the OG extra firm. You want it to hold its form but still have that softness and give unless your goal is to imitate sad dining hall scrambled eggs.

Hello??

Hello!!!???

Shaking your hand shaking your hand shaking your hand???????

It is even worse when it is Unhinged Comedy That's Mostly Going To Be Funny To People On Tumblr. (For example, the main character being a supreme gremlin made of 90% memes by weight (examples: carries around a bag that is never called anything but his "little rucksack"; has a near-verbatim "stick me legy out real far" moment; talks about his metaphorical "orphan gruel bowl" which is a direct reference to that one Oliver Twist gif) because those are funny to me personally.) Unhinged Tumblr Comedy is difficult because tumblr is not a platform where it is easy to market things to people, because we are generally violently anti-capitalist and LOATHE advertisements and reflexively resist being marketed to for most anything. I LOVE that about this website. Except for right now, because I have bills to pay and a cat to feed. So look, fellow tumblr gremlins, I am just trying to say that if your personal brand of comedy is laughing at the kind of jokes that could only be produced on this hell website, and:

you like pirates

you're queer and want to read more books by queer authors

you want your fictional queer characters to be a hell of a lot more Messy and Unhinged than they often are depicted as being

you're interested in seeing a love triangle (M/M/NB) that resolves into polyamory

you want books where the hottest character gets to makes Passionate Speeches about rebelling against oppressive institutional regimes like governments and organized religions

you believe that capitalism is the most oppressive institutional regime of them all

you think it's fun when two characters have been in a 15-year-long relationship where the vibes have been "We're Newly Divorced" nearly since day one

you believe that All Cops Are Bastards and want to know what to do when you get pulled over by the boat cops

you think the Great British Bake-Off would be improved with weaponry, ritualized bribery/coercion of judges, and elaborate shit-talk

then this book might be for you. Beneath the wall-to-wall hijinks, it is political and it is righteously angry and it is the funniest thing I have ever written (which is saying something, because I have written some funny shit). It's called RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND. Here's a picture of it.

If all that sounds cool, you can read a review of it here and the first chapter of it here to see if it as funny as I am claiming it is, and then if you think that it is, you can preorder it here. It comes out on June 11! Ten days from now!

(Pictured above: both me reading this book and also Avra every moment of every day)

When people are saying that this feels very Terry Pratchett in execution, take them seriously. It does. It's very much its own thing as well - far more explicitly queer and with its own style of humour that is distinct from Pratchett, but the blending of comedy, social commentary, and outright rage against injustice is VERY Pratchett in the best possible way. There comes a moment near the end of the book when a particular character goes on a full-blown raison d'etre rant where I genuinely wanted to applaud at the end.

Also, all of the character voices are so distinct and entertaining that I read so much of the dialogue out loud to myself because it felt fun to just SAY.

I love everything from Alex Rowland, particularly in the Chantiverse, but I felt like this one took a step out and just GLOWED. I will be re-reading many times just to feel it all again.

Final addition: the cake competition was one of the greatest things ever.