#which is SOMETIMES another book

[hellenhighwater]

okay, settle an argument for me. I'm being told it's weird to listen to an audiobook while simultaneously reading a different book. Do you do this? Like, audiobook in your headphones, unrelated book being read at the same time, not just alternating which you're working on by listening to a chapter, then reading a different chapter.

[babybells123]

(ASOS, Sansa II)

(ASOS, Jon XII)

[tariah23]

Man, I still remember participating in one of the many jjba zines that I took part in and how my piece was placed as the first page (for the second time) and how one of my mutuals/artists that I’ve always admired, hit me with the “oh… you’re on the front page again… 😅…” like man, that kind of killed me lmfao. I never got over it like man, what was that about.

[keyofjetwolf]

So far 2024 has seen me knocked flat by a cold, but hey, enabled my first book of the year to start and finish!

[quatregats]

I did kind of enjoy the first chapter of Parkinson's Hornblower "biography" because it offered some things that I had either been wondering about or which I thought were delightful little headcanons, but I have to say that since then it has just been making me hate Hornblower an unbelievable amount and/or occasionally go he would not fucking say that

[isablooo]

every time i blink theyre doing another terrible adaptation of a gothic novel will i ever be free

[icewindandboringhorror]

If you became super rich and could design your own house, but could only add THREE unnecessary/random/expensive home additions (like how people will have bowling alleys, movie theatres, closets with museums of shoes, car display rooms, spa rooms, wine cellars, etc. in their mansions) - what three would you choose?

[the-busy-ghost]

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

[batemanofficial]

hello upper middle class northern usamerican tumblr user. i want to play a game. you will notice that you are in a super america convenience store in rural kentucky - you have three minutes to purchase a snack and drink of your choice and make normal small talk with the cashier. however, if you use the word "cryptid" or generally make reference to appalachia and its inhabitants as "wild", uncivilized, or lacking restraint around alcoholic beverages during your time here, i will personally tie you to the chassis of a four wheeler and tip it into the river. live or die. make your choice

[duchessvultjag]

you mean to tell me that the crown princess of ida, coronabeth ("crown" + beth) chose the code name crown him with many crowns aka crown for short. yeah that's going to fool everyone

[markantonys]

i zoomed in and saw that the costume labels are "novice", "warder", and "accepted".....................PLEASE let the warder one be gawyn's costume PLEASE!!!!! to think i was like "haha surely i won't have to wait until the literal season airing to find out whether he exists in showverse" and now here we are

[inthewaytoamultilinguallife]

hello, ive been learning portuguese for a bit and i was wondering if you had any recommendations for media? like youtubers, blogs, movies or series. if you do, thanks in advance

uff fuck, i will sure try my best but i can’t promise anything

I normally get my dose of Portuguese via going to academic workshops or working alongside Brazilian people, so I don’t exactly engage with media in Portuguese as a conscious learning process, I'm afraid. Like, for example, i normally just get a bunch of Instagram reels and TikToks cause I'm on the Brazilian side of instagram/tiktok, and not exactly because i follow any particular account or something, and i don’t level or recognize how hard the Portuguese is in each one, etc 

I have some series that i remember watching and liking tho, which are:

De volta aos 15: a drama/comedy series around a 30yo woman that time travels a few times to when she was 15 and tries to fix everyone's life, as one does

A sogra que te pariu: a very absurd sitcom in the best latinoamerican style (and set during covid)

Samantha!: Another comedy, now about a kid star from the '80s who is trying to launch herself back

Lulli: comedy, drama and romance. A medic student gets electrocuted and starts hearing everyone's thoughts

3%: suspense, fiction, drama. Set on a diasporic word where, while everyone gets a one-time change to better their life, only the 3% makes it

Ciudad invisible: Drama, mystery. This one has lots of references to folk culture and stories! It's about a man who, after a family tragedy, starts seeing different mythological creatures that will help him uncover the past

omnisciente: sci-fi, drama, thriller. The city is controlled and watched all the time everywhere by drones. A woman tries to solve a murder that the drones never picked on + plus discover how fucked up the system and the drones are

Coisa mais linda: Drama, romance, set in 1959, after getting cheated on and left alone, a woman sets herself to open her own bossa nova club

ninguem tá olheando: comedy, drama, fantasy after discovering some secrets of the bureaucratic angelic system, a guardian angel set himself to break every rule that there is for protecting humans

Valentina: drama a young trans girl moves to a more conservative rural town 

Alice júnior: Coming of age film about a YouTuber trans girl as she challenges her catholic school's conservative ways 

[neixins]

ngl i don’t think any of my irl friends care about me all that much…………

[mermaidsirennikita]

The dichotomy between what's popular according to booktok (from what I've see) from the most blandest books imaginable to the most taboo erotica you can think of is kinda wild.

I think that what gets me with taboo books recommended by BookTok is that they're usually very poorly written. And if the writing is poor, you're not really getting the full "shock" value.

Like, when you read Sierra Simone's Thornchapel series, the scenes read as really intense because Sierra is an excellent writer. In contrast, a book like Hooked (that one dark romance~ modern Captain Hook book, a concept I was very open to and wanted to like, for the record) is very badly written. There's taboo content and a horrible hero, but like... It just reads juvenile.

I'm about 65% through A Kiss at Midnight by Anne Stuart, a historical romance that is QUITE dark, but the writing is frankly fabulous. Because Stuart can write, the darkness (which is not like, the corny "oh he's so bad he's in a motorcycle gang" torture sequence stuff--it's TRULY intense and pretty accurate for the era) is balanced out by emotional progression and honestly? A very dry, at times dark humor. If a lesser writer handled this plotline, it would just seem like shock factor after shock factor layered on just to get people talking. Very 2edgy4me.

And I'm gonna be really real here. Some fanfic authors are made to transition to actual published books. I think Ali Hazelwood writes a really solid contemporary romance. I really enjoyed You, Again by Kate Goldbeck, and that's based on a fic I actually read. The Hurricane Wars works as a book. (And mind you, let's not take away from the work the editors and authors did to rework fics into actual books here.)

Some fic authors are meant to stay fic authors and to excel at that. I personally think that one of the reasons why we have so many blaaand romance novels right now is that a) some of them are written by less-equipped fic authors trying to write real books and b) some of the authors have read less actual books than they have fics.

There are some tensely plotted, exciting fics out there. But personally? I think the standout nature of those fics--fics like Manacled, which... I think.... is not.... for me. However, bland it is not lol--makes people think that is the NORM for fic, when it's not. The norm for fic, and what I think a lot of more casual fic consumers and people who read more fic than they do books (compared to a lot of romance readers who turn to fic to supplement their reading habits) is very plotless slice of life stuff.

And that's not meant to be derogatory. It works, especially when you're writing about characters a lot of people know and love and are PROGRAMMED to know and love. Even if it's AU and they're basically other people, if you're writing a modern, sedate romcom about Katniss and Peeta and she mentions going to archery classes and Peeta being a baker, people are like aawwwww and they enjoy the nicely written scenes that are just people being people.

That.... ultimately creates a bland story when you're writing a book about original characters nobody has a preexisting investment in.

[alagaisia]

I love when I read a book *after* seeing an adaptation and it gives me a new appreciation for the adaptation. Season one of The Expanse follows the plot and major scenes of Leviathan Wakes remarkably closely, and the characters are exactly the same. I’m replaying scenes from the show in my mind. Conversations that weren’t in the show still read in the actors’ voices. I swear I recognized some dialogue. And the changes I did notice (such as where Miller finds Julie Mao in the end, and how the dead man’s switch comes in) made complete sense in smoothing over the transition from page to screen. Fuck Amazon and all that, but the writers and showrunnners of that show should be lauded for their attention and dedication to the source material.

I’m interested to see how that holds up in the rest of the series. I know that the actor playing Alex Kamal left the show for reasons unrelated to the character’s original arc, and I think I know that the books go on longer than the show, so I have a feeling eventually the two will split, but I’m hoping to meet a few more favorite characters before that happens :)

(other books I've read this year)

[llycaons]

xl went through so much insane suffering, things like being stabbed until he barely resembles a human form and being locked in a coffin for literally a hundred years, but I think making him immortal and ever-healing and showing how much he learned from his experiences AND ending his story with so much closure and close relationships makes his tragedies a lot easier to bear than wwx's. like, emotionally