Lestat's Sizequeen

A pair of progressive Democrats unveiled a bill on Tuesday that would raise the federal minimum wage to $25 per hour, considered the bare minimum a single adult needs to meet the cost of living in much of the US. The Living Wage For All Act is the first bill to be introduced by the newly sworn-in Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), who won a special election earlier this month after helping to lead the fight for a $15 minimum wage in her home state of New Jersey. Citing data from MIT's Living Wage Calculator, the Living Wage For All campaign backing the legislation argues that $25/hour is needed for a single adult in most parts of the country to afford basic necessities like housing, food, and healthcare. As the cost of living has skyrocketed over the past decade and a half, the federal minimum wage has remained frozen at $7.25 and hour since 2009.

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

At the same time, it advances claims that attempt to forcibly redefine identity through crude, low-grade distinctions—assertions such as “there is no such thing as an ethnoreligion” or "you cannot be born into a religion." Of course, no actual anthropologist would take these claims even remotely seriously.

Anthropology, by contrast, studies precisely the relationships among categories like ethnicity, religion, nation, and tribe—categories that are historically complex, internally variable, and context-dependent—while also taking seriously the perspectives and epistemic validity of the people it studies.

Antizionism flattens these complexities into rigid formulas in order to deny Jews the capacity to define themselves. It really is a crackpot pseudo-anthropology used to objectify and do violence to Jews."

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”-Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth’s Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation).

Nissim Vaturi (Deputy Speaker of Knesset, Likud Party): Stated in February 2025 that "all adults in Gaza should be killed" and that "[Palestinians] are scum, no one in the world wants them. The children and women need to be separated and the adults in Gaza eliminated".

Amihai Eliyahu (Heritage Minister): Suggested that dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza was "one of the possibilities".

Aharon Haliva (Retired Major General): Reportedly said, "for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn't matter now if they are children". 

It’s the fact that we’ve seen Lestat bite a woman’s inner thigh, carry a woman in his arms, choose a woman groupie for his “vodka bottle” and multiple shots of Baby Jenks…

Lack of Loustat aside, why is the promo centering Lestat and white women specifically?

Yes, we’ve seen him with his arm around Dee Pharma, but only in a seemingly platonic way.

my favorites:

Daniel JrStetch (fitness)

Frilancy Hoyle (fashion)

EarthtonesGirl (knitting)

https://youtube.com/@reesewaters?si=OOV1cQllMSoYhKx_

TL Yarn Crafts (crochet)

Charm City Ewenicorns (knitting)

1. request--the thing you're begging for. let me cum, don't spank me, get me pregnant, etc. be descriptive--usually, the more explicit, the better. make it sound appealing to your partner. refer to them by title (if applicable) in this step or the third step. not both.

2. promise--why they should do it. this can include descriptions of how whatever you're asking for will feel for them, how you'll react, or a promise for good behavior or quid pro quos. (in noncon scenes, this is also where you'd put a promise not to tell anyone/get the aggressor in trouble). this should be your longest section, and you CAN give more than one reason.

3. request--rephrase what you asked for in step 1. if step 1 was short, make this longer. if step 1 was long, make it shorter. this is the step where eye contact is most important.

in general, use a deferential, beseeching tone--you can choose how composed to keep it, but keep an undercurrent of "i'll die if you say no." (alternatively, you can lean into the humiliation of verbalizing your desires and speak soft and stuttery. but be warned, you'll run the risk of your dom making you repeat yourself louder.)

wait

wait fuck

It has some genuinely fascinating stuff to say about gender, and I feel like it's worth looking at/thinking about in the context of Historical Gender Stuff. This 100 year old book has the following to say:

"The truth is that some young gentlemen would rather they had been born young ladies: they cannot admit this openly, because in the male world to confess as much would lead to instant ostracism if not worse; but they cannot conceal it either, and by preferring the company of girls, and soft, feminine clothing, and by flinching during the rough pursuits to which all boys, willing or no, are occasionally heirs, they attract opprobrium."

"Such boys weep too readily for their fellows' tastes - weeping is a great crime among boys unless it is generally admitted that circumstances left little choice - and are hounded for that reason."

"Just as there are girls who had rather been boys - we all know examples of the type - there are boys who, in a kinder world, would have been born into the gender more suited to their dispositions."

"Many young people of this sort are riven with a guilt they do not deserve but have been forced, by the conventions of society, to adopt; they are confused, ashamed and thoroughly unhappy."

"The ideal thing to do would be to treat these cases on their merits, send them to girls' schools, and so on. (The same thing should happen with those girls who would rather be young gentlemen.) Boys of this sort are girls in any case-in all respects save one."

For something like computers, this looks like how pricey "gAmiNG" laptops look all fancy but fall apart in about the same timeframe as the lower end laptops for students. But if you've ever handled the sort of laptops for banks or businesses, you'd wonder why laptops can't all be like this. People swear by Lenovo Thinkpads for a reason. Dell's Latitude (general productivity) and Precision (has the power of a gaming laptop but far less bs) lines, HP's probooks, all feel really nice and last for-fucking-ever. But you can't buy them in a store even if you wanted one.

So the trick is to buy what big organizations are buying, but you likely gotta get 'em secondhand when the orgs are done with them. For basic clothes, mil surplus might be a good port of call, for technology see an e-waste recycler or sometimes government auction (you just gotta know what to ask for; ThinkPads, Dell Latitude/Precision, HP Probook/Zbook). Otherwise try to thrift old, pre-enshitification items. The blanket I had as a kid is still going strong and has lived to bury multiple sets of newer bedding (which have worn thin and torn). Kitchen items, see if you can shop at a restaurant supplier.

Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!

I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs) 

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!

As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)

New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!

Read banned books!

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

Article 1 | Article 2 | Addameer

Reading through these articles by Al Jazeera and the HRW had my heart stop cold. Not only do military trials of Palestinians have a 96% conviction rate and prisons full of horrible, torturous conditions, but now there's this. Just vile. Please give the articles a read if you've the time. There's more out there as well.

Article 1 | Article 2 | Addameer

Reading through these articles by Al Jazeera and the HRW had my heart stop cold. Not only do military trials of Palestinians have a 96% conviction rate and prisons full of horrible, torturous conditions, but now there's this. Just vile. Please give the articles a read if you've the time. There's more out there as well.