don’t make a promise you can’t keep

being too parasocial about celebrities was bad enough, but that is the guy running the government. her job is writing laws. they are not your blorbos! you gave them political power to protect your interests, not entertain you, and if they treat power like theater, you should be super suspicious of that!

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People started saying the most aggro, edgelord shit at the drop of a hat, and if anyone pointed out how shitty it was, the culprit would immediately turn around and claim they were being tone policed. The levels of toxicity this resulted in were through the fucking roof, and the result was multiple left-wing online communities fostering the presence of utterly vile trolls because any attempt to curtail them was met with a combination of defensive retreat into marginalization ("Oh, so [members of X marginalized group] aren't allowed to be angry?" "You wouldn't blink an EYE if a cishet white man said the same thing!") and a lambasting dogpile on whoever had dared to point out their bad behaviour. This reached a fever-pitch in around 2014, at which point a bunch of shit happened that collapsed the established troll ecosystems across various online fronts. Since then, things have calmed down somewhat, but the impulse towards treating "hey, stop being an asshole" as a species of microaggression remained, such that it has now metastasized into - or at least significantly contributed to - the "UWU I am a Smol Bean 26yo minor and therefore I can't be held accountable for anything I say or do because I'm PRACTICALLY a CHILD" phenomenon. At base, what all this bullshit ultimately reflects is the desire of a certain type of person to act like an asshole without consequence, which in left-wing spaces is achieved one of two ways: either by situating their target as having more privilege than them, such that they're fair game to abuse (because if they don't take the personal attacks or scathing denunciations of the entire category of person to which they belong in "good humour," then they're proving themselves to be one of the bad ones); or by situating themselves as having a unique right to never ever be criticized or held to account (because they're marginalized or disabled or having a mental health crisis or a MINOR, YOU GUYS and making them feel bad about the shitty things they said is basically abusive).

Some silly sketches from tonight's drawing livestream! Again, lovely talking with y'all!

That's polltrek.tumblr.com!!!!!! @polltrek

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book