Things I Like

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.

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

The Sir David Attenborough That Lives In My Brain: Being smaller-than-average presents an added challenge to foraging ... but necessity is the mother of invention. A little creativity turns a baguette into a tool, and voilà--

(paper towel roll falls on my face)

Here's how that works:

say you get a text from your internet provider, let's say it's Comcast (whom i hate). So you have this text that says it's from Comcast about your bill with a contact number and a clickable link -- could be real, could be a scam.

Don't touch anything about this text. Open a web browser and look up the customer service number for Comcast. Or get the number from the bill they send you. However you do it, get the contact info for Comcast from a trusted source, like an official phone directory or the Comcast website itself.

Get in touch with them using that information.

So. Let's run the example both ways it could go.

If it IS a scam: you reach out to Comcast and tell them you were contacted about a problem with your bill, they look you up in their customer database, and they tell you there is no problem with your bill.

If it's NOT a scam, you do the same thing, they look you up, and they explain the problem. In this case, neither Comcast nor the employees involved give a single shit whether or not you clicked the link in the text vs. going through their official website.

This works the same for the your bank, the IRS, Amazon, political causes, charities, everything.

If it's not scam they'll be like sure, here's the reference number. Then you follow the instructions above, call the separate number you find yourself on a reputable website and give that person the reference number. And they'll help you resolve the issue.

But mortal hands build clever tools, and these last few hundred years I have lived in dread that they will break this, my sacred stone, the last link that preserves me, a faint shadow of a forgotten god. While my sacred stone stands, I do not, quite, fade away.

I am in a park, now, clipped and tamed, my forests long gone. But they landscape around me and my stone, admiring its beauty, so I do not complain. While they take pleasure in the stone, I am safe.

There is a playground a few lengths away, and the laughter and happy shrieking rouse me a little from my sleep. I watched over children, once. It’s nice to hear them again.

But I don’t truly awaken until the Offering is made.

Little hands touch my stone, with curiosity and a sort of reverence that only the very young feel now. For a child young enough the world is still a mystery, and even an ancient granite stone provokes wonder. So I stir, when she touches the stone, becoming hazily aware.

And then, solemnly, the child places a tiny colourful object in the roughly shaped alcove in the stone’s side, the place where offerings were laid two thousand years ago and more, and I awaken. Many people have put things in that alcove, of course… to take pictures, usually, these days, or putting a lost object where it will be seen. Merely to place an object in the alcove isn’t enough. A true offering is given as a gift, with intent.

As this is.

In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

that way we know we’re from tumblr without revealing anything

I’m just going to say this to strangers until i find a tumblr person

must keep reblogering!! Im going to be so suspicious if any one tells me this now!

Remember the answer is: I stole them from the president.