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I was a boy, and I was good / but there are witches in these woods

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hormonal birth control is honestly the best thing to ever happen to me idc i ❤️ not being in touch with my natural cycle 🥰

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if any of y'all see posts about house m.d on tumblr and think "I wanna watch that" you need to know that you can skip episodes. i would argue skipping certain episodes is vital to having an enjoyable house experience. house md is one of my favorite shows and has been genuinely important to me as an autistic queer chronically ill cane user. it also revels in it's main character being offensive for the sake of being offensive with that special early 2000s flair. if you care about the concept of fatphobia you will be unable to have a uncomplicated relationship with this show. for every earthshatteringly homoerotic hilson moment and every profoundly accurate disabled scene we the viewers must pay in some insane misogyny. that's just how it is on this bitch of a show

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April was a productive reading month. And I liked everything that I read so that was great. Also got a 5 star read FINALLY! The Reappearance of Rachel Price was amazing and I'm happy that I got a perfect read after so long! I read the full Defy the Night series which put a good dent in my TBR. Here's the wrap up:

Mexican Gothic ⭐⭐⭐

Four Aunties and a Wedding ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Expiration Dates ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Reappearance of Rachel Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Loveless (reread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Rule Book ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Party ⭐⭐⭐

Everything I Know About Love ⭐⭐⭐

Defy the Night ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Teach Me ⭐⭐⭐

Long Time Gone (ARC) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Defend the Dawn ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bethrotal or Breakaway ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Tomb Sweeping ⭐⭐⭐

Only and Forever ⭐⭐⭐

Destroy the Day ⭐⭐⭐

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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides.

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Seattle Public Library is doing this awesome program called Books Unbanned that allows teens and young adults (ages 13-26) access to their collection of e-books and e-audiobooks from anywhere in the USA. All you need to do is fill out a simple form and you get their Books Unbanned card. Please share this information far and wide. I know they're not the only ones to have done this, but the more the merrier!

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Books I Read in 2024

#26 - Imogen, Obviously

Rating: 5/5 stars

And now we have recaptured the magic of Simon that I felt was sorely missing from The Upside of Unrequited.

It's impossible not to see how this novel (2023) is deeply informed by Albertalli's experience in publicly coming out (2020) after years of criticism since her debut novel (2015) for writing queer characters while being, as her Wikipedia page puts it, a "presumed heterosexual."

While I don't share that exact experience, I am a white American bisexual woman who didn't come out until later in life, mostly because I didn't even figure out I was bi until my early thirties, and it was several more years before I felt comfortable enough to claim the label, precisely because of the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, straight-passing "privilege," and the eternal debate raging in my head due to imposter syndrome of "but am I really queer enough?"--all of which are a part of this story.

This book might be YA and hopefully has both entertained teen readers and helped some of them figure out who they are--but it's also very much a book Albertalli wrote for herself, and for me, and for an entire generation of women who are queer adults now despite growing up either believing they were straight, or knowing they weren't but staying closeted, or even not knowing enough about themselves to question who they were.

While most of the supporting cast is queer and supportive, one character in particular is the queer gatekeeper loaded with good intentions but often spouting toxic rhetoric despite that. I appreciated the nuance of it, because her history naturally makes her defensive in understandable ways, but the narrative doesn't shy away from calling out her bullshit, and the ending doesn't resolve her part in the story--she's a loose thread deliberately, and it's rare for me to say this, but I like that decision. It's not important to Imogen in the midst of her happy ending that she decide if she can forgive that behavior and they can continue to be friends. That's something she clearly can figure out later as she figures out more about herself (and hopefully if the gatekeeper's behavior improves to the point where she no longer deserves that descriptor.)

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alanna was gifted to me when i was 9 and there was no going back for me!! while i do have critiques of her story, there will always be things i love and i really appreciate how the series have grown over time. but yeah, alanna remains iconic to me and she will always be my fave

Top 5 books by Tamora Pierce 😀

in the hand of the goddess (alanna 2) i reread this one and almost yearly

alanna: the first adventure (i reread this one less but almost as much)

the realms of the gods (i remember the final battle scene even tho its been a while)

page (kel 2) why??? i cant remember, vibes

magic steps even tho i didnt read any after, i was super into it

ask for my top 5!!

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i am chaotic and will listen to new books to fall asleep and then inevitably have to back pedal to catch up. this often backfires on me as i then get overly invested in the story and want to stay up.

the magic sleep book is chalice by robin mckinley tho. ive fallen asleep listening to that book twice now and i . .. cannot remember anything excpet pretty words lollll

Top 5 things to do to help you fall asleep 😀

a curated playlist of familiar slow songs

audiobook (usually robin mckinley)

asmr podcast

yoga routine

drink warm milk

ask for my top 5!

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I firmly believe in mermaids with their tits out. No shell tops, no scaly tops. Bare chested, maybe some fun little accessories like necklaces or something but let them be topless. They live in the sea you think they’ll have clothes? They’re fish people, they don’t follow human ideals. Let the fish girls have their titties out!!

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2024 reads / storygraph

Dear Wendy

YA contemporary

two first year students who become friends, bonding over their shared aroace identity and starting a club for aspec students

while unknowingly engaging in a petty war with their anonymous relationship advice instagrams

friendship, navigating potential futures and entering adult life, and exploring QPOC experiences

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Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.

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Weekly Bookish Question #387 (April 28th - May 4th 2024)

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Fascinated by stories of the - I guess you'd call it the "stolen identity" genre, like, of the Anastasia Romanov variety. But - from both sides.

Your husband has been at war for thirty years. You married when you were teenagers. The man who returns bearing his name looks... plausible, you don't remember his eyes being quite so blue, but it's been thirty years and it's not like you could ever afford to have a portrait painted. He knows your name and the names of your children and your parents, but there are curious gaps in what he remembers. But war does things to the mind. And if he's kinder than you remember? Kind enough that, maybe, you let yourself believe...

No one has ever looked twice at you, since you're just the maid, until the day a revolutionary bomb goes off, blowing a crater in the summer palace. The famously reclusive duchess and the rest of her household lie dead in the rubble. You know that you and she were the same dress size. You know where her jewels are kept. Most importantly, you know the location of the secret tunnel that leads down to the docks, and to a life overseas that would be torturously hard going for a poor maid, especially one suspected as a thief, but a lot more comfortable for a royal in exile...

The old king's most faithful retainer swears this is the heir to the throne, raised in secret and trained to one day step into his father's shoes. As the usurper as dragged off the throne, she screams that the old king's children are all dead, she made sure of it; no one pays her any heed. (Maybe they should have...)

The man in the tavern is buying drinks for the whole bar before he sets sail tomorrow for the far side of the world. He's got it all figured out - a ship of his own, retirement to a tropical paradise when he gets sick of the pirating life. His lip curls as he talks about the stultifying boredom of the aristocratic world he's already left behind. You find out that his parents recently died, and the estate is in the care of his younger sister, who was only six when her brother first left home two decades since. Between the lines, they sound like a good family; they sound like they love him, the way your family never did. Your heart aches. He shows you portraits, letters, before shoving them carelessly back in his coat pocket. They would be so easy to lift...

It's a surprisingly common concept and I just love it. It's The Return of Martin Guerre; it's multiple 90s romcoms; Agatha Christie pulls it half a dozen times. Sooner or later, it crops up in fanfic for just about any fandom with a royal or aristocratic main character.

And I can see why, because there's so much richness to it. From the outside, it can be anything from a horror story to an unlikely love story; from the perspective of the person pulling off the con, a heist movie or a tragedy or a heartwarming tale of found family. And then there are the longer-term implications: What happens if you wear a mask so long that it becomes who you are? What happens if you come to love the "replacement" to the point where you don't want to find out the truth? What is it like to uncover such a deception a century down the line, to find out that your great-grandfather... wasn't?

Just. Identity stories, man. <3

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helpful diagram for anyone who needs it