Taliabear

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

I was watching Starships, as you do, and had the thought that surely someone must have made a similar style fanvid for horses.

Many fruitless searches later, I found myself here.

Including the Sam Adam's Taproom. Whose only job is to HAVE BEER.

I've entered the final phase of my graduate degree program in Folklore and Ethnology. My coursework and fieldwork/data collection complete, I am now in the process of writing my thesis during this summer trimester.

As planned, the support so many of you so generously provided, in addition to an education stipend I earned through environmental work, enabled me to enroll in and attend courses in my program, afford housing, and generally live everyday as a student for the duration of my course modules.

The funds lasted exactly as long as planned (literally to the day, I couldn't believe it lol!), and I could not be more grateful for every cent and word of support I received over this last year and a half.

In the final leg of my program, I must ask for support of one final need: There are quite a few books I need which I cannot access through my university, from friends and classmates, my professors, online archives & epublications, or any other means. Some are difficult to find in the first place to be able to purchase at all.

Put simply: I need some help buying books!

Many of them have Ebook editions for as little as €15,00! Others I have to actually email the authors and ask for personal PDFs, but they still aren't too expensive.

I began a new job recently and am on my way, but I won't have the couple hundred euro it will ultimately cost to purchase all of these books this month in order to have them while I work on my thesis.

Two limits! You can have a maximum of 4,096,000 characters in 1 [one] tumblr post. I would work out how many combinations this is, but 26^6,000 is already considered to be "Infinity" by most calculators, and a program I wrote threw an error code.

26^95,000 is already over 134,000 characters long - which would take 33 different text blocks to convey via tumblr. Whenever somebody says we're running out of posts, don't forget that tumblr is needlessly designed for MASSIVE amounts of information [no matter how detrimental it may be for mobile phones].

Though I'm not certain if that character count includes spaces, unfortunately, as I got that figure by googling "how many letters are in lord of the rings" and came upon a TikTok that counted the number of letter characters in LotR in order to figure out how many Spaghettios cans would be needed to re-write the entire thing, if one were to cut and paste each individual letter from the cans blackmail-letter style.

For those curious, the numbers are 2,261,081 letters in LotR, which calculates out to 8,795 cans of Spaghettios needed, which would cost about $12,225.

So, those are the theoretical limits, yeah. But in practice, the editor is not even close to be optimized to handle these kinds of huge posts: there is a point, far far away from the size of the lord of the rings, that your browser would just crash.

So if you are planning to post long fanfiction, or anything, you better work on something that's optimized for long form (locally, or some alternative to Google docs) and then post in chunks.

For the first post (first book only) there was no issue. Edit loaded, I could add the tag, press Save and done. Note: this was on a PC using Chrome

For the second post (all three books) it worked the same way as the API. I could load up the page and edit it, but when pressing save I'd get an error message. However the edit did go through actually and the tag is now there.

Haven't tried to edit the text itself, but don't think it would make a difference - if your browser can load it'd just work.

(On mobile on a low/mid-range Android the App could open up the post without problems, but haven't tried editing. Using a mobile browser - Firefox in my case - the page could load but it was super slow, and buggy, and it also did crash once)

Also as a public service announcement: if you want to filter the post out from your dash the tag is #full-lotr-test

I'm a proud black trans boy!!! ♥️🖤⚜️🖤♥️

Every now and then a difficult period like this comes along: so it's time to request some assistance.

I've kind of been neglecting my vision for the past year or so, aware that I needed new glasses (and to go have a consult for possible eye-related surgery), but putting it off... and now the situation has, as it were, come home to roost.

The other day, when I was typing something and then (to check it before posting) had to pick up the Mac and hold it up to my nose to see what I'd typed... I realized that if this went on much longer, even with dictation (because after you dictate, you still have to edit...), I wouldn't be able to write.

That would be bad.

I need to go see my Eye Lady, get examined, and get both sets of glasses re-fitted with new prescriptions. This—as usual, each time it needs to be done every year and a half or two years, due to Weird Eyes—is going to run into a low-four-figure-ish kind of money. And due to other recent unexpected medical expenses, right now there's not enough dosh around (or spondoolicks or whatever term you prefer...) to get things sorted.

Therefore: can I get people interested in keeping a writer, you know, writing (as I've got three novels working at once at the moment...), to consider doing one of these things?

(a) Go over to Ebooks Direct and buy a book. (Or a bundle. Or a gift card for somebody else who might like my work.) And if you do: thanks so much!

(b) Stop by my Ko-Fi and drop a little something in the pot. It'll be most appreciated.

And if you can't do either of the above:

(c) Reblog this and let other people see it?