#how to get past a paywall of a book

[florasstudyjournal]

paywalls are the ENEMY oh my god (how do y'all find book chapters that are behind paywalls/you don't have access to?)

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Good Omens graphic novel update: December 2024

We promised a graphic novel treat for December to send off 2024, which we have at the end of the update, so let's dive in!

Colleen has been working diligently ahead of the graphic novel going to print next month, which she discussed over on Patreon. For those looking for more behind the scenes on both Good Omens and Colleen's work more broadly, we recommend either following her Substack, or subscribing via Patreon, as she approaches the finish line.

A snapshot from our production HQ where dummy books of the graphic novel, slipcase and other editions of Good Omens have been arriving thick and fast. The graphic novel (slipcased version shown) has quite the heft to it. It's going to be such a magnificent object inside and out.

Here, we're testing out the various papers, finishes, embellishments and more – everything is falling into place!

Merch-wise, some more delights. The A.Z. Fell & Co tote bag design is in, one side in celebration of our favourite angelic bookseller, the other as if it's been purchased from the bookshop itself, so you can take your pick.

We've got more pins that will be available in the 3-pin set add ons. While the full list will be available in 2025, we're happy to share a few more to get excited about:

On the trading card front, have a look at some of the base deck designs by Steve Gregson and Kirsty Hunter in situ as this all comes together rather nicely, and causes a heated game or two behind the scenes.

And, a quick admin note to wrap up that we always recommend checking the FAQ page as a first port of call for any queries. If you have questions tied to specific tiers, we'd suggest checking the last few updates if your answer can't be found on the FAQ. If there is any information required for your pledge, we will be in touch. We will be back at full steam in the New Year!

Thank you.

So, to wrap up this year's updates, we give you the draft of the full first scene of the graphic novel, artwork by Colleen Doran and lettering by Lois Buhalis. If you'd like to wait until the graphic novel publishes in Spring, skip everything after the ducks!

To 2025 🥂

Until next time.

+ post from Colleen Doran:

Good Omens: You Get...Stuff Like This

In the most recent Good Omens update at the Kickstarter, a few people got upset at the suggestion that you have to get past my paywall here to see Good Omens updates.

Except you really don't, and the post doesn't actually say you do. You get a bit more, like pics of my studio, a discussion of tools and process - but not all of that is exclusively about Good Omens.

I think the Dunmanifestin team just wanted to draw a little attention to my blogs and other works, for which I am very grateful.

As my Patreon supporters already know, Good Omens info posted here gets to the Substack and Kickstarter eventually. And since most of my posts here aren't just about Good Omens, but my other projects and personal stuff, as well as links to our weekly Virtual Art Studio sessions, I think I'm justified in keeping that material behind a paywall.

In fact, I don't think I've posted much stuff about Good Omens since the summer: pages of flats like the one you see above, a few studio photos, and color tweaks.

Also, me boo-hooing about my nerves and health.

But for those who feel left out missing even this small amount of stuff, then the screen shot above is for you.

That's called a flat.

It's a prelim color before adding final color.

Here's what the final color looks like.

So I've posted a handful of this sort of thing since this summer, but frankly, there's even more of my sketches and so on posted at my Instagram that aren't here at all.

For those who don't know, I am doing most of the color myself on the book, but I am working with assistants. I'm not sure how much the Dunmanifestin team wants out there before the big reveals, but here's a snippet of a sky.

In the first image, my flat color.

And after my assistant worked on it.

Here, I've done a repaint. Sometimes I do very extensive repaints after the assistant works on a page. Sometimes not so much. I didn't use assistants on many pages at all. About 80% of the labor on the color of the book is my work.

However, the assistants have been a big help, and I am very appreciative of them.

I will make a point to go through all my prior posts and get every single bit of art that you haven't seen and make it public for all of you in the coming weeks. I need to excise it from previous posts. As I respect the privacy of all my readers, I never make prior posts public without their permission as they may not want their comments or identities to be public.

Thanks so much for everything!

[valdevia]

Hi, I love your works!! I was wondering where you find the original, unedited pictures you use for your art? Do you take them yourself or find them online?

Hey there! I get them from many different sources! Whenever I can I use my own, and sometimes my followers send me cool pics to use (or put them up in the Sacrificial Altar channel in my Discord), but I find most of what I use through public domain sources online!

For the online part, I put this little list together with some of the common resources I use! Feel free to share it around and copy it:

For an easier experience, I'll copy the relevant part below:

STOCK SITES

- Unsplash: Usually the best quality out of the free stock sites. They’ll try to sell you a subscription plan but you can ignore that.

- Adobe Stock: Select “Free” on the dropdown menu next to the search bar. The free image selection here is big and high-quality, though they feel more like stock pictures than natural photos. Note: They limit how many pictures you can download per account per day, but you can make several accounts to circumvent this if you use it a lot.

- Texturelabs: lots of free, very high-quality textures!

- Pexels: Similar to Unsplash, but it has more pictures with people. If you need a photo with models, this is usually the best place.

- Pixabay: Widest selection, but worst quality control. Go here if you haven’t found anything in other sites and don’t mind sifting through a bunch of garbage pics and occasional AI images.

PUBLIC DOMAIN SOURCES

- Wikimedia Commons: an enormous selection of CC and public domain pictures. Super useful, especially for the really specific images that you'd expect to find on a Wikipedia article. Always check the copyright conditions! To filter by license, search something and then click on the License dropdown under the search bar. Select “No restrictions” for public domain images.

- Picryl: A repository of public domain sources, ranging from ancient historical books and artifacts to fairly modern pictures. If you're looking for something old/historical, chances are it's here! This website is probably one of the most complicated ones to use, so here are three important tips before you use it:

This site added a paywall that appears after the 3rd page of search results. To remove it, install uBlock Origin, go to the “My Filters” page (clicking on the gear icon after opening the extension), and paste this filter: picryl.com##._9oJ0c2

After searching, use the timeline on the top right to narrow down the result by year.

It won’t let you download the full picture without paying, but it always has a link to the source site below the description. Click on that, then copy-paste the image’s name to find it in the original source. That way you can get it for free, and often in better quality than Picryl offers.

National Archives Catalog, The Library of Congress, NASA, and Europeana have wide selections, but they are included in Picryl so it’s usually better to search there and then download them in the source as mentioned above!

- Flickr Search: a ton of usable pictures with a generally more amateur feel, just remember to filter by license using the “Any license” dropdown menu. When you find an image, make sure to check its specific license (you can find it below the image, on the right side).

- Openverse: The official Creative Commons archive, has many sources! Includes other sites on this list, but has a lot of clutter if you don’t filter.

- iNaturalist: a repository of user-submitted images of animals, plants, and fungi. Look for a genus or species, then navigate to the photo list and filter by license.

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

- The Met: An amazing selection of artifacts from all over the world, with top quality photographs of most of them (usually with several angles for each). You can filter images by material, location, and era.

- Getty Museum: Another smaller selection of museum pieces, but this one includes old photos as well as artifacts. You can also filter by dates, materials and cultures. Make sure you include the “Open Content” filter to only see public domain things!

- Smithsonian: Big selection of around 5 million museum pieces, with some 3D scans of museum pieces. Most pieces just have a single picture that can sometimes be low quality, but pieces with 3D models sometimes also include a lot of high quality photos from multiple angles. This collection also includes things from museums of natural history, so you can also use it to search for bones and specimens.

- Artvee: public domain classical art. They make you pay to download high-quality images.

If you guys got any others, please let me know and I'll add them to the collection!

[archivlibrarianist]

"Bots on the internet are nothing new, but a sea change has occurred over the past year. For the past 25 years, anyone running a web server knew that the bulk of traffic was one sort of bot or another. There was googlebot, which was quite polite, and everyone learned to feed it - otherwise no one would ever find the delicious treats we were trying to give away. There were lots of search engine crawlers working to develop this or that service. You'd get 'script kiddies' trying thousands of prepackaged exploits. A server secured and patched by a reasonably competent technologist would have no difficulty ignoring these.

"...The surge of AI bots has hit Open Access sites particularly hard, as their mission conflicts with the need to block bots. Consider that Internet Archive can no longer save snapshots of one of the best open-access publishers, MIT Press, because of cloudflare blocking. Who know how many books will be lost this way?  Or consider that the bots took down OAPEN, the worlds most important repository of Scholarly OA books, for a day or two. That's 34,000 books that AI 'checked out' for two days. Or recent outages at Project Gutenberg, which serves 2 million dynamic pages and a half million downloads per day. That's hundreds of thousands of downloads blocked! The link checker at doab-check.ebookfoundation.org (a project I worked on for OAPEN) is now showing 1,534 books that are unreachable due to 'too many requests.' That's 1,534 books that AI has stolen from us! And it's getting worse.

"...The thing that gets me REALLY mad is how unnecessary this carnage is. Project Gutenberg makes all its content available with one click on a file in its feeds directory. OAPEN makes all its books available via an API. There's no need to make a million requests to get this stuff!! Who (or what) is programming these idiot scraping bots? Have they never heard of a sitemap??? Are they summer interns using ChatGPT to write all their code? Who gave them infinite memory, CPUs and bandwidth to run these monstrosities? (Don't answer.)

"We are headed for a world in which all good information is locked up behind secure registration barriers and paywalls, and it won't be to make money, it will be for survival. Captchas will only be solvable by advanced AIs and only the wealthy will be able to use internet libraries."

[reality-warp]

A word from Rella concerning AI, binding and selling fics, and Book 3 of Rávamë's Bane

Hey folks,

I’m treating this post as a bit of a blanket PSA for all those who read my work and follow me here, but I’ll also be copying the message over to AO3 once Book 3 of Rávamë's Bane goes up. Before anyone gets spooked, all is well, I am well, and I’m still happily working on the first 5 chapters of Amabilis Insania. However there are a few glaring subjects that have sprung up in the fandom space that I can’t really ignore. The fanfic community as a whole has changed a lot in the past decade I've been part of it, and given some of the unpleasant stuff I’ve seen going on in just the past year, I wanted to cover some housekeeping points ahead of posting the next RB book.

1.) Please don’t ever bind and sell fanfics.  Profiting from fanfiction in any way is completely illegal, and puts the entire community at risk.  I’m lucky enough that I’m a relatively small fish in the fanfic pond, so no one has sold bound copies of my story specifically (that I know of). However, I know several folks who have had their work bound and sold without their knowledge, and have had to take their fics down completely to stop it happening (which royally sucks). If you see any fanfics being sold on sites like Etsy, please do report them — they are absolutely not supposed to be there. And if you want a bound copy of a fic for personal use, I'd really encourage you to learn to bind them yourself. There's a tonne of tutorials out there, it’s pretty fun and easy to learn (I picked it up in a couple of weeks) and it doesn’t take as many materials as you’d imagine. Side note: I have made typesets of LM and CM for myself and friends, but honestly, I’m reluctant to share them publicly now given all the above. That said, if you really want a copy of LM or CM for personal use only, you can message me directly on Tumblr and I can maybe look into making a watermarked version to share on request.

2.) In light of the recent news that AO3 was scraped to create a generative AI dataset, I’ve decided I’ll only be posting the final RB book to AO3 from now on. On top of that, all my fics will be restricted to users with AO3 accounts only. I really don’t want to do this as it cuts off guest users from enjoying the story too, but for now it’s the only way to protect my work from being scrapped again. I don’t believe this will be a one-time occurrence given how carelessly AI is being used right now, and I feel very strongly that no one’s work should be used in model training without their consent.

The vast majority of you in my comments, asks and kudos are genuinely wonderful, and I’m so damned grateful that you aren’t a part of the issues above. However, with all that in mind, let me be absolutely clear just for the public record…

!!TRLD: This Is The Important Bit!! You do not, and will never have my consent to: - use any of my writing in generative AI (this includes making AI-generated fanworks, or scraping my fics for training AI models) - bind and sell any of my fanfics (profiting from fanfiction is completely illegal, and puts it at risk for us all)  - profit in any way from any of my work that I have publicly shared online (this includes putting my fics on recommendation lists behind paywalls, or selling my fics in the form of typesets or bound copies)

If you do any variation of the above despite knowing the risk it poses to the entire fanfic community, I respectfully hope you spend the rest of your life in clothes that smell damp no matter how much you run them through the dryer.

To the rest of you; a genuine thank you for making the community what it is. And thank you for making the RB comments section specifically such a joyful place to be.

I promise my next post/update will be less grim.

Until then,

Rella x

Edit: Since I literally just had to deal with this happening just earlier today 🙄 You also do not and never will have my consent to:

- advertise any generative AI apps in my review/comments section (Seriously? I firmly believe that generative AI has no place in the writing and publishing world, and more often than not, using it makes you both worse at writing and is no better than stealing from people who took the time to learn to do it well. Keep all that trash out of my comments section.)

[bilightningwriter-writing]

Working on getting past writer's block for Chapter One of Celestia+Melanie's story. So while I do, how about a vote for the drabble? These are all in the past, before the events of the story, so it's a 50-50 whether or not some of these will make it into the actual book. But I still want to write them, so here we are.

Whichever wins will be here on Tumblr/free access. The rest I'll either write for myself or put on my Patreon+Ko-fi paywall. I feel bad doing that, but at the same time, I need to have something to put over there. Especially with maybe not being able to work anymore/shifting to less hours in my current job because of disability.

[email-me-more]

Reedsy Editor - no longer free.

Reedsy Book Editor - the editing program I use for outlining, editing and keeping track of everything from characters, locations, lore, offhanded details and detailed overarching plotlines in all my writing - just overnight changed everything from a free service, into a tiered paid premium subscription, WITH NO WARNING WHATSOEVER.

Naturally, they have some stuff that is the "free tier"; and if they had given any warning - even if it was some vague email the day before implementing this - this wouldn't be as infuriating, but I suppose that was just asking too much?

Why give me a chance consider it, when they could just lock my work behind a paywall, and then refuse to even let me LOOK at my own notes?

What they've done is market themselves as a free service that will implement unspecified 'future premium features', and I quote their website directly:

"Is Studio free to use?: Yes! Reedsy Studio is currently 100% free. There will be premium features available for purchase in the future, but they are optional. Every functionality that you need to write a book in Reedsy Studio will remain free."

They then locked most of my stuff behind a paid premium, without ever hinting at their *already free* features being those 'optional premium features available for purchase'. Once again, no warning what-so-ever.

Not only have they now essentially locked my stuff behind a premium of 4.99 USD a month, oh no, they've been so kind as to lock the sole reasons I ever started using them for it's sheer convenience, the unlimited storyboards and pinned notes, behind a 7.99 USD add-on tier. Interestingly enough, they've split their features into two tiers, so if you want the full functionality that was free as late as yesterday, - such as statistics, goals or pinned notes - well, then you have to subscribe to both tiers.

Which means, I will now have a 7-day free trial to get all my stuff out of there, unless I want to start paying for another goddamn subscription fee.

I'm not all that happy to be strongarmed into a paid subcription, and I certainly don't trust that they won't just randomly hike the pricing or change the features included in the paid tiers in future, if this is how they implement it to begin with.

It's so blatantly obvious they've made this shift after receiving positive feedback from users, because I am wholly unsurprised that the *very same features* that made Reedsy Studio into one of the more easy-to-recommend programs (pinned notes, storyboarding, boards) have been locked behind the most expensive add-on tier. And I know a lot of people love their statistics and goals features aswell, although I personally don't use it, so them being behind a paywall too doesn't surprise me either.

I'm not a fan of paid subscriptions, but in the past I have paid for services I deemed important enough to keep around, because I liked the program or the convenience of it. Key difference: I was made aware of the changes before they were implemented.

What I refuse to do however - no matter how good their editor is or how comfortable I am using it - is to pay to be given back my access to months upon months of my own work like this.

I'm extremely disappointed in how they went about implementing this change, it's shameful.

I will be using my 7-day free trial to get my writing out of there, and then never use Reedsy again.

[the-most-humble-blog]

WHY SO MANY CELEBS WANT YOU TO SEE THEIR VA-JAY-JAYS NOW (Or: How the Sex Tape Era Killed the Myth of Female Modesty)

There was a time when we believed the lie. The one that said:

“Women don’t want to be seen. They want to be protected. Preserved. Hidden away like virtue in cotton lace.”

The patriarchy fed us that story — wrapped it in etiquette books, school dress codes, and sitcom moms who winced at cleavage like it caused migraines.

They told us modesty was sacred. That if a woman showed you her body, it meant she was broken, desperate, or paid.

They were wrong.

Then came the Kardashian sex tape.

And everything changed.

🔥 Let’s call it what it was:

A high-production psychosexual transmission disguised as a scandal but engineered as a blueprint.

Not for porn. But for the power of being watched.

Because whether you liked it or not, whether you judged her or not — you watched.

You talked. You clicked. You learned, subconsciously:

“Wait… she’s not ashamed. She’s in charge.”

And millions of women felt something twist inside them.

It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t judgment.

It was awakening.

💻 Fast forward: OnlyFans.

Now every “shy girl” from high school has a custom paywall, a lighting setup, and a waiting list of men who used to say she was too quiet to be hot.

And guess what?

She’s not bashful. She’s not broken. She’s not yours.

She’s performing her power — with her pussy front and center.

Because deep down, she always knew:

Being seen gets her off.

Not touched. Not sweet-talked. Not even kissed.

Watched.

That’s the real button.

🧠 You thought modesty was natural?

No.

It was just rehearsed suppression taught to girls who were never asked if maybe being visually desired was their first orgasm.

Because when a woman opens her legs on camera — and looks into the lens like it owes her money — that’s not humiliation.

That’s proof of design.

That’s her saying:

“My sex was never meant to hide. You just weren’t worthy of seeing it.”

📎 Let’s talk psychology.

Your partner — the “shy one”? The one who flinches when her bra strap shows in public?

She’ll ride you and finish when you stare directly at her pussy like it’s the center of your goddamn religion.

Because it is.

She wants to be looked at, not in passing — but like the gaze makes her real.

She wants her genitals witnessed, not rushed past. Not apologized for.

Seen.

And seen fully.

🤍 So why are celebs flashing skin now?

Why the upskirt shots, the sheer dresses, the labia-level bikini angles?

It’s not attention-seeking. It’s not accidental.

It’s reclamation.

They’re correcting a century-long lie that said:

“A good woman doesn’t want to be looked at like that.”

Except… many do.

Especially when it’s on their terms.

🛐 Female modesty was always a man’s fantasy.

A way to feel in control of a body he couldn’t decode.

He needed her to be bashful — so he could imagine her submission was “natural.”

He never asked her what actually made her wet.

He never realized it might be the fact that he was looking.

So here’s the truth:

They don’t want privacy. They want permission — to be seen the way they’ve always deserved to be.

And if that means using a sex tape, a camera, a stage, or a swipe?

They’ll do it.

Because modesty never turned them on. But the right audience always did.

🔁 CALL TO ACTION

👁 Reblog if you’ve ever gotten hard from being watched — or wet from being witnessed.

💦 Save this if you’ve ever wanted your partner to just look longer.

💬 Comment: “I wasn’t shy. I was sacred.”

📸 Tag someone who understands the power of being seen… and stared at.

[theoutcastrogue]

the internet is rotting, as Jonathan Zittrain noted in an important (but paywalled) 2021 Atlantic article. A huge percentage of the links on the internet are broken, and there is no single authoritative, accessible universal repository that keeps track of everything. It is frighteningly easy for crucial information to slip away. ...

The practice of making changes to an article without noting that you’ve made them is called “stealth editing,” and even the New York Times does it. ... The existence of stealth editing means that it’s difficult to trust that the version of an article you click on at any given moment is the article as it was originally published. ...

I also, to my alarm, realized just how dependent we are on private publications themselves to give us access to records of their own work. Often, they keep it payawalled behind locked gates and charge you admission if you want to have a look. There are lots of sources in the Chomsky book to which you have to subscribe if you want to verify, such as this 1999 story in the Los Angeles Times about NATO’s bombing of a bus in Yugoslavia. This is a story of national importance, far too overlooked at the time, but if you don’t subscribe to the LA Times, you need research library access or a workaround if you want to read it.

Thank God for the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine preserves as much of the internet as they can and is invaluable for researchers trying to figure out what was once housed at now-dead links. But the Internet Archive has its limits. Social media posts, YouTube videos, paywalled Substack posts, PDFs—all can be very difficult to track down after they disappear. If a politician tweets something embarrassing, for instance, and then deletes it, it might be preserved in a screenshot. But we know screenshots are easy to fake. So where do you turn to prove satisfactorily that something was in fact said? ...

it’s very easy to lose pieces of information that seem permanent. E-books, for instance, can be changed by their publisher without the changes even being noted. You might read a book on your Amazon Kindle one day and open it up the next day to look for a quote only to find that the quote has disappeared without a trace. The Guardian, for twenty years, hosted a copy of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people,” an important historical document. After the letter went viral on TikTok, the Guardian removed it from the site entirely. The New Republic did the same after an article of theirs about Pete Buttigieg caused controversy. The documents in question can still be found, but only by digging through the Internet Archive. If that ever goes down, researchers will find that trying to piece together the online past is like trying to learn about a lost civilization from excavated fragments. ...

I think that in an age where people (rightly) don’t trust the information they’re getting to be true, it needs to be as easy as possible to do research. Instead, while we have better technology than ever for sifting through information, it’s still the case that the truth is paywalled and the lies are free. If you want to “do your own research” to check on the veracity of claims, you will run headlong into a maze of broken links, paywalls, and pop-ups. How can anyone hope to find the truth when it’s so elusive, trapped behind so many toll gates? 

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

A possible last message from the mod?

Greetings, fellow Tumblrs.

As I said in my second-to-last post, it's getting ever harder for me to juggle this blog with my other tasks (professional, personal, and daily). I queue an average of 30 to 40 posts every day (for a few weeks I've been trying a 6x1 schedule but for long seven years it was daily), and it can eat up to four whole hours, no exaggeration. While I did open up a Ko-Fi and had some lovely people donate, the monetary return hasn't been nearly enough for the labour All The Brazilian Politics demands.

I love and am proud of what I do here. I feel I have a good critical eye to sift through reports about what happens in this country's political scene in order to spread quality and important information, and I feel I do something important. But I need to be honest: I'm a whole adult with quite a lot of responsibilities, and I don't think I'm at a point in my life in which a hobby can take so much of my time without any tangible, material return. There's been times I gave up on other activities and plans to spend the entire day here, and it hasn't been just a handful.

I suggested a book club in the last messages by the mod, but not enough people have taken interest. I've been cracking my head trying to think of alternatives, even talked to friends and my therapist (!) about it.

Straight to the point: my only options now are

1. Make the access to this blog's content paid; 2. Ending the blog

I won't delete shall I go for option 2, for I believe I have built a valuable archive here. But I'm afraid 4 hours of free labour almost every single day is not an option for my life anymore. I'm not sure how I'd make what (I know) is essentially paywalling the blog work. Maybe making it accessible only via a password? Maybe turning it into a newsletter (but. Like. 40 news per day, fellas. That'd be the longest newsletter ever)? I don't know just yet.

Before I go into full research mode for my options, I first need to know: would anyone be interested in subscribing for the content? I think I'd charge, like, R$ 20 or R$ 30 per month, or maybe even cheaper, but I'll need to charge something.

If I don't, and this is not clickbait, this might be my last post. I've been almost already grieving these past days, but this is my last attempt and hope.

Thanks for the attention and I apologize for anything.

Sadly,

Mod Nise da Silveira.

[explodingchantry]

hi sorry to come into your inbox for this but i just need. to gripe. every new bit of info we get about the new DA game is making me more and more preemptively tired lol. mostly the way it's looking like eeevery bit of lore that's been revealed has something to do with such and such book. or this comic over here. or this podcast from two years ago. or THIS podcast that is happening now that's a ~discord exclusive~. or this youtube series. or this random VA talk show. etc etc ad nauseam. i am so tired of videogames coming with HOMEWORK you're expected to do just to know what's going on

Please never apologise for sending messages!!

I think its honestly REALLY funny how bioware just doesn't know what it wants. On one hand they say that the new game is fine for newcomers, the way they did for dai, and use this as an excuse for how dumbed down some of the writing is - but then in the other hand the majority of the characters and plot beats have origins hidden behind pay walls.

It was already bad enough when, to understand each game properly you had to have paid for the previous one's dlc (want to know anders' past as a warden? Buy awakening! Want to know wtf is up with Morrigan and the eluvians? Buy witch hunt! Want to know who tf corypheus is and what hawke and varric even have to do with him? Buy legacy! Want to understand ANYTHING about veilguard? Play the descent AND trespasser, our epilogue that we hid behind a paywall!!!!!) and you know at least the dlcs were pretty good on their own so I could forgive it a little bit.

But there's so much extra media now omg I haven't touched a single one of the comics because I'm not rly into American comics, I've read almost all the books and some of them are genuinely fucking mid. And at least back in the day the books were more... Bonuses? You DONT need to read the stolen throne to understand anything on the games, but it's INTERESTING. it explores characters you mightve been curious about. I love that ! Or the last flight is really interesting, just, to see how the 4th blight was beaten, to get to know those legendary heroes, and know why griffons went extinct. A bit annoying because you do need to read it to also understand how the hell they're coming back - but it still feels a bit more like a bonus than a necessity.

But then we have asunder, which also in general just kinda sucks as a book, that is really really needed to understand the mage rebellion, Fiona, Cole, and the cure for tranquility. The characters will explain a lot of those things to you in game, but it leaves you with the certain feeling that you're missing something. It's a huge advertisement for asunder.

Similarly wicked eyes and wicked hearts is hollow if you haven't read the masked empire which is also my least favorite book because it's so damn fucking boring I literally never managed to finish it, but it's mostly because I hate Trick Weekes' writing lmfao. Gaider was wildly misogynistic but my god at least he was entertaining as a writer whenever he didn't butcher female characters.

That's two major plot beats in inquisition that require reading one of the books. And ofc it's major villain and another major plot beat that require having played the previous game's dlc to properly understand.

And since then we've had so much more. I don't know. It's just complicated because I *like* book characters showing up and the books having importance in the sense that, I like reading and I'm a lore nerd lol. But I think there's a lot of frustration to be had as to the sheer quantity of extra media you need to consume if you want to be invested in the story. Because you could say "well just don't buy them then" but I LIKE dragon age, it's story, and plot, but omg some of the books and comics are also so hard to find and so EXPENSIVE. I think tevinter nights costs like 20£ if you want it on paperback rather than Kindle, and don't get me started on the dozens of comics.

At least the podcasts and discord only content isn't nearly as offensive, imo, because they're free. But also there's another issue with all of this extra content - it's that it doesn't get fucking translated. Not often, anyway. Not in as many languages as the games do. That means there are many, many many many players and fans who are just not allowed to learn more about their favorite game series because they don't speak English, because theyre not rich enough to buy 10 books and 20 comics. It feels a bit wrong

[aloveofclaritea]

some fascinating sibling research for the sibling website:

When we think about the forces that shape us, we inevitably turn to parents. The parent-child relationship is the basis of probably half a millennium’s worth of psychoanalytic conversation and intellectual discourse; parenting books are perennial best sellers, with advice that fluctuates as often as the health advice on what to eat or drink and how much. Their whiplashing instructions don’t stop many parents from reading them, and who can blame those mothers and fathers: Children are baffling, variable, not that verbal — and parents also know that if they get it wrong, their kids will blame them for just about everything. And yet researchers, after analyzing thousands of twin studies, have come to the conclusion that the shared environment — the environment that siblings have in common, which includes parents — seems to do precious little to make fraternal twins particularly alike in many ways. They can be exposed to the same rules of oboe practice, dinnertime rituals, punishments, family values and parental harmony or discord, and none of it really matters in many key regards — siblings’ personalities may very well end up as different as those of any two strangers on the street. No one would argue that parenting doesn’t matter; it’s just that the choices so many loving parents agonize over — whether to co-sleep or not, whether to enforce the rules rigidly or sometimes let them go — don’t matter nearly as much as we imagine they do. Nor does that mean that genes are all-powerful; it’s just that nurture comprises so much more than parenting — the environmental effects a child is exposed to are vast, and include (just to start) the media they consume and the friends and teachers in whose company they spend most of the day. And then there are siblings. “I think the influence of siblings on each other is an area in psychology that has not nearly received the attention it deserves,” says Lisa Damour, a psychologist and author who writes about adolescence. “When we look at child development, our main frameworks have been around the influence of parents on children, and that’s the established tradition that we’ve had a hard time moving past.” Anyone raising more than one child, Damour says, or who has a sibling, intuitively knows that sibling relationships play a powerful role in affecting who we become. “If parents are the fixed stars in the child’s universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets nearby,” wrote Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, in a review of a book about siblings in 2011. A body of research has been growing in recent years that adds clarity and depth to our understanding of how significant the impact of siblings can be. Researchers have studied how siblings influence one another’s choices and life trajectories through competition; they have uncovered deeper knowledge of so-called spillover effects, the ripple effects of how one sibling’s experiences affect another’s; and they have brought rigor to bear on popular ideas about birth order. New tools of genetic research may challenge or sharpen previously held conceptions about siblings. The data set of families whose stories might shed light on some of these interactions is limitless, but one place to look is at siblings who have long fascinated me: those in families in which a surprising number of brothers and sisters have found their way to the top of the ladder of success. Some of the dynamics described in the research, in those families, might be borne out in the extreme. Siblings, at their best, can urge one another on; competing and collaborating — whether intentionally or not — they help chart the course of one another’s lives.

Full article without the paywall:

[ilajue]

i hope the entire internet collapses and we can finally be free I'm so serious I loathe the internet I need it gone I hate ai I hate chat gpt I hate google docs I hate using the computer for everyone of my godforsaken assignments 300 to 400 word reading response make a video or a podcast or a paper if you want to write a paper you need to jump through 100 little hoops to find peer reviewed sources that are actually reviewed and accessable I hate paywalls I had the commercialization of the internet I hate capitalism I hate that I could never go to school without a computer I hate that all my data is being collected and stolen I hate that I have to use google I hate blackboard I hate canva I hate google I hate Microsoft I hate the money I hate how much money the internet produces for the greedy freaks that run our godforsaken planet I hate it I'm so so tired and I wish that I had options I wish I could just get an assignment, write it up and submit it the next day I hate you 11:59 pm deadlines I hate schoology I hate zoom I hate you zoom classes I hate that I spend so so so much money to attend college and half of it is already online why am I here I hate growing up in the transition period I hate knowing what classrooms where like before chromebooks I hate you chrome books I hate you google I'm so tired guys I want to throw the whole thing out and start over I hate you deregulation I hate you extractive industries I hate you lithuium ion mining I hate you planned obsolescence I hate phones I hate computers I hate all of it I want it gone I hate screens I hate bluelight I hate you bluelight glasses no I should not have to buy a product to fix the problem created from another product get rid of all of it I hate checking and double checking my spelling because I've been conditioned to always doubt my knowledge and why wouldn't I check its so easy the information is right there I hate that I've gotten lazy and complacent with technology I hate you Grammarly I hate you grub hub I hate you uber eats I hate you temu i hate you shein i hate you blackboard i hate you college board i hate you online standardized testing i hate you digital sat i hate you software updates i hate you censorships i hate that in the past few years the internet is so enmeshed into american culture that we dont even use money anymore i hate our dependence i hate our consumption i hate technology in places where we dont need it i hate typing i hate arthritis i hate back pain i hate migranes i hate the fact that i know it was never like this before and i hate the fact that im expected to accept it as normal now i need to throw my laptop into a volcano i need to eat my entire phone and spit it back out and smash it with a hammer and eat it again and then shit it into a volcano i hate the internet release me

[the-unconquered-queen]

*The key to both of these features is that the necessary amount of points for success is in no way paywalled and you can get the best of every outcome provided you make good choices

[littleraccooncarl]

Carl the Collector has been reviewed by Common Sense Media, who gave it a 4/5 and a Common Sense Selection seal of approval. To be honest, I don't really like this website that much because some of their reviews (such as the Codename: Kids Next Door one) are just awful, and the user reviews open the floodgates for Karens and bored teenagers who hate on kids shows for no reason. In fact, there is a one-star review by a 17 year old already, but don't pay attention to it. However, it is good that they gave Carl a relatively positive review. Apparently, there's a paywall on their site after reading three articles, so I'll just copy and paste what they wrote here:

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Carl the Collector is an animated series about a young raccoon with autism (voiced by Kai Barham, who is also neurodiverse) and his woodland creature friends in Fuzzytown. The series celebrates inclusion and encourages noticing each other's similarities and differences. Characters are kind, helpful, and empathetic, learning to express their emotions and work through problems together. There's no iffy content, making the series appropriate for all ages

Any Positive Content?

Positive Messages - Positive messages around including different types of friends in your play, with a focus on neurodivergent friends on the autism spectrum. A strong focus on being kind and helpful to others, as well as expressing your emotions and working through problems together.

Positive Role Models - The characters are all kind, helpful, and empathetic to one another. They model how to work through problems and how to express emotions. They often put others' needs and interests before their own. They do not always get along, but they work together to make it right.

Educational Value - The show models positive problem-solving and social-emotional skills.

Diverse Representations - The show features two characters on the autism spectrum, the lead character Carl the raccoon and supporting character Lotta the fox. They each experience autism in different ways. The characters don't talk about autism, and don't point out the autistic characters' differences. Behind-the-scenes, the production team includes neurodiverse writers, animators, voice talent, and advisors. Other representation includes Forrest the squirrel, who has a tree nut allergy, and Carl whose parents are separated (Carl spends some time living with each). Gender-wise, the supporting characters are both boys and girls, and includes Carl's best friend Sheldon who is an empathetic and sensitive boy. The characters are all animals, and none have an implied race.

What's the Story?

In CARL THE COLLECTOR, Carl (Kai Barham) is a warm-hearted autistic kid raccoon who loves to collect different items. He is extremely detail-oriented, and appreciates all the special qualities of his various collections which range from fake mustaches to bottle caps. Whenever he has a problem, Carl calls up best friend Sheldon (Peter Laurie) the beaver with his walkie-talkie. Carl and Sheldon's other Fuzzytown friends Lotta the fox, Forrest the squirrel, and twin bunnies Nico and Arugula also join in on the day's adventures. They work together to help Carl with everyday problems like organizing his massive stuffed animal collection or tracking down his runaway bouncy ball collection. Carl's Mama (Heather Bambrick) guides the kids as they work through difficult problems and disagreements. They learn about each other's similarities and differences, and have lots of fun along the way.

Is It Any Good?

Creator Zachariah OHora (children's book writer and illustrator) calls his universe of characters "Fuzzytown," and Carl the Collector is sure to give kids and grown-ups the warm fuzzies. Its characters are super relatable: They try really hard to be good friends, but they don't always get it right. They have troubles recognizable to any young kid (like being asked to part with precious stuffed animals). The voice actors sound like real kids, making it seem like the characters could be a friend in real life. OHora's exquisite art is featured in the show's animation, and watching feels like jumping into a picture book. Grown-ups will appreciate the slow, calm pacing and overall gentleness of the show.

Carl the Collector is the first PBS KIDS show to feature a main character on the autism spectrum, and it does a great job of showing how two different characters (Carl and supporting character Lotta) experience autism differently. It simultaneously shows true-to-life characteristics of people with autism, without calling out the differences in a way that feels othering. The neurotypical kids on the show treat the neurodiverse kids the same as their other friends, while having extra sensitivity to how Carl and Lotta interpret the world. It's a beautiful celebration of appreciating everyone's unique qualities.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the empathy characters show in Carl the Collector, or when one character is able to understand the feelings of another character. Sheldon is really good at understanding how Carl is feeling, and helping him to work through tricky situations. Can you think of how Sheldon is empathetic to Carl?

All of the animals in Carl the Collector are really good at communicating how they're feeling. Can you think of a time in the story when one character told another one how they are feeling?

Carl and Lotta are on the autism spectrum, which means their brains and bodies experience the world differently than people who are not on the autism spectrum. How are your friends different than you? How do you find a way to play together even though you're different?

This review confirms that Carl's parents are separated, which is different from being divorced. A legal separation is when a couple lives apart from each other but are technically still married. It's basically like a 'cooling off' period.

[cr1ngetherapyyy]

Here are all the websites and tools I use as a writer

For Writing:

Reedsy — this is where I have all of my projects. You can create new books or import files and it will automatically turn them into books. It has a lot of cool features like tracking your word count, how many words you wrote, how many you deleted, and the current word count. There’s a word count goal you can set. You can create different sections (I can’t remember what they’re called). This is where I like to keep my notes and character sheets. It auto saves your writing and you can go back into your past saves to recover them. It also allows you to export your story in proper publishing format for ebooks and manuscripts. There’s a lot more too. The site holds weekly contests for $250. They have 5 prompts you can submit 1-3k word stories to. Highly recommend. The downside is that they very recently put everything behind a paywall. So you have to subscribe to two different plans in order to get all the features they offer. Which I’m pissed about because up until recently I had it all for free. And I got locked out of my notes and stuff that were already there.

Miriam Webster’s dictionary — I always have this open while I’m writing. I usually use the thesaurus to find the words I’m looking for.

Capitalize My Title — very straightforward I have a hard time remembering proper formatting for titles so I just write it into this and copy paste it.

For Character Sheets:

CharacterHub — this site offers highly customizable character sheets and world/story sheets. You can create a unique style for every character from color to information and pictures. The only downside is that the site is incredibly slow and often glitchy. You have to be really patient with it. There are also social channels where you can talk to other users.

Unvale — less customizable when it comes to formatting but it is still great in its own right. You can post pictures, writing for both characters and stories. You can make pages for your stories and link them to your characters. There’s a very active community on here as well.

For Publishing:

Archive of Our Own (Ao3) — I post my fanfics and my original works here. It’s a non-profit that prides itself on its zero-censorship policy. Yes the tagging system to weed out all the things you don’t want to read or to find what you want to read. It’s hard to get reads on original works but if you cross-post to tumblr you can build an audience.

Reedsy — they have a market place where you can find authors, editors, freelancers, and other experts and resources. You can also get a job here yourself. And there’s a place where you can publish your stories for people to find.

Patreon — it’s hard to be a writer on Patreon. But I post my work in progress stuff for my original story as well as posting the finalized episode as soon as it’s done so people can get early access to episodes that normally get published once a month.

Tumblr — this platform is honestly one of the best places for posting your writing and getting feedback from communities. Reddit is also a great place to get feedback too but there’s rarely a place you can self promote your writing. Here you can.

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) — personally I have not used this but I know that a lot of people self publish here. Especially erotica authors. There’s a bunch of loopholes you have to jump through to not get banned or blacklisted if you write for mature audiences. But if your looking to make money off your books then this sight is your best bet for self publishing.