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It's not there yet, but The Undetectables series by Courtney Smyth is on its way to meeting that description! Only the first 2 books are out so far; book 3 is scheduled for September 2025. Not sure what's planned beyond that.

It's a contemporary / urban fantasy about a group of witches working as private investigators and solving magical crimes and includes at least one main sapphic relationship.

Friends, I am looking for book recs again!

Any suggestions for long (4+ books) episodic sapphic romance or urban fantasy series?

Think: Ilona Andrews, Seanan McGuire, Eileen Wilks, Hailey Turner, Kai Butler, Hailey Edwards, Jeaniene Frost, Suzanne Brockmann, Toni Anderson, Lucy Lennox, Devney Perry (but sapphic).

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Sorry if I'm mixing you up with someone else, but you've worked security before, right?

If you're willing, I'd be really interested on your thoughts on the murderbot diaries or murderbot as a character with that in mind?

Like did you recognise aspects of your job in murderbots descriptions of security work? Or did they like throw you out of immersion in the story?

Anyway thanks and hope you're having a good day/evening wherever you are!

As a security guard who has read the first two Murderbot books, Murderbot has been the number one most realistic security specialist character I have ever seen in media so far 😭

The third most annoying thing in security in my experience is handling threats. The second most annoying thing is having no threats to handle and being bored. The number one most annoying thing is the client being an idiot

Ihave social anxiety which I am medicated for. When I am in uniform with clear instructions, that anxiety is zero. I have a script and a set of rules and that makes life easy. I’m super good at performing tasks with clear expectations and that’s kinda how I keep getting good offers, it’s super straightforward

Bad clients are clients who give stupid, inefficient, counterproductive, cruel, or flat-out illegal orders. There are ways of shutting that shit down without them losing heir shit, but it’s still a pain in the ass every time

I’m a security specialist. I specialize in security. This is what I am trained for- handling crisis situations and minimizing harm. If you, an off-shift cashier at pet smart, see me deescalating a situation and decide you’re gonna drop your untrained uninformed ass in there with zero context or skills and “help” because I look small and helpless, then all you’re doing is increasing my likelihood of getting hurt while increasing my paperwork load by like two hours, and I’m gonna hate you the entire time. What you have essentially done is promoted me to meat shield while giving the aggressor I’m calming down an obnoxious and aggravating hostage. Good god please do not

Yes, I am sometimes asked to stand perfectly still in a corner for several hours like a mannequin. What do I do to avoid going insane? Think about Star Trek and the very good fanfiction I’ll be reading on my break, mostly

Yes I can assist in evacuating tw location in the event of an environmental disaster. No I cannot tell my waiter that they put cilantro on the wrong order. Yes this makes perfect sense

I love Murderbot. I love how realistic it is. Like obviously I can’t speak for everyone in the industry but yeah I’ve worked for absolute dogshit security companies in the past and yeah a lot of the books so far are super accurate to that experience so A+ so far, honestly

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So I just had a realization that kind of helped me with my dark thoughts and mental health, and ofc it's linked to Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

Because sometimes, around 2:17 AM, my mind turns into the Ankh river: grim, swirling, toxic, and full of god-knows-what floating past. The usual thoughts, such as: you're a failure, everyone hates you, and you forgot to send that one important email back in 2019.

And then I often feel like I'm broken and I don't deserve anything, and I'm being a burden for everyone I know.

But then I thought about Vimes, and how he would just light a cigar and grunt that the river's always been like that - and the real point isn't to clean it, it's to keep building the city around it anyway.

And about Vetinari, who would raise an eyebrow and remind me that the river is essential - and irrelevant all at once.

Because the citizens of Ankh-Morpork don't waste their lives waiting for the river to run clean. They build bridges over it, while trying not to fall in, and live their rich and difficult lives anyway.

And I'm not just the river, I'm the whole bloody city of Ankh-Morpork. And I fucking love that city.

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may i offer you a crumb of nostalgia? or a refreshing sip of vinegar?

some friends & i ended up talking about animorphs a while ago. at some point in the conversation i was explaining andalites to my partner who never read the books, stopped & went ".........you know what i'm gonna do?" to which people responded with "make an andalite bjd?" and yes. they were absolutely correct.

this also finally motivated me to sculpt a centaur body with more joints. i'm very happy with the range of motion in this, especially how nicely it lies down. need to work a little bit on stability, but the poseability is where i want it.

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LINK: tinyurl.com/oldgaySF

I'd like to share with y'all a project I've poured my heart and soul into over the last couple of years: a database cataloguing every single older queer science fiction book I've managed to track down, consisting of just over 200 titles with LGBT characters/themes & by LGBT authors, spanning over a century (1880-2000) 🚀

The database can be filtered by representation, subgenre, whether the book is currently in print, and more; additionally, it includes my own ratings & brief thoughts on the ones i have read, if anyone needs a suggestion on places to start! (or feel free to shoot me an ask for a more personalized recommendation)

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A couple fun extra notes on Bookshop.org and Libro.fm if you're not familiar with them:

The local bookstore you select gets a direct cut of your specific sale, not just a vague profit-share down the road. (If you don't select a store, that cut instead goes into a general fund to be shared between participating bookstores.)

When you find your local bookstore(s) on Bookshop.org, you can also see if they've set up a storefront where they can showcase their specific staff picks! (IDK if Libro.fm has something similar on a store level, but they include booksellers' blurbs pretty frequently.)

Bookshop.org now sells ebooks as well as physical books! Really psyched about this personally since I pretty much only read on my phone these days.

Bsky post by libro.fm: Tomorrow, a certain online mega-retailer launches a book sale, just days before Indie Bookstore Day on 4/26. This is no coincidence; Bookstore Day is one of the largest revenue drivers for indies.

Indies need our support to thrive & build community spaces for all...mega-retailers do not.

--

Fuck Amazon. Go to bookshop.org or better yet, take a little time on Saturday to visit your local indie bookstore.

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tbh, sometimes the “platonic explanation for this” is the more interesting one

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Bsky post by libro.fm: Tomorrow, a certain online mega-retailer launches a book sale, just days before Indie Bookstore Day on 4/26. This is no coincidence; Bookstore Day is one of the largest revenue drivers for indies.

Indies need our support to thrive & build community spaces for all...mega-retailers do not.

--

Fuck Amazon. Go to bookshop.org or better yet, take a little time on Saturday to visit your local indie bookstore.

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Libro.fm audiobook sale!

Libro.fm, the audiobook platform that supports indie bookstores, is having another sale to coincide with Independent Bookstore Day (April 26, 2025). The sale includes discounts of 80% or higher, with $20-30 audiobooks on sale for $5.

Go get your audiobooks!

This time around the list includes a couple of my absolute favorite books:

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

The Village Library Demon Hunting Society by C. M. Waggoner

Other SFF highlights:

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

The Parable of the Sower & Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Full Speed to a Crash Landing by Beth Revis (note: epilogue has some text features that don't translate well to audio)

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

Lots of other interesting stuff there as well.

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Why become a serial killer when you can watch movies instead?

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I guess if I thought about it I knew that with the TV show coming out, Murderbot would get media tie-in covers. And I would have expected them to be bad, first because media tie-in covers are always bad and second because the show's already doomed by casting.

But god, I did NOT anticipate the levels of "oh HELL no" this would immediately give me.

Like. Holy shit. This looks like a fucking YouTube thumbnail.

You've already cast a lead who doesn't suit the role at all. And then you take this character who canonically HATES eye contact and prefers for people not to look at its face at all ... and have it on the cover making direct eye contact with the audience?

(Yes, the point of a media tie-in cover is to put photos of the actor(s) on the cover so that fans of the actor(s) will buy the book. But I find that proposition dubious at best, and here? Really stupid.)

The tone of this cover is SO FUCKING OFF. This gives the vibes that the book(s) will treat constructs getting dismembered as casual and meaningless, when that exact dismissal of harm to constructs and bots is part of the themes of the series.

Like, as a bookseller, I legit would not be able to sell this book. The glib, slapstick vibes of the cover would turn off the customers I'd want to recommend this book to. I'd literally have to tell people, "Don't pay attention to the cover; it's a media tie-in and they did a terrible job."

God. It already sucked for the TV show to be such a dumpster fire immediately, but at least I could just go "well I was never going to watch it anyway, so it doesn't affect me, it doesn't change the books." But here we are, changing the books.

(Note: This is an ebook cover, so I wouldn't have to physically hand this monster to someone, but that actually makes matters worse. When a publisher puts out a print tie-in edition with a bad cover, I can just order the original cover instead. But the new cover has already been automatically populated to ebook platforms, including Bookshop.org's beta platform and even Libby. So now if someone goes to buy the ebook of All Systems Red, they automatically see this shit -- and might very well go "oh, this looks terrible," and close it.)

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"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book

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Unfortunately I can only come up with one at the moment: Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel.

Anyone have any suggestions for adult books with asexual and/or aromantic main characters (ideally romance, fantasy, or sci fi)?

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i love how as you read more into tlt, the ninth house seems more and more normal. Like if i'm at an immoral evil government competition, and i use human fat as soap and animate skeletons to do menial labor, i'm gonna LOSE if my competition is the third house, represented by ianthe "who HASN'T eaten human flesh and fucked a corpse" tridentarius. My weird skeleton thing seems normal, suddenly. Well-adjusted, even. It's recycling. They're using resources in a sustainable way. Normal and regular and productive for a post-climate change apocalypse universe.

People go on and on about how Muir drops you into gtn hearing from the person who knows the least about whats happening, and does not hand hold the reader through the crazy shit that occurs, and that's all true. It truly is a crazy writing decision to make your first pov character come from the universe's equivalent of amish fundamentalists. But the reader is actually done a huge favor being dropped into the ninth house first, because we already understand that space is cold and what catholic nuns are, and what goths look like, and what lesbians are. Very little time is wasted in the first chunk of gtn ripping hair out of your head wondering what the fuck is going on, because for all of its strangeness, the ninth house is already the most familiar thing we're gonna get.

Because THEN we learn that this whole universe's medieval chivalry system is designed to groom people from CHILDREN to not only be exploited and used as human batteries for necromancers, but to LIKE it. to wax poetic about it. to confuse it for love, to write fucking academic papers about it! Then we learn about planet flipping, an act so horrific and violent it turns the planet's soul into a massive vengeful monster capable of killing GOD. Like what do you MEAN the animals "change"? Is this why noodle has six legs? I would MUCH prefer to wear skeleton makeup and repent forever if the alternative was to witness my family dog grow TWO EXTRA LIMBS because the planet he lived on fucking died. Suddenly, living in the asscrack of a planet where no light gets in seems like a sweet deal when the whole solar system is lit by a sun that MAKES YOU GO CRAZY. The ninth house's WORST sin, killing 200 babies to make Harrow, a waste of resources and an act so terrible it haunts Harrow for the entire span of her life, is like a BLIP compared to the death count Jod's empire. God even hears about it and he's like, no big deal! The cohort probably kills that amount of people in a DAY.

And its ALSO tragic because you realize that all of this trauma and abuse that Gideon goes through is not really because of the ninth house at all. It's really just an individual skill issue that she wasn't treated with compassion. Nobody hated her because she's jesus or a bomb, nobody even KNOWS she's a bomb. It's just Priamhark and Pelleamena being deeply guilty and scared people that motivates her treatment, and absolutely nothing else.

They did something bad, and they know it, and Gideon survived it, and they can't kill her to cover it up, and that's IT. They killed themselves for pride, because they were afraid of the consequences of their actions (both the baby killing and Harrow opening the tomb) coming back to bite them. You can argue this is the catholicism of it all, and I wouldn't say you're wrong, but compared to the cavalier system, where exploitation is in the very lining of the house's institutions, the ninth house is really removed from the space empire's blood factory. This is compared to the fourth house where they have tons of children to be CANNON FODDER to join the cohort at fucking 14, compared to the eight house uncle nephew fuckery, even the fifth house which actually does seems nice to live on but also seems to have the fourth house in some sort of fucked up political bear hug??? (maybe the fourth house has so many kids in order to fight the fifth's battles? which is EXACTLY what jod's whole empire is about; politely stirring your tea and acting nice while you destroy everything) compared to ALL OF THAT, the cruelty that Gideon faces is really more a bug of the ninth's system than a feature.

There's nothing baked into the culture and everyday life of the ninth house that necessitated that cruelty; in fact, for such a pragmatic and resource-scarce place, it's WEIRD that a strong able-bodied young person was treated like a waste of space and resources. It could just have easily not happened, if Harrow's parents had been different people. Maybe they were products of their environment, but so was Harrow, and she values Gideon's life SO MUCH that she'd literally rather carve out parts of her own brain than exploit her. Gideon grows up knowing really NOTHING about cavaliers, so remote from the horrors of the empire that she develops an idea of what the cohort is from porn magazines. And in a lot of ways, that upbringing was desolate and terrible, and in a lot of other ways it literally DID NOT HAVE TO BE.

Gideon's MAIN THING is that she wants to be useful, to be needed, to be loved and it SUCKS that she couldn't even get it in the one place where she was actually an invaluable resource, where the death empire had the weakest reach. Gideon can't even blame her lack of love on the fucked up chivalry system like everyone else can because it JUST WASNT REALLY RELEVENT!?!?! This is like if i rolled up to the trauma competition and everyone else was raised in a nuclear warzone by wolves or something and i grew up in like, the suburbs and was raised by teachers and i somehow STILL WON. truly what the fuck guys.

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you can't take loved away

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Evil creature Ianthe Tridentarius 🤲

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Very messy sketch but I finally got to draw them