Pickles R Us

The Green Place was around them all along, and it takes this long, cyclical journey to understand that, both for them and for the audience. The circular narrative structure is an absolute work of genius, and the fact that the entire plot can be boiled down to “they leave and come back” is an indication of how well this works as an action movie - that the plot is simple enough so everyone can understand what’s going on while explosions are going off and cars are racing past at 100mph - yet it’s still incredibly rich and wonderfully complex too.

“Now type out your work experience, even though you just fucking uploaded your resumé”

“While you’re at it, type out your education too, even though it’s on the fucking resumé as well”

“When people read erotic symbols into my paintings they’re really talking about their own affairs,” O’Keeffe said. Still, the sexualized misconceptions of her work devastated her. “I almost wept,” she wrote of one review in 1921.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/59249/

she also loved painting landscapes, and was particularly inspired by desert landscapes in new mexico:

she also painted bones, particularly skulls. like flowers, she was inspired by the abstract shapes that bones make:

her artwork is extremely cool and she deserves to have a legacy other than “flowers”

beautiful

modern

colorful

and aid in the movie’s storytelling in a way the costume design of the other nominated movies simply does not.

again, Black Panther deserves to win the Oscar for Costume Design and Ms. Ruth E. Carter deserves so much praise for the beautiful masterpieces she created

Man: talks

me, an aged monarch lounging on my fur-strewn throne, gesturing for my servant to bring me my monacle: Bring them here! Bring them here, I say. Let me look at them.

guards: *drag the unwitting blog before me*

me, peering intently at the new blog and poking them with my scepter: Is this a real person? Hmm? What have you to say for yourself? What are your fandoms? Your interests? Speak up, these old ears aren’t what they used to be.

guards, tentatively: they do seem to be a real person, sire. We found them in possession of several memes and a fandom rant.

It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.  

There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.

Google BetaBooks. Do it now. It’s the best damn thing EVER.

You just upload your manuscript, write out some questions for your beta readers to answer in each chapter, and invite readers to check out your book!

It’s SO easy!

You can even track your readers! It tells you when they last read, and what chapter they read!

Your beta readers can even highlight and react to the text!!!

There’s also this thing where you can search the website for available readers best suited for YOUR book!

This past weekend, Forbes published and then took down a controversial article. “This article was outside of this contributor’s specific area of expertise, and has since been removed,” said Forbes, after significant backlash. The article in question? An op-ed arguing that libraries are a waste of taxpayer money and should be replaced by Amazon stores.

Libraries do seem to be outside of author Panos Mourdoukoutas’s areas of expertise; he’s a professor who specializes in world economy. (A popular tweet suggested that Mourdoukoutas paid for the privilege to be published on Forbes, though it turned out to be an error; he’s a paid blogger for Forbes.) But both the article itself and the backlash against it point to a profound anxiety centered on libraries and the question of whether they should be up for debate.

If we take it as read that public libraries exist and are good and important, then we’re saying that the services they provide are basic rights that it is our government’s responsibility to safeguard. If we suggest that libraries shouldn’t exist — that they’re a waste — then we call into question the rights that they protect.

Enter Mourdoukoutas’s now-deleted op-ed, whose central thrust was that the roles traditionally performed by libraries — lending books, of course, but also serving as community gathering places — are now performed better by “third places” like Starbucks and bookstore-cafes. And since Amazon’s brick-and-mortar bookstores are equipped with easy access to the comprehensive Amazon database of books around the world, the article concluded, Amazon bookstore-cafes are superior to libraries.

Many people might read this argument and protest, “But I must pay for books at Amazon! At a public library, I may borrow for free!” Mourdoukoutas had a comeback. “Let me clarify something,” he wrote on Twitter. “Local libraries aren’t free. Home owners must pay a local library tax. My bill is $495/year.”

It is true that libraries are partially funded by property tax dollars, in much the same way that taxpayers fund the other public services that we as a society have decided are vital to the public good, like schools and fire departments and parks and roadworks. I may not have children who attend school, but I still pay tax dollars toward the public school system, because we have agreed that when all children are educated, it’s good for the whole country.

What Mourdoukoutas was trying to debate was not whether libraries are “a good buy” (by and large they are, especially if you don’t have lots of very valuable property to pay taxes on), but whether making library services available to the public is good for the whole country. He was putting into question the library’s status as a public good.

Libraries are designed to serve the public. Amazon is designed to maximize its profits.

Libraries are funded by the public in order to serve the public. They offer books, movies, and music curated to entertain and inform the public, with more available through interlibrary loan. They offer internet access and low-cost printing services. They offer financial literacy training and job search assistance. They serve non-English-speaking immigrants. They serve incarcerated people and homeless people and housebound people.

Libraries do all of this because we as a society have decided that we should put our tax dollars toward a resource that offers the public education and entertainment, and that sees serving our most vulnerable populations as part of its mission. We have decided that doing so is part of the public good.

An Amazon bookstore-cafe is funded by an enormous corporation for the purpose of maximizing its profits. It is stocked with books selected by algorithms, with most of its stock made up of recent best-sellers and books that Amazon has been successful at selling online, along with various Amazon electronic devices. Educating the public is not Amazon’s priority. It is not designed to serve vulnerable populations. There is no reason it would be designed with that purpose in mind: Amazon is a business, not a public utility, and its only goal is to make money.