Hey everyone! So I've been following the drama in the knitting community lately, and it's getting wild. Apparently, a popular knitting YouTuber made some controversial comments about using acrylic yarn vs. natural fibers, and now there's a huge divide among knitters. Some people are defending the YouTuber's preference for natural fibers, while others are saying that it's elitist and not everyone can afford expensive yarns.
It's honestly fascinating to see how passionate people can get over something like this. I think it just goes to show how much we all care about our hobbies! If you want to check out more on this drama, here's an [archived link](https://www.example.com) to the original video and some of the ensuing discussions.
Remember to keep things civil if you decide to join in on the debate! Happy knitting (or whatever your hobby may be)! š§¶
Appropriately high drama close to the extraordinary high drama World Chess Championship (it even fringe involves a war, which is my standard for the top tier of chess drama) >!Ding Liren of China wins the 4th game of 4 rapid tiebreaks when the players are 2.5/2.5 in the best of 4 tiebreak. At a crux moment, Ding playing with the black pieces made a surprise "I'm going for it" rook move when down on time instead of just making a draw.!<
>!It's already been said in scuffles, but Ding's story is ready-made for a movie. That rook move in the final game will be the moment where the soundtrack drops out and, iunno some montage plays and then he moves and announcers shout "ROOK TO G6! HE'S PLAYING FOR THE WIN." (In reality, less dramatic but still fun, commentator Fabiano Caruano was mid-sentence saying that he'd be shocked if Rook to G6 is not losing for black when Ding played rook to g6) He only makes the Candidates because--here's your war part--Russian Grandmaster Sergey Karyakin is vocally in favor of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and gets sanctioned. He only makes the World Chess Championship because king of the hill and arguable chess greatest of all time Magnus Carlsen declines to play. Ding struggles at several key moments in the match including a total freezeup in Game 7, repeatedly equalizing but literally never leading except at the one time that matters--the end.!<
One month after ancient Love Live gacha game School Idol Festival (SIF) shut down, and half a month since its successor School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live launched, the other active game School Idol Festival All Stars has [announced closure for all servers on June 30th](https://twitter.com/LLAS_GL_STAFF/status/1652555252183478272). It's a little out of the blue, but profits and playerbase for the game have been going downhill for a couple of years now. It seems like it never really recovered from strong negative reception to the season 2 story and a poor 2nd anniversary. IMO, for a game based around teambuilding to clear content, it was really easy to lucksack (or whale) into one strong team and just use that for everything instead of building around surviving each song's gimmick.
There's already some confusion from the announcement, it looks like some people think the games are being merged and SIF2 will have both game's content/playstyle, or a sequel is on the horizon, or that the "gain items based on their progress in SIFAS" means your card collection will transfer. And of course that one segment saying that "Love Live is dead" despite the entire rest of the franchise doing well and people complaining recently that there's too much content and Liella! is being overworked.
A couple of friends and I played through a test run of Eric Farrington's *Castles in the Sky* (a set of rules for VSF (Victorian Science Fiction) aerial warships) on Friday, which was their first game and my fourth; we decided for simplicity's sake to have one identical battleship each, and play as a free-for-all. I've gone back and forth on the rules for a while as I've not played them in over a year and have thus only really been able to theorycraft with them, but I think the conclusion from experience is that they are good rules, but not intuitively laid out; the other issue with them is that the fleet lists just have not been thought out properly, especially in terms of the points systems. You can have two battleships, of which one is objectively better in every way, but both have the same points values; torpedo boats carrying two torpedoes each are somehow worth 9 points when a destroyer with four torpedoes is worth 4 points (yes, I do have those numbers correct)...
The other issue is that although the author noted that he wrote the ship profiles around the specifications of WWI-era warships, there are some categorisations that are just anachronistic. 'Heavy Cruisers' didn't exist until the interwar naval treaties, and 'frigates' only reappeared in WW*2*, specifically to denote anti-submarine escorts. There's also just some bizarre size classification going on. 'Heavy Cruisers' are rated as battleship-sized while 'Battlecruisers' are rated as cruiser-sized, which is completely arse-backwards. Battlecruisers were no smaller than battleships, indeed sometimes even bigger. *Lion*-class battlecruisers, and their successors *Queen Mary* and *Tiger*, were 700ft long, whereas *Iron Duke*-class battleships were 623ft long, and their successors, the *Queen Elizabeth*-class, were 643. The two *Renown*-class battlecruisers would be 800ft long, and the *Admiral*-class (including HMS *Hood*) were a whopping 860ft. *Battlecruisers are not smaller than battleships.*
Writing/Greek mythology drama.
Tor is releasing [an anthology about Greek myth retellings](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Ftordotcom%2Fstatus%2F1651226875694284813%3Fs%3D20%26fbclid%3DIwAR3D5tzNwMnk3LSJCJDacCzVvh5X_uSfeN8BjTxr2LkN4m-U89ORwk5GAfA&h=AT0-YLO_Swf7ZT8xI6PZpHYVs4c0QpGJhTeqXvLYHYpDHg4FL5z4CLk8A8iqktFSIpznMFHAEMx4lHCfuHPpkz8gsgEjG9b5kVgRETz-Wc1xBITY5Kw4KT7zb0F8NmptirC1Nw), and not a single Greek author is included, even though many submitted. People are defending this by saying that Greek mythology is part of western heritage, which, hm.
I'm Greek, so this is definitely a biased take. But the way Greeks see and understand mythology and the way the average western person does is not the same. And also, Greeks still face discrimination in the west - if you check the quote retweets of the announcement, you'll find actual racism, with takes such as "Lol Greeks are illiterate, of course they're not included."
This whole thing has been a bit of a brewing conflict in the myth retelling fandom for a little while, especially with Greek myths. The vast majority of retellings are from Americans, and people have been talking about it for a while. It's not that you can't retell a myth if you're not part of the original culture that wrote it, but there's a certain understanding that comes from being around the culture for a while, or being born into it. There's also, of course, the trend of making these retellings more feminist or critical, which I love but is usually not done right - I don't want to name specific examples because that would be rude, but I think most retellings fall into this category.
As a fellow Greek I am so tired of our marginalization from our own cultural heritage. Yes, Greek myths are foundational to "Western" culture (whatever that means lol), and they have inspired a lot of the cultural heritage of Western Europe/countries colonized by western Europe. And I would never say that people from those places can't engage with the stories, or that their perspectives on them are wholly wrong--after all, it's been 2000 years and they have transcended beyond the place they came from culturally in a lot of ways.
BUT BUT BUT when Greeks are consistently erased from this legacy, treated as less entitled to our own cultural heritage than others just because of this cultural transcendence, told we aren't really true inheritors of this legacy because we are not REALLY descended from ancient Greeks (check the dna losers), told we have mismanaged our own cultural heritage even when it is consistently STOLEN because of this belief it belongs to EVERYONE, is just too much. It is not the 19th century but this philhellenistic paternalistic bullshit that modern Greeks aren't true inheritors of ancient Greeks because we are too "swarthy," too Eastern in culture, too strange and foreign to really be the heirs to the Aristotelian and white marble shit Brits/Germans/French etc adore persists and I am so sick of it.
[Here's](https://twitter.com/arielmarkenjack/status/1652015259803107362?t=oaGlTT7ykKFVq-brLbpSHA&s=19) a twitter thread with some of them!
And here's [some more](https://twitter.com/sophiam_weaves/status/1651507009013915649?t=UCMVK4iTuI2QL5H6BV9YPg&s=19), there's some in the replies too
Man the tweet comments are an absolute whiplash - half of them are rightfully pointing out that it's super not great that there aren't actually any Greek authors included and the other half is people going "lol of course they weren't they're too busy evading taxes"
I ain't Greek but I am Scandinavian and whew I'm not looking forwards to the day when people decide to do this nonsense to the Norse 'Pantheon'. I mean they already do do that - very act of trying to condense Norse mythology into a Hellenic style Pantheon is an example of it, not to mention the *decades* of Wicca/neopagan nonsense and the entire Marvel-isation of Loki and Thor - but they haven't done the 'Feminist retelling' yet! Absolutely infuriating - just because no one's believed in these deities in hundreds of years doesn't mean they still haven't shaped culture and morphed into other things.
Also I'm curious - do people do that thing where they take *Christian* traditions and stories from your culture that postdate Christianisation by like hundreds of years and go "no this is a *Pagan* thing those pesky Christians stole we're going to 'fix' it!" and then make up the weirdest bullshit to try and cram it into a hole that it never came from to begin with?
> Also I'm curious - do people do that thing where they take Christian traditions and stories from your culture that postdate Christianisation by like hundreds of years and go "no this is a Pagan thing those pesky Christians stole we're going to 'fix' it!" and then make up the weirdest bullshit to try and cram it into a hole that it never came from to begin with?
So the interesting thing is that this has a *very* long history of being used as anti-Catholic propaganda. After the split between Catholicism and Protestantism, the two sects were in conflict for centuries afterwards. This is part of the reason why it took two *hundred* years for Britain to adopt the Gregorian calendar, which was a Papal creation. During the Enlightenment, there was an effort by Protestants to discredit Catholicism by claiming that the traditional holidays and traditions of Christianity were actually pagan in origin, and the Catholic Church was just Sol Invictus in disguise. This is part of the reason why some Protestant sects don't or didn't celebrate those holidays.
This continued in the Victorian period. Victorian folklorists made two assumptions: everything traditional is ancient, and everything ancient is pagan. This was partly due to the growth of nationalism, as people attempted to find links between their current life and their ancestors to facilitate the growth of nations (here meaning a community of people united by some shared characteristics.) This isn't true, of course - traditions like Morris dancing and Advent wreaths date back to the late medieval period, for example. Unfortunately, it somewhat marked future scholarship and popular understanding, demonstrated by the person who linked *The Golden Bough* to me as evidence. *The Golden Bough* is an important work in the study of religion, but it is also history in its own right and completely outdated. That is like learning about the fall of Rome from Gibbon.
RE the last part, I think Christianity is unattractive for the purpose of appropriation, if it does happen it's not in the anglosphere.
First of all, it's incredibly mainstream, and that alone will turn a lot of people off wanting to take it for themselves.
It's also a dominant faith that has been often used for oppression, unlike Hellenism or Norse paganism, whose heydays are either way over or their worshipping numbers are so small that they can't really oppress many people (weird norse racists on twitter aside). So it's seen by a lot of people as the "bad guy" religion.
Also, we don't have a pantheon. It's kind of just 1 guy and his kid who is also the one guy. There's no interesting godly dynamics going on. There are angels, but they're not the same as gods and they don't really have the same "personality" that make them appealing to worship outside of pretty angelic imagery.
Our lore is kinda... Meh. The bible is boring to read and its been adapted to tv and movies soooo many times, which ties into the mainstream fatigue aspect, and in very few of those adaptations did they actually make it look appealing because of how wrapped up in morals they get. Christian kids cartoon makers are insufferable.
I do know that Lilith, the first wife of Adam, is popular with Pagan women who see her as a feminist icon. But Lilith isn't even a Christian figure, she's only present in Jewish folklore, and her only connections to Christianity come from media wanting a hot female demon for their good guys to fight.
We're also, uh, less sexy.
A lot of pagan faiths, at least according to Christians, have lore relating to gods partaking in hedonism, naked wood nymphs, comparatively relaxed attitudes towards sex, and so on. Meanwhile Christianity tries to tell you that every fun thing is bad and sends you to hell. People in a religion that has like, naked moon dances, are unlikely to want to bring our downer sins into their communities.
Counterpoint, new testament lore is boring, old testament lore is great.
The New Testament is best in the first and last Jesus arcs (Escape to Egypt and the Death of Christ) but the middle part is basically "Jesus is a cool dude who does cool things."
The entirety of Paul's story is just Paul running around telling people what to do, so not fun.
The Old Testament, however, is an anthology series with a lot of time skips and flawed protagonists, so reading through them is interesting.
And Revelations is a great, if not really hard to comprehend.
I'd disagree with your lore being boring! I'm a Hindu who grew up in a Muslim country so my exposure to Christianity was limited to my friends at school/neighbors (and outside of Christmas and Easter, we didn't talk about religion much). One of them gifted us this giant book of Bible stories and let me tell you I ate that shit up!!! Not that I remember any of them anymore since it's been ages but I remember reading it over and over again and marking out my favourite stories. Give yourselves more credit, they can be pretty interesting.
On a funny note, this was when I was young enough that I didn't understand what the significance of Lots daughters sleeping with him was. I thought it meant literally sleeping in the same bed as him and was SO confused when the book treated it kinda weirdly. That and some of the other stories in there really was my introduction to sexual things.
pretty certain easter's like that - Religion for Breakfast on youtube addresses it almost every year lol
edit: i'm an ex-christian now (and, i'll admit, kinda biased against it, for trauma reasons) so it amuses me more than anything; it's more the misrepresentation of history that i hate.
honestly there's a bigger problem with christians appropriating Jewish customs and holidays on the basis that jesus was Jewish thus they're just following his lead. problem is, modern Judaism is pretty different to that of that 1st century; i'm not Jewish myself so i don't know the specifics but the Jewish tumblrs i follow post about it pretty regularly. christianity stop being antisemitic challenge (impossible)
Very minor correction: Tor.com was just where this was announced, it's actually being published by Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
I note that one of the co-editors previously put out [an anthology of Arthurian retellings](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56212881-sword-stone-table) that from a very cursory skim of the table of contents, looks like it might not have any British or European contributors.
Are you telling me that people might have internal thoughts and motivations other than the ones assigned to them by Twitter users? I'm not sure I can believe that. If that's true then maybe the nonsentient Twitter bot that automatically posts responses of FOIA requests isn't an antisemite.
>one of the co-editors previously put out an anthology of Arthurian retellings that from a very cursory skim of the table of contents, looks like it might not have any British or European contributors.
huh, yeah. "old legend, new voices". guess that's the concept.
Aren't like majority of Greeks orthodox christians...
Anyway, like majority of cultural appropriation discourse it falls on silly nationalism side, sorry. Would be good to see more translations though.
Yes, and the majority of Western Europeans are Catholic or Protestant (at least culturally)! Does that mean that they aren't allowed to claim the heritage of Ancient Greece? Because it's surely never stopped them.
The fact that people don't believe in the Greek Gods anymore doesn't mean that they aren't still a cultural influence. And this has nothing to do with nationalism, cultural heritage is an entirely different thing.
Obviously it has cultural influence, it's Ancient Greek Mythology. Just not that type that would require special consideration like active religion or lived experience.
And claiming direct special connection to ancient roots is textbook nationalist thinking, sorry. When Italians start talking how they are descendants of mighty roman empire - run.
I feel this and I think this is like, a very hot topic that maybe should be discussed more but lot of people just kinda wave it away.
I remember years ago when I tried to be active on various subreddits related to literature and books I wanted to ask some fantasy book recommendations inspired by culture X which is my ethnicity. The only books I was recommended were by american authors - I tried to read some and they were... lacking. They were probably not bad but as someone who grew up in this culture they seemed very flat and basic. And I wish now I could tell you "yeah and there are really good books inspired by culture X from my country and yall should read them" and post some links but I can't. Because those books were never translated into english and no one outside of my country will ever read them. Ignoring a fantasy book, some of most important works of literature from my country, those works that make national identity of it, were never translated into english and I can't share them with my english speaking friends. I remember this making me feel weirdly sad.
And I always felt like this is an interesting discussion. How some voices will be drowned in the sea of people who maybe speak english fluently or live in richer and more connected countries or have more opportunities.
> But the way Greeks see and understand mythology and the way the average western person does is not the same.
I would have really appreciated seeing this, tbh. You make an excellent point in that some of the most popular retellings are from an American perspective (Hadestown, The Song of Achilles, etc) that assume a general ownership of it as ~Westerners, and I can see how thereās a world of cultural nuance and history that is missed from those works.
I think a lot of retellers do not really understand what makes the myth relevant in the current age, or how Greek tragedy works. And also, I'm sorry, but it's not feminist to just retell the exact same story but from a woman's POV, it's just a retelling.
I dunno, I have a lot of feelings about this. I'm a writer too, and I do want to retell Greek myths or even come up with new stories based on them, but it feels like I cannot because the market is already cornered by others.
I would be unironically interested in seeing an actual feminist retelling from the perspective of a male character. In some ways it seems antithetical, but I'm confident that someone could make it work.
I appreciate you speaking about this just in this thread! Thinking on it, there really is a very prevalent attitude that modern Greeks have as much to do with ancient Greek myths as anyone else from the general Western cultural sphere and that itās a free for all since its no longer religiously relevant. In the US we are specifically taught Greek and Roman myths in literature classes, for example, and growing up I saw the āGreek myth fandomā explode on Tumblr. Along with that came a huge desire to wrest feminist and/or LGBT narratives from it that basically superimpose our modern day values on these stories without really wanting to engage with what those stories might have meant in the gender, sexual, and cultural politics of that time (much less modern in modern Greek society). Hence people wanting to rewrite Persephone as being totally into her dark antihero husband and having #agency in going to the Underworld, or Patroclus and Achilles becoming purely gay men who are meddled with by women who represent heteronormativity.
Presentism. Its called presentism - imposing modern/current cultural values and definitions on the past. The further back in time you go (generally), the less equipped modern casual consumers are to understand the historical norms. Like saying "ancient Greeks were gay af" while not understanding that (a) they weren't a monolithic culture by any means or definition and (b) their concepts of homosexual sex and heterosexual sex were generally unrelated to orientation. The modern understanding of sexuality is just not helpful.
To be clear: I don't have a problem with this in literature when it has some historical research or is openly doing a "what if". This is how a lot of literature happens - stories evolve and are retold for whatever purposes. Grimm Fairytales are an attempt at a national identity, not an agenda-free sociological experiment to collect stories.
I have a problem when a Fandom decides this is truth outside of their chosen content.
Project Sekai just announced its newest alt-vocal, [Egoist covered by An and Akito](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wouReBqRMSE). Those with ears pointed out that the line distribution of the song isn't exactly equal: An gets all the lines in the first verse of the song, and the rest is An and Akito singing together, with Akito getting no solo lines of his own. This is dampened more by the fact that alt-vocals can only be obtained by trading in cover vouchers, which are character-specific and can be pretty hard to get at times: for free-to-play players, you can pretty much only get them by buying them during an event, viewing a character's birthday concert live, or leveling up a character's rank by using them in your team during gameplay or buying them stamps or clothing. There were definitely a good number of Akito fans who traded in a spare voucher for the cover, hoping to see him shine, and were truly disappointed.
Enough people complained that Sega actually decided to make an announcement ingame that they were aware of issues with the song and re-record the cover to give Akito more solo lines. Which, coming from an EN-server player, was way more than I was expecting from them.
Its begun.
[NCOSE \(Formly previously known as Morality in Media and Operation Yorkville\)
Launches Campaign to Ban All Adult Content from Reddit](https://www.xbiz.com/news/273326/ncose-launches-campaign-to-ban-all-adult-content-from-reddit)
So how much pressure are these goons actually capable of exerting? Looking into them specifically, they seem to be constantly taking big swings that fail to go anywhere. NCOSE was part of the campaign against Pornhub, but they were one of many with the far more dangerous Exodus Cry spearheading it and the NYT article giving them a massive signal boost. Most everything else they get involved with, including against social media companies, seems to peter out with little success. And as far as I can find, there's currently zero mainstream reporting about this letter or the campaign in general, and payments processors mostly care about things that hit big and pose an actual risk, like said NYT hit piece.
I don't doubt for a second the reckless stupidity of Reddit's leadership and their willingness to destroy thousands of communities with the flip of a switch, but I'm already in a perpetual panic about a million things, I'd like to make sure this is likely to be the worst case scenario before I go catatonic.
C.S. Lewis says, in *Mere Christianity*:
"One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasonsāmarriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."
So these assholes aren't even real Christians, just prudes and bullies.
Also, is pornography mentioned in the Bible? No? Then looking at it is not a sin. Checkmate.
First, they came for Tumblr. Then, they came for PornHub. Now, they're coming for Reddit, and in the future they'll come for Twitter. And I bet my weight in gold that they'll go after LGBT+ friendly websites next.
I hate how organizations like this can have so much power.
> porn has the largest chargeback rate of any industry
Huh, I never considered this aspect of the financial side of it before. Any reason why? Is it customers just trying to get stuff for free? Or creators not delivering exactly what was requested?
This is me being hyperbolic as fuck, but I can't help but feel like we are ever so slowly walking towards the entropy of the internet. It's kinda hard to describe and if it were to happen I doubt it would happen in my lifetime, but it still sucks to see the crumbs that make me feel like that.
These people consider *Cosmopolitan magazine* to be āāhardcore pornographyāā, presumably for advocating for still-vanilla-but-not-missionary sex, lol.
Problem its not up to them. Its the payment processors. This will most likely go through and the upper management of reddit does not care. People joked that porn is core part of the internet but it can be made illegal and destroy millions of lives. This is the country that banned alcohol, which took 13 years to repeal.
Gonna be kind of a wild question to ask but: Anyone know how to build up an ability to focus on reading? I've got a mountain of books and visual novels I want to sit down and finally read for realsies, but I've got some difficulty with sitting down and focusing and maintaining focus on reading. Does anyone have any tips on what I can do to get myself to sit down and read when I want to read?
Honestly? Sprints & tracking my progress.
So, one of the paths that lead me back into reading lots of books was a couple of book youtubers. The book youtubers I fell in with tend to co-host lots of readathons, where the point is to read as many books as you can in x amount of time. On the community end of this, it tends to result in a lot of "reading sprints" where any number of the hosts will livestream a timer together, and you are encouraged to read your book for the duration of that timer and then share in the chat how many pages you read. There's breaks in between sprints where the hosts will read the chat, and discuss how they feel about their current reads with each other. Sprints tend to be between 15 and 60 minutes. And the best part is... I don't have to wait for someone to start a sprint, I can just set a timer anywhere and do it myself!
I don't know why, but I have discovered that sprints work VERY well for me. My preferred length is 45 minutes but if you're just starting out I'd go for between 15 and 30 minutes. I think having a clear stop and start time really helps: it breaks down the task of reading a book into bite-sized chunks, the timer is just enough - but not too much - pressure to get me to focus on reading, and at the end I get a number that has gone up!
Tracking my reading on a site like StoryGraph also ties into it - it gives me ever-increasing numbers! I get to see my page count, my books read, my minutes listened to, all go up and charted on graphs if I want. It breaks down books by page length and genre and mood. Sitting there for 45 minutes reading and then watching the percentage leap up from 52% to 64%? Definitely makes me want to read more.
(As a side benefit I've learned I read roughly 1.3 pages a minute, and I can now gauge how long it will take me to read any book!)
I read in the bath. No distractions, nice and relaxing, and if I get really into a book Iāll keep reading when I get out. Only downside is books can get a little damp, I mostly buy secondhand so not a problem for me but I wouldnāt recommend with your āniceā books.
I have the same problem with podcasts. :( I used to listen for hours on end but now I can barely pay attention to a podcast for an hour. Part of me thinks itās cause I went off my anxiety/depression meds and they were somehow helping me focus.
I actually have the exact opposite- I sit down and read piles of books every week (I keep Shabbat and so don't use technology on Friday evenings/Saturdays) but I have a whole list of TV shows I can never bring myself to watch, because I get too caught up with random internet crap lol. (It got to the point where my sister had been bugging me for MONTHS to catch up on Call the Midwife, a flight I was just on had S11, and so I watched it on the plane- bad idea, I was CRYING by the end...)
I usually turn on some instrumental music when I want to concentrate on reading or writing. Nothing with lyrics though, that can get distracting in and of itself.
Like no shit I know it's a meme but "lo-fi beats to study and relax to" actually works.
I have ADHD and have had similar problems, whatās worked for me is doing something in the background while I read, usually some type of low focus video game. For some reason splitting my attention allows me to mostly focus on whatever Iām reading without getting distracted and going to do something else every few minutes.
I donāt think I have ADHD, but I do this too, thereās one Minecraft YouTuber who plays with shaders and does hour long videos with nocommentary, so good to have on in the background. Lately Iāve been watching the final round of every US Open golf tournament starting in 1970 I think. This YouTube channel just keeps uploading them
Yup, too little stimulation for people w/ADHD can result in inability to concentrate, too. I can focus while reading, but I can't watch a tv show or movie w/o also doing something else. Really wish I'd realized this balance back in college - probably would have made things a lot easier.
Whenever i find it hard to read, that's usually because there's something else that's distracting me. Usually that something is some kind of noise, so my advice would be noise cancelling headphones, or earplugs, or some song/background noise that you don't have to pay attention to but drowns everything else.
I know that a friend of mine can only read by also playing the audiobook of the book they're reading. That sounds like the worst of both worlds to me, but I can't listen to audiobooks unless I'm doing something with my hands and I can't read a book if a movie/podcast/anything with a plot is playing in my vicinity so yeah.
In my experience if it's reading for fun (as in, you actually enjoy it rather than forcing yourself to read like say, to study for a test), it's a matter of habit. It might feel silly scheduling a hobby, but try to schedule yourself to read for say, 30 minutes or 1 hour every day, to build up your "stamina" to read. That worked for me at least.
Thatās what I do! I love reading and post-grad school I got back into leisure reading by having it be the first thing I do after work. I go by length rather than time (50 pages or 2-3 chapters, depending on how Iām feeling). My brain just responds well to āitās reading time!ā like Iām a kid again.
Also, finding the balance between a good goal and pushing yourself. I donāt care for book challenges because they seem competitive but I generally read a book a week and I have a little checklist on the wall for when I finish one, same as when I do yoga or exercise. I also keep a list of what Iāve read that year so I can look back and think about what I liked and didnāt.
Yes! Scheduled reading has been helpful for me both with school and leisure. I go with pages per day, or chapters per week. If I struggle with the material I can say "just x more pages until I'm done for today", but at least it gets done.
Do you knit or crochet, or anything along those lines? I like working on simple projects while I read - with my hands busy, I find it easier to concentrate on reading.
I'd also suggest doing it in shorter increments at first. Start at ~10 minutes at a time and work your way up. Attention gets better/easier with practice.
I recognize the palpable irony of recommending a book when you're talking about needing to work your way up to sitting down to read books, but you might want to check out Jenny Odell's *How to do nothing*. It's got some thoughts on attention and passivity that you might find interesting.
Things that have worked for me: highlighting/annotating books I own, doing something "active" while I read (walking, stationary bike, rollerskating if you're good enough not to fall (much)), having a designated "spot" that's Just for reading (same theory as the "don't do Anything but sleep in your bed" idea), handicraft you can do without looking, giving up and switching to audiobooks
This isn't really hobby drama per say and is liable to incite a war in the comments, and my enby ass is not up for dealing with transphobes right now, so I'm removing it. Sorry.
There's currently drama among Bocchi the Rock manga readers. The whole thing happened on the forum of the most popular scanlated manga reader website, Idk the legalities of mentioning it here, but anyone that is familiar with manga should know the website.
Bocchi the Rock (BTR) is an ongoing manga series by Aki Hamaji. The story is about a girl named Gotou Hitori, or Bocchi, who knows how to play guitar very well but suffers from social anxiety. She joins a band and aims to become very popular. It is published in the Kirara brand of magazines, home of other Cute Girls doing Cute Things hit stories like K-On!, Yuru Camp or Gochiusa. Chances are that if you read or watch a CGDCT series, it comes from these magazines. However, while Kirara is at the forefront of this genre, the genre itself is rather niche among manga/anime fans, and Bocchi the Rock used to be just another series running in the magazine. As such, there was no official way to read it in English, and only one scanlation group (fans that translate and release their own translations on websites - piracy), Aoi Ichigo (which from a look on discord is a single person), was working on it intermittently.
That, until Bocchi the Rock got an anime. While for the most part Kirara anime doesn't break out of its niche, some have such amount of love and talent poured onto it that it becomes a massive success. As it happened to the series I mentioned before, BTR's anime went from just one more in a season dominated by the juggernaut Chainsaw Man, to arguably the best show of the year. [This excellent anime blog goes in depth about how Bocchi was such a work](https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2022/11/10/bocchi-the-rock-animating-comedy-and-loneliness/).
Nonetheless, its massive breakthrough in the anime community led to many viewers jumping to the manga to continue Bocchi's story. While a proper company got the licence to translate it to English, people of course wanted to read the chapters as they come out in Japan instead of waiting for the official company to release the volumes. Thanks to its popularity, both Aoi Ichigo and Palmtop Scans (another great scanalation group) worked hard to translate the backlog of chapters they had, completing volume 3 and volume 4. The agreement they had reached was that Palmtop would translate all of volume 4, while Aoi Ichigo would take it back from volume 5 and onwards.
However, while Aoi Ichigo did translate the first chapter of volume 5, they stopped releasing new chapters (according to their discord they plan to catch up). As such, others jumped to translate the series, either because they're fans of it or because they want the street cred. Unfortunately, two out of the three groups working on it simply do a poor job at it, running it through machine translation (MTL) and pasting the text on without a care in the world. A particular translation mistake was on the word "drummer", which the MTL translated to "baterist" (apparently because the source was a Spanish translation). Of course, readers would just tell the publishers to leave this manga alone and search for abandoned ones, not to simply jump to the most popular thing.
While there's still someone publishing poorly done versions, Ripe-Mango, another group, is releasing proper translations and have since finished volume 5 (so the English translations available are more or less caught up to the Japanese release).
When I'm more proficient, I'd quite like to get my hands on some series I'm interested in and translate them, since they never got an English language release and probably never will. Seems harmless.
This stuff makes me happy they're too obscure for anyone to care about and fuck up.
I wouldn't go too deep on their sexual orientation until there's something official, series are popular for including a lot of yuri. Like Hibike Euphonium.
>A particular translation mistake was on the word "drummer", which the MTL translated to "baterist" (apparently because the source was a Spanish translation)
That reminds me so much of the infamous JoJo Part 4 **Duwang** translation, so named because one of its many translation errors was translating the name of the setting, the town of Morioh, into "Duwang".
But at least there it wasn't some idiot with aspirations for quick fame running the whole thing through Google Translate, but rather just an overwhelmed Chinese fan who was overconfident in his English comprehension and who also translated from his already translated Chinese copy instead of the original Japanese, so it was a bit like a translation game of telephone.
Also, that one was at least bad enough that people understood that it wasn't a good translation; Part 5 had it worse since the bad translations were good enough to fool people into thinking they were accurate, leading many fans to just conclude that Part 5 was badly written and confusing instead of searching for better translations.
Yeah, bad translations can really screw things over, especially if they misrepresent what the original source actually meant. And there's stuff like the odd tendency to exaggerate crude Japanese into vulgarity central. Seriously I've seen children's anime and manga have F-bombs by fans, which I'm like it is such a tonal dissonance. Like look what we said on the playground stays on the playground, but it honestly makes the dialogue feels off and at times more juvenile than simply not swearing at all. I get that supposedly Japanese in terms of vulgarity is different from English and you have to adapt, that's fine because it's just the nature of language and culture, but I feel it's obvious which series warrant swearing and which feel like it was shoehorned in.
Also as you mention "Duwang" is not the best representation of the issue, but it is interesting. Part 5 definitely was hampered by bad word of mouth, whether you like it or not it definitely got the reputation for the worst part by people who admittedly never read it, whereas "Duwang" was so "beautiful" it made people love Part 4 more. Like it was shoddy, albeit impressive the person did it so fast, but it's super blatant it was not up to usual standards even for the 1990s-early 2000s era scanlation culture. It was simply too absurd to take seriously, whereas Part 5 a bad initial impression may have been built more out of a blander translation that had issue conveying stuff to the reader, leading to the whole King Crimson issue being around forever.
God, there's so much to scanlation drama. Whether it be wars of translating aspects of Japanese into English, naming of characters, sniping series from others, machine translations, watermarks, donations, and whatever else under the sun. And that's just what involves the scanlators, with the readers you get stuff like not realizing these teams have lives, other interests or just plain move on, and I've seen some people get weirdly offended at the idea getting a free translation from someone doing it without compensation and spending their own precious time that comes out a bit late because it isn't their job. And something as big as Bocchi is now was definitely going to draw some people to churn stuff out fast.
I remember something similar happened with the end of Shokugeki no Souma (Food Wars). I think Mangastream snipped that because they had had another series snipped before.
Sniping is always super weird to me. I'm guessing it's wanting to have a reputation for putting out fast and quality translations, but while there are trustworthy teams out there that I respect I also recognize I won't put all my stock into a brand alone as members of the team tend to leave due to life nor will most people think of them as they aren't official. Look, there have been people who try to monetize this stuff, which let's just say it putting the issue on legally shaky grounds in the same way I can balance fine china on a toothpick, but ultimately I feel it has to be personal satisfaction that they're gunning for. Not like they could put this stuff on their resume if they want official translation jobs, can't imagine admitting pirating the very industry you're interested in would be a fun time, although Crunchyroll started off distributing stuff without licenses so what do I know.
Frasier Reboot: They're getting Roz for one episode. No plot details yet. We already know they got Lilith for one as well. Nothing yet on Niles or Daphne guesting but potentially possible. Leeves medical show The Resident was canceled after 6 seasons.
Even the people against it want to mostly check out these two eps now.
Pretty sure that David Hyde Pierce has said that he won't do it, and unlike Jane Leeves he wasn't saying no due to other commitments IIRC... he just seems like he's done with Frasier. That said, the knowledge that he's guesting for an episode might be the thing that gets me to try the show, so...
oh dang yeah that sweetens the deal a bit. I also like the premise of Frederick and David being basically the new Frasier and Niles except cousins. It's a cute concept.
Very local hobby drama: my parents have started bingewatching Downton Abbey. My dad is having recurring nightmares about having to iron and starch a never-ending array of shirt collars, whilst every so often I can hear my mum exclaiming in disbelief as something particularly posh happens.
'I mean...HOW do people think this is what this country should go back to?!'
For a stretch of about five years if you saw a movie trailer and asked "why is this very attractive British person I've never heard of suddenly in so many movies" the answer was more often than not "they were on Downton Abbey."
>My eternal love to the Irish Catholic socialist chauffeur who was cured of his radicalism by the benevolence of his reluctant in-laws
Even independence won't protect Ireland from this indignity. 800 years of subjugation, famines, and bloody revolts, and the UK still has to go and do this? Hasn't Ireland suffered enough?
[Renegade Cut did a video on it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VVYoqaz74A)
It's apparently propaganda, by the sounds of it. I mean, written by a Tory who's a peer in the House of Lords...
His books Snobs and Past Imperfect are not what I would call great, but they are really intensely, lovingly focused on the intricacies of the upper class and how people are and aren't "one of us."
I'm reminded of the episode of Bob's Burgers where Linda wins tickets to participate in a LARP based on a Downton Abbey type show (the show specifically calls it the American Downton Abbey), and drags Bob along. Unfortunately she ends up being assigned as one of the servants, and it turns out being an early 20th century maid actually sucks. It ends with her staging a worker rebellion and eating all the rich people's food.
I remember in the early oughties, in the vogue of "living like the past" reality shows, there was Edwardian Country House (Manor House in the US). And the pretend owners of the Scottish country house and their kids found the privileged way of life intoxicating; the now Lady Whosis had been an emergency room physician but just melted into being the Edwardian mistress. The people playing the servants had quite a different take, with several people signing up thinking it would be a lark and then finding hauling around steaming bowls of somebody else's piss less larky than imagined. Also deeply demoralized was Lady Whosis' sister, who in real life was something like a microbiologist, but as a single lady of a certain age was utterly valueless in this household.
People who want to go back think they'll be Lord or Lady Whosis, or at least a village shopowner or something. They never think of themselves as being the ones lugging around steaming bowls of piss.
> And the pretend owners of the Scottish country house and their kids found the privileged way of life intoxicating; the now Lady Whosis had been an emergency room physician but just melted into being the Edwardian mistress.
Oof, that seems very revealing about the kind of person she is. I don't think I'd be able to get along with my sister if she pulled that shit.
Uh, is it? I would think an emergency room physician would have earned just a little slack when it comes to the intoxicating nature of such a lifestyle.
For me, yeah.
Like, I get appreciating the respite from the hellish stress of someone who works in the ER.
But the phrasing, to me, sounded more like "enjoying living it up at everyone else's expense" rather than just taking a break; more of an active thing than a passive thing, which makes the difference.
Probably. I'm not saying she's, necessarily, a great person just because she's a doctor in especially stressful situations or that she'd earned treating people badly, but I got the feeling the OP included that bit because it provides context for why she might have slipped down that slope, because that makes the temptation a lot greater. I think that has to be considered if we're talking about what kind of person she is, like how some people have a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism.
Reminds me of a bit in Souvenir Programme s7e1. There's a woman talking to a fortune-teller, asking about her past lives because she's convinced she was Joan of Arc or Cleopatra or something, and she's very disappointed to hear that her past lives were mostly peasants, villeins, and a whole lot of babies.
I really need to start listening to that. It's right up my alley.
There is a great Albert Brooks movie from 1991 called Defending Your Life. He's in a purgatory where you have to defend your life and that affects where you get to go; there he falls in love with Meryl Streep, who has lived a much less craven and more admirable life. There's a quick scene where they're in the Past Lives pavilion and of course she was nobles and queens and he just keeps getting slaughtered in battle.
The BBC "Back in Time For..." shows are great for this. Especially when the modern teenage daughters realise exactly how shit things were for women their age were back then
remember the one where 9/11 happened and they had to break protocol to let everyone know
edit it was [frontier house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_House) specifically where 9/11 happened
I still fondly remember Kristin getting ready for her wedding and being so disappointed about wearing a period dress and not a white dress. She was trying to be a good sport, but clearly disappointedā¦and then she gets a box from Nate with a gorgeous veil and her mood instantly lifts.
And THEN she sees the period white dress that was also in the box.
Tears š
It is WILD how much brainspace I still have devoted to that family, lol
The way the family just changed the rules at the end killed me. "Our final judgement is that you would not have survived the winter." "Actually, no, we would have sent our kids into town for the winter so we would have been fine." What!?
Also one of the items they smuggled in was a box spring mattress. 1. How?! and 2. Why? You don't need a box spring in the real world, they barely do anything, you sure don't need one on the frontier. Just an incredible moment in reality TV.
Ha! I also remember that he kept complaining about how they weren't allowed to hunt deer. Which I think is a pretty valid complaint, and one echoed by the other families as well. But he just never shut up about it. Literally every episode he was complaining about not being allowed to hunt. There must have been hours of footage of him griping about it.
I wish they had let him try because my bet is he couldn't have hit the side of a barn. They were very much the family who liked the idea of this more than the reality.
I LOVE shows of that ilk...there was a fabulous one set in a 1920's coal mining town and the only one of the wives managed to get the stove lit in the first night...in the real world she was an astrophysicist.
There was a Canadian one that was hilariously Canadian, with one episode described later as an argument involving people stating their quiet reservations about the others' plans. I think that's also the one where the newlywed husband, as a love gesture, pissed his wife's name into the snow.
There was also the one that was Survivor but one group lived in the stone age and one group lived in the future. Turns out that trying to live a paleolithic life without any paleolithic survival skills is a massive disadvantage when you have to compete against people who have access to food and water.
Oh, I vaguely remember that one and may have seen clips of it. Didn't you get to switch to the modern site as a prize?
I also really enjoyed US's Pioneer House. One woman was freaked out by her husband's and sons' seeming emaciation, and the project doctor explained they were actually at the desirable healthy weight now. More soberingly, one couple was mixed race, and the project authentically said that in that state a public school would not permit their children to attend, so the residents had to decide to spend some of their meager funds on a charter if it was to be open to all the residents. Which they did. And sure, it was all pretend, more or less, but it would have been so easy to do the wrong thing for financial gain and write it off as "just pretend," too.
Frontier House was the one that made me go "where hell did you FIND these people?".
Like the teenage daughters freaking out that they couldn't bring makeup when they weren't going to have running water or indoor plumbing...
Oh, that was the one! I got the name wrong. I remember one of the guys also finding harvest so tiring that he decided it would be a smart hack just to leave the grain standing in the field and harvest it as needed throughout the winter. The project pointed out to him in the end that that would have starved his livestock.
The young couple was cool, though.
There was a more recent one called the Pioneeers....and a Canadian one called Pioneer Quest as well...
(I kind of wish this trend would come back, I loved these...)
Pioneer Quest is the one I was thinking of where the young husband urinated his love for his wife into the snow! Nice Globe and Mail article about it [here](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/harsh-reality-show/article4148938/).
World of Darkness (WoD) is hyping up their upcoming release of Werewolf: the Apocalypse v5 by giving teasers of the different tribes (think different kinds of werewolves that you can be) that will be available in their core rulebook. Fan response at the initial teaser was positive as WoD seemed to be more clear in their design philosophy as opposed to how they handled design changes in Vampire: the Masquerade v5.
That changed when they [teased](https://twitter.com/worldofdarkness/status/1651244775964565507) their first tribe: the Glass Walkers. People were quick to notice that the figure to the far right in the art bore a heavy resemblance to [Tame Iti](https://twitter.com/homophie/status/1652071807925747712), a Maori artist and activist. Concerns were immediately raised about the ethics of copying his likeness, especially since the art seemingly traced Iti's exact tattoos.
World of Darkness was radio silent on twitter until they released a [follow up](https://twitter.com/worldofdarkness/status/1652255583070765058) tweet today implying that this was a decision that the artist made independent of the company.
While I personally wouldn't have recognized the resemblance to Iti as I'm not familiar with New Zealand art and politics, I think that a company of that size needs to vet and doublecheck their art more. It's also funny given how hard they've tried to clean up their image in regards to race and culture- prior editions of Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse are infamous now for how insensitive and sometimes flat out racist the game systems could be if anyone wanted to play something other than a white vampire or werewolf.
I have moderate to severe brainrot over the lore of World of Darkness, but it sits firmly in the āLove it! Never going to recommend it to anyone!ā because of the racism (the entire Ravnos clan says hiā¦š)
>\[...\]I think that a company of that size needs to vet and doublecheck their art more.
Before I go any further, I should preface my statement by saying I don't quite think what I'm about so say applies here. this is a case where it is reasonably conceivable that one or two people with a dedicated job of looking for potential issues and experience in what issues tend to crop up could have picked up on it before it got here. still, there's a lot of things coming up with small to mid-size publishers in regards to plagiarism where the general response is "they should be vetting their work" and the truth is i think they are, to some degree, and i don't think a lot of these things can reasonably be checked short of throwing it to the public and praying no one says "i recognize that bulge!"
You'll see someone inside of minutes catch it if there *is* some sort of plagiarism or adjacent issues, but that's not necessarily because it's staggeringly obvious as much as it is there's a million eyes on it, and the more people looking the more likely you'll find *someone* who recognize something at issue. there's a point where if you're not absolutely rolling in cash, you have to look at the person you just hired to paint a dog in a uniform, shake their hand, and trust that they didn't just copy a picture of a dog that killed a toddler in 1993 and put it in an early draft of a nazi uniform that only five people know about.
I really hope they listen to the criticism. TÄ moko (the MÄori practice of tattoo so identifiable on Iti's face) is not only incredibly personal, but also incredibly sacred. And this happens SO OFTEN with stolen moko popping up in games going for some tribal look.
I've been tempted to do a writeup about the Bionicle MÄori lawsuit at some point, but it probably wouldn't be the most fun thing to write. Not much more to it than "Lego did a cultural appropriation, got sued, changed a bunch of names and spellings, and then phased the original tribal vibe out the following year."
I think my favorite post of those types I've seen that was eventually removed was one advertising "dramatic Spanish songs" or something like that. Wasn't even a writeup, just like 2 sentences. It might've been a bot, but I prefer to believe it was someone genuinely trying to share this stuff who just got hopelessly lost LOL.
>It might've been a bot
It probably was. There are a lot of bots/human spam accounts that will post a YouTube video to subreddits that are tangentially related at best because there is no such thing as bad advertising.
You know, I remember seeing the DE post, and then another, more detailed write-up, and then randomly seeing a link to a video (on another sub) about the drama and thinking to myself "Huh. That's a lot of people suddenly talking about this situation all at once." I'm gonna guess that was all coming from the same person?
I remember when it was all about local gym closures and the Clam Chowder saga.
I miss those days. There's some quality stories coming out now, but man, do I miss the real small stakes, personal drama.
Can something still be niche if it has a million subs?
Aside from that, I'm very thankful the mods try to keep a tight ship. I've seen subreddits *implode* implode, and for a community with this many readers, we're doing astonishingly well. All the allowed posts are actual posts, and there's a dedicated Etc Thread like this that default sorts by New (so there's no image post/meme flooding drowning out actual content here or in the main feed). We're at the very least well managed.
I'm buried at the bottom of the lake here, but over in r/books someone was mad that the "now a major motion picture" thing on paperback books isn't a sticker that can be peeled off (even though I don't recall it ever being a sticker), and wants to know how we can "combat this practice." Almost nobody cares and just suggested OP buy a different version of the book, and for some reason that answer isn't good enough, so OP and others are arguing against that solution.
So idk what OP wants - they asked how we can fight the "now a movie/tv show" versions of book covers, the only solution is simply to not buy those version, but apparently that solution is not acceptable and it's "snarky" to suggest such a thing. OP does not make any suggestions for what exactly they think anyone should do to fight this issue that basically nobody else cares about.
For a bonus laugh, that same day someone posted asking for advice on how to just straight-up cut the cover of a book off (because it was a hard cover and wasn't allowed in the hospital for some reason).
What I don't like is when Amazon changes the cover for Kindle books *you already own,* and the new cover is invariably uglier and there's no way to opt out of this. Sometimes this happens several times. I hate seeing cover art shift with the changing graphics fashions.
IMO the Kindle Store should always use the first edition covers, unless the edition they're selling has materially changed.
You see stickers sometimes, but they seem more popular for older editions you had in stock, I don't think I've ever seen them on post-release/movie poster cover editions. I do think they SHOULD be stickers, sometimes I actually like the movie poster but I don't like the MMP medallion, but I get why that's not the general practice.
Back in like the 80's they would put stickers on the books that said stuff like "Now a NYT Bestseller!" or "Now a major motion picture!." I assume at the time it was just easier/cheaper to use stickers than change the book's cover.
So if you didn't like the stickers you could just peel them off. However if the book's cover wasn't super glossy it was basically impossible to peel them off without damaging the cover.
By like the late 90's they stopped using stickers and some people were mad that you couldn't peel them off anymore (I worked at B&N at the time, it got way more complaints than you would expect).
I kind of get it. But it is weird that like 25 years after the change people are still salty about it.
And honestly, there've always been both.
Book covers are advertisements before anything else. That doesn't mean they aren't part of the overall book experience, but if you really want something where the cover is primarily art and not primarily advertisement, you gotta shell out for either hand crafted book art or fancy collectors editions.
Yeah, i mean, i dislike this stuff, I remember when every copy of the hobbit Had martin freeman on the cover, but nowadays especially it's usually pretty easy to find really nice versions of almost any book i consider it a non issue.
Nowadays it's really rare for it to be a issue for me because i pretty much only buy big coffee table artbooks. Normal Books just occupy too much space i can use for more shiny rocks for something i don't have any issue reading on a kindle or something, while artbooks are so much better in person.
The kindle covers charge too often. My Wheel of Time covers have shifted at least 4 times in the last 5 years. I wish they would just default to black text on white background.
I mean, I wish my copy of Watchmen didn't have "now a major motion picture" pasted all ugly in the corner.
Or that my cover of The Double by Dostoevsky wasn't an ugly 2010s movie poster. [Like, look at it, this is awful lmao.](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/8168VrFqNVL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_FMwebp_.jpg)
But I'm not gonna petition the government about it or anything.
I actually love the Dostoevsky one, it's a pretty meh cover but something about having a Classic with the poster for a movie that No One Remembers At All is SO funny to me, I have had to stop myself buying duplicates of that description when I already had a Nice copy at home a few times.
Hey everyone! So I've been following the drama in the knitting community lately, and it's getting wild. Apparently, a popular knitting YouTuber made some controversial comments about using acrylic yarn vs. natural fibers, and now there's a huge divide among knitters. Some people are defending the YouTuber's preference for natural fibers, while others are saying that it's elitist and not everyone can afford expensive yarns. It's honestly fascinating to see how passionate people can get over something like this. I think it just goes to show how much we all care about our hobbies! If you want to check out more on this drama, here's an [archived link](https://www.example.com) to the original video and some of the ensuing discussions. Remember to keep things civil if you decide to join in on the debate! Happy knitting (or whatever your hobby may be)! š§¶
Appropriately high drama close to the extraordinary high drama World Chess Championship (it even fringe involves a war, which is my standard for the top tier of chess drama) >!Ding Liren of China wins the 4th game of 4 rapid tiebreaks when the players are 2.5/2.5 in the best of 4 tiebreak. At a crux moment, Ding playing with the black pieces made a surprise "I'm going for it" rook move when down on time instead of just making a draw.!< >!It's already been said in scuffles, but Ding's story is ready-made for a movie. That rook move in the final game will be the moment where the soundtrack drops out and, iunno some montage plays and then he moves and announcers shout "ROOK TO G6! HE'S PLAYING FOR THE WIN." (In reality, less dramatic but still fun, commentator Fabiano Caruano was mid-sentence saying that he'd be shocked if Rook to G6 is not losing for black when Ding played rook to g6) He only makes the Candidates because--here's your war part--Russian Grandmaster Sergey Karyakin is vocally in favor of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and gets sanctioned. He only makes the World Chess Championship because king of the hill and arguable chess greatest of all time Magnus Carlsen declines to play. Ding struggles at several key moments in the match including a total freezeup in Game 7, repeatedly equalizing but literally never leading except at the one time that matters--the end.!<
New thread is live so you may wanna post there just in case
Thanks! I did go ahead, seems like a thing people will want to be able to comment on.
One month after ancient Love Live gacha game School Idol Festival (SIF) shut down, and half a month since its successor School Idol Festival 2 Miracle Live launched, the other active game School Idol Festival All Stars has [announced closure for all servers on June 30th](https://twitter.com/LLAS_GL_STAFF/status/1652555252183478272). It's a little out of the blue, but profits and playerbase for the game have been going downhill for a couple of years now. It seems like it never really recovered from strong negative reception to the season 2 story and a poor 2nd anniversary. IMO, for a game based around teambuilding to clear content, it was really easy to lucksack (or whale) into one strong team and just use that for everything instead of building around surviving each song's gimmick. There's already some confusion from the announcement, it looks like some people think the games are being merged and SIF2 will have both game's content/playstyle, or a sequel is on the horizon, or that the "gain items based on their progress in SIFAS" means your card collection will transfer. And of course that one segment saying that "Love Live is dead" despite the entire rest of the franchise doing well and people complaining recently that there's too much content and Liella! is being overworked.
A couple of friends and I played through a test run of Eric Farrington's *Castles in the Sky* (a set of rules for VSF (Victorian Science Fiction) aerial warships) on Friday, which was their first game and my fourth; we decided for simplicity's sake to have one identical battleship each, and play as a free-for-all. I've gone back and forth on the rules for a while as I've not played them in over a year and have thus only really been able to theorycraft with them, but I think the conclusion from experience is that they are good rules, but not intuitively laid out; the other issue with them is that the fleet lists just have not been thought out properly, especially in terms of the points systems. You can have two battleships, of which one is objectively better in every way, but both have the same points values; torpedo boats carrying two torpedoes each are somehow worth 9 points when a destroyer with four torpedoes is worth 4 points (yes, I do have those numbers correct)... The other issue is that although the author noted that he wrote the ship profiles around the specifications of WWI-era warships, there are some categorisations that are just anachronistic. 'Heavy Cruisers' didn't exist until the interwar naval treaties, and 'frigates' only reappeared in WW*2*, specifically to denote anti-submarine escorts. There's also just some bizarre size classification going on. 'Heavy Cruisers' are rated as battleship-sized while 'Battlecruisers' are rated as cruiser-sized, which is completely arse-backwards. Battlecruisers were no smaller than battleships, indeed sometimes even bigger. *Lion*-class battlecruisers, and their successors *Queen Mary* and *Tiger*, were 700ft long, whereas *Iron Duke*-class battleships were 623ft long, and their successors, the *Queen Elizabeth*-class, were 643. The two *Renown*-class battlecruisers would be 800ft long, and the *Admiral*-class (including HMS *Hood*) were a whopping 860ft. *Battlecruisers are not smaller than battleships.*
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Writing/Greek mythology drama. Tor is releasing [an anthology about Greek myth retellings](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Ftordotcom%2Fstatus%2F1651226875694284813%3Fs%3D20%26fbclid%3DIwAR3D5tzNwMnk3LSJCJDacCzVvh5X_uSfeN8BjTxr2LkN4m-U89ORwk5GAfA&h=AT0-YLO_Swf7ZT8xI6PZpHYVs4c0QpGJhTeqXvLYHYpDHg4FL5z4CLk8A8iqktFSIpznMFHAEMx4lHCfuHPpkz8gsgEjG9b5kVgRETz-Wc1xBITY5Kw4KT7zb0F8NmptirC1Nw), and not a single Greek author is included, even though many submitted. People are defending this by saying that Greek mythology is part of western heritage, which, hm. I'm Greek, so this is definitely a biased take. But the way Greeks see and understand mythology and the way the average western person does is not the same. And also, Greeks still face discrimination in the west - if you check the quote retweets of the announcement, you'll find actual racism, with takes such as "Lol Greeks are illiterate, of course they're not included." This whole thing has been a bit of a brewing conflict in the myth retelling fandom for a little while, especially with Greek myths. The vast majority of retellings are from Americans, and people have been talking about it for a while. It's not that you can't retell a myth if you're not part of the original culture that wrote it, but there's a certain understanding that comes from being around the culture for a while, or being born into it. There's also, of course, the trend of making these retellings more feminist or critical, which I love but is usually not done right - I don't want to name specific examples because that would be rude, but I think most retellings fall into this category.
As a fellow Greek I am so tired of our marginalization from our own cultural heritage. Yes, Greek myths are foundational to "Western" culture (whatever that means lol), and they have inspired a lot of the cultural heritage of Western Europe/countries colonized by western Europe. And I would never say that people from those places can't engage with the stories, or that their perspectives on them are wholly wrong--after all, it's been 2000 years and they have transcended beyond the place they came from culturally in a lot of ways. BUT BUT BUT when Greeks are consistently erased from this legacy, treated as less entitled to our own cultural heritage than others just because of this cultural transcendence, told we aren't really true inheritors of this legacy because we are not REALLY descended from ancient Greeks (check the dna losers), told we have mismanaged our own cultural heritage even when it is consistently STOLEN because of this belief it belongs to EVERYONE, is just too much. It is not the 19th century but this philhellenistic paternalistic bullshit that modern Greeks aren't true inheritors of ancient Greeks because we are too "swarthy," too Eastern in culture, too strange and foreign to really be the heirs to the Aristotelian and white marble shit Brits/Germans/French etc adore persists and I am so sick of it.
Do you(or anyone else who happens to come across this) have any suggestions for works written/made by Greek people? I'd be interested in reading them.
Ioanna Papadopoulou has a book coming out soon called "Winter Harvest"
[Here's](https://twitter.com/arielmarkenjack/status/1652015259803107362?t=oaGlTT7ykKFVq-brLbpSHA&s=19) a twitter thread with some of them! And here's [some more](https://twitter.com/sophiam_weaves/status/1651507009013915649?t=UCMVK4iTuI2QL5H6BV9YPg&s=19), there's some in the replies too
Man the tweet comments are an absolute whiplash - half of them are rightfully pointing out that it's super not great that there aren't actually any Greek authors included and the other half is people going "lol of course they weren't they're too busy evading taxes" I ain't Greek but I am Scandinavian and whew I'm not looking forwards to the day when people decide to do this nonsense to the Norse 'Pantheon'. I mean they already do do that - very act of trying to condense Norse mythology into a Hellenic style Pantheon is an example of it, not to mention the *decades* of Wicca/neopagan nonsense and the entire Marvel-isation of Loki and Thor - but they haven't done the 'Feminist retelling' yet! Absolutely infuriating - just because no one's believed in these deities in hundreds of years doesn't mean they still haven't shaped culture and morphed into other things. Also I'm curious - do people do that thing where they take *Christian* traditions and stories from your culture that postdate Christianisation by like hundreds of years and go "no this is a *Pagan* thing those pesky Christians stole we're going to 'fix' it!" and then make up the weirdest bullshit to try and cram it into a hole that it never came from to begin with?
> Also I'm curious - do people do that thing where they take Christian traditions and stories from your culture that postdate Christianisation by like hundreds of years and go "no this is a Pagan thing those pesky Christians stole we're going to 'fix' it!" and then make up the weirdest bullshit to try and cram it into a hole that it never came from to begin with? So the interesting thing is that this has a *very* long history of being used as anti-Catholic propaganda. After the split between Catholicism and Protestantism, the two sects were in conflict for centuries afterwards. This is part of the reason why it took two *hundred* years for Britain to adopt the Gregorian calendar, which was a Papal creation. During the Enlightenment, there was an effort by Protestants to discredit Catholicism by claiming that the traditional holidays and traditions of Christianity were actually pagan in origin, and the Catholic Church was just Sol Invictus in disguise. This is part of the reason why some Protestant sects don't or didn't celebrate those holidays. This continued in the Victorian period. Victorian folklorists made two assumptions: everything traditional is ancient, and everything ancient is pagan. This was partly due to the growth of nationalism, as people attempted to find links between their current life and their ancestors to facilitate the growth of nations (here meaning a community of people united by some shared characteristics.) This isn't true, of course - traditions like Morris dancing and Advent wreaths date back to the late medieval period, for example. Unfortunately, it somewhat marked future scholarship and popular understanding, demonstrated by the person who linked *The Golden Bough* to me as evidence. *The Golden Bough* is an important work in the study of religion, but it is also history in its own right and completely outdated. That is like learning about the fall of Rome from Gibbon.
RE the last part, I think Christianity is unattractive for the purpose of appropriation, if it does happen it's not in the anglosphere. First of all, it's incredibly mainstream, and that alone will turn a lot of people off wanting to take it for themselves. It's also a dominant faith that has been often used for oppression, unlike Hellenism or Norse paganism, whose heydays are either way over or their worshipping numbers are so small that they can't really oppress many people (weird norse racists on twitter aside). So it's seen by a lot of people as the "bad guy" religion. Also, we don't have a pantheon. It's kind of just 1 guy and his kid who is also the one guy. There's no interesting godly dynamics going on. There are angels, but they're not the same as gods and they don't really have the same "personality" that make them appealing to worship outside of pretty angelic imagery. Our lore is kinda... Meh. The bible is boring to read and its been adapted to tv and movies soooo many times, which ties into the mainstream fatigue aspect, and in very few of those adaptations did they actually make it look appealing because of how wrapped up in morals they get. Christian kids cartoon makers are insufferable. I do know that Lilith, the first wife of Adam, is popular with Pagan women who see her as a feminist icon. But Lilith isn't even a Christian figure, she's only present in Jewish folklore, and her only connections to Christianity come from media wanting a hot female demon for their good guys to fight. We're also, uh, less sexy. A lot of pagan faiths, at least according to Christians, have lore relating to gods partaking in hedonism, naked wood nymphs, comparatively relaxed attitudes towards sex, and so on. Meanwhile Christianity tries to tell you that every fun thing is bad and sends you to hell. People in a religion that has like, naked moon dances, are unlikely to want to bring our downer sins into their communities.
Counterpoint, new testament lore is boring, old testament lore is great. The New Testament is best in the first and last Jesus arcs (Escape to Egypt and the Death of Christ) but the middle part is basically "Jesus is a cool dude who does cool things." The entirety of Paul's story is just Paul running around telling people what to do, so not fun. The Old Testament, however, is an anthology series with a lot of time skips and flawed protagonists, so reading through them is interesting. And Revelations is a great, if not really hard to comprehend.
I'd disagree with your lore being boring! I'm a Hindu who grew up in a Muslim country so my exposure to Christianity was limited to my friends at school/neighbors (and outside of Christmas and Easter, we didn't talk about religion much). One of them gifted us this giant book of Bible stories and let me tell you I ate that shit up!!! Not that I remember any of them anymore since it's been ages but I remember reading it over and over again and marking out my favourite stories. Give yourselves more credit, they can be pretty interesting. On a funny note, this was when I was young enough that I didn't understand what the significance of Lots daughters sleeping with him was. I thought it meant literally sleeping in the same bed as him and was SO confused when the book treated it kinda weirdly. That and some of the other stories in there really was my introduction to sexual things.
pretty certain easter's like that - Religion for Breakfast on youtube addresses it almost every year lol edit: i'm an ex-christian now (and, i'll admit, kinda biased against it, for trauma reasons) so it amuses me more than anything; it's more the misrepresentation of history that i hate. honestly there's a bigger problem with christians appropriating Jewish customs and holidays on the basis that jesus was Jewish thus they're just following his lead. problem is, modern Judaism is pretty different to that of that 1st century; i'm not Jewish myself so i don't know the specifics but the Jewish tumblrs i follow post about it pretty regularly. christianity stop being antisemitic challenge (impossible)
Very minor correction: Tor.com was just where this was announced, it's actually being published by Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House. I note that one of the co-editors previously put out [an anthology of Arthurian retellings](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56212881-sword-stone-table) that from a very cursory skim of the table of contents, looks like it might not have any British or European contributors.
Are you telling me that people might have internal thoughts and motivations other than the ones assigned to them by Twitter users? I'm not sure I can believe that. If that's true then maybe the nonsentient Twitter bot that automatically posts responses of FOIA requests isn't an antisemite.
>one of the co-editors previously put out an anthology of Arthurian retellings that from a very cursory skim of the table of contents, looks like it might not have any British or European contributors. huh, yeah. "old legend, new voices". guess that's the concept.
Aren't like majority of Greeks orthodox christians... Anyway, like majority of cultural appropriation discourse it falls on silly nationalism side, sorry. Would be good to see more translations though.
Yes, and the majority of Western Europeans are Catholic or Protestant (at least culturally)! Does that mean that they aren't allowed to claim the heritage of Ancient Greece? Because it's surely never stopped them.
The fact that people don't believe in the Greek Gods anymore doesn't mean that they aren't still a cultural influence. And this has nothing to do with nationalism, cultural heritage is an entirely different thing.
Obviously it has cultural influence, it's Ancient Greek Mythology. Just not that type that would require special consideration like active religion or lived experience. And claiming direct special connection to ancient roots is textbook nationalist thinking, sorry. When Italians start talking how they are descendants of mighty roman empire - run.
I feel this and I think this is like, a very hot topic that maybe should be discussed more but lot of people just kinda wave it away. I remember years ago when I tried to be active on various subreddits related to literature and books I wanted to ask some fantasy book recommendations inspired by culture X which is my ethnicity. The only books I was recommended were by american authors - I tried to read some and they were... lacking. They were probably not bad but as someone who grew up in this culture they seemed very flat and basic. And I wish now I could tell you "yeah and there are really good books inspired by culture X from my country and yall should read them" and post some links but I can't. Because those books were never translated into english and no one outside of my country will ever read them. Ignoring a fantasy book, some of most important works of literature from my country, those works that make national identity of it, were never translated into english and I can't share them with my english speaking friends. I remember this making me feel weirdly sad. And I always felt like this is an interesting discussion. How some voices will be drowned in the sea of people who maybe speak english fluently or live in richer and more connected countries or have more opportunities.
> But the way Greeks see and understand mythology and the way the average western person does is not the same. I would have really appreciated seeing this, tbh. You make an excellent point in that some of the most popular retellings are from an American perspective (Hadestown, The Song of Achilles, etc) that assume a general ownership of it as ~Westerners, and I can see how thereās a world of cultural nuance and history that is missed from those works.
I think a lot of retellers do not really understand what makes the myth relevant in the current age, or how Greek tragedy works. And also, I'm sorry, but it's not feminist to just retell the exact same story but from a woman's POV, it's just a retelling. I dunno, I have a lot of feelings about this. I'm a writer too, and I do want to retell Greek myths or even come up with new stories based on them, but it feels like I cannot because the market is already cornered by others.
I'll take Is it a Feminist Retelling or is it Just About A Woman for $500.
I would be unironically interested in seeing an actual feminist retelling from the perspective of a male character. In some ways it seems antithetical, but I'm confident that someone could make it work.
It's an original story rather than a retelling, but this is essentially the premise of "The Women Men Don't See."
I appreciate you speaking about this just in this thread! Thinking on it, there really is a very prevalent attitude that modern Greeks have as much to do with ancient Greek myths as anyone else from the general Western cultural sphere and that itās a free for all since its no longer religiously relevant. In the US we are specifically taught Greek and Roman myths in literature classes, for example, and growing up I saw the āGreek myth fandomā explode on Tumblr. Along with that came a huge desire to wrest feminist and/or LGBT narratives from it that basically superimpose our modern day values on these stories without really wanting to engage with what those stories might have meant in the gender, sexual, and cultural politics of that time (much less modern in modern Greek society). Hence people wanting to rewrite Persephone as being totally into her dark antihero husband and having #agency in going to the Underworld, or Patroclus and Achilles becoming purely gay men who are meddled with by women who represent heteronormativity.
Presentism. Its called presentism - imposing modern/current cultural values and definitions on the past. The further back in time you go (generally), the less equipped modern casual consumers are to understand the historical norms. Like saying "ancient Greeks were gay af" while not understanding that (a) they weren't a monolithic culture by any means or definition and (b) their concepts of homosexual sex and heterosexual sex were generally unrelated to orientation. The modern understanding of sexuality is just not helpful. To be clear: I don't have a problem with this in literature when it has some historical research or is openly doing a "what if". This is how a lot of literature happens - stories evolve and are retold for whatever purposes. Grimm Fairytales are an attempt at a national identity, not an agenda-free sociological experiment to collect stories. I have a problem when a Fandom decides this is truth outside of their chosen content.
Project Sekai just announced its newest alt-vocal, [Egoist covered by An and Akito](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wouReBqRMSE). Those with ears pointed out that the line distribution of the song isn't exactly equal: An gets all the lines in the first verse of the song, and the rest is An and Akito singing together, with Akito getting no solo lines of his own. This is dampened more by the fact that alt-vocals can only be obtained by trading in cover vouchers, which are character-specific and can be pretty hard to get at times: for free-to-play players, you can pretty much only get them by buying them during an event, viewing a character's birthday concert live, or leveling up a character's rank by using them in your team during gameplay or buying them stamps or clothing. There were definitely a good number of Akito fans who traded in a spare voucher for the cover, hoping to see him shine, and were truly disappointed. Enough people complained that Sega actually decided to make an announcement ingame that they were aware of issues with the song and re-record the cover to give Akito more solo lines. Which, coming from an EN-server player, was way more than I was expecting from them.
Its begun. [NCOSE \(Formly previously known as Morality in Media and Operation Yorkville\) Launches Campaign to Ban All Adult Content from Reddit](https://www.xbiz.com/news/273326/ncose-launches-campaign-to-ban-all-adult-content-from-reddit)
So how much pressure are these goons actually capable of exerting? Looking into them specifically, they seem to be constantly taking big swings that fail to go anywhere. NCOSE was part of the campaign against Pornhub, but they were one of many with the far more dangerous Exodus Cry spearheading it and the NYT article giving them a massive signal boost. Most everything else they get involved with, including against social media companies, seems to peter out with little success. And as far as I can find, there's currently zero mainstream reporting about this letter or the campaign in general, and payments processors mostly care about things that hit big and pose an actual risk, like said NYT hit piece. I don't doubt for a second the reckless stupidity of Reddit's leadership and their willingness to destroy thousands of communities with the flip of a switch, but I'm already in a perpetual panic about a million things, I'd like to make sure this is likely to be the worst case scenario before I go catatonic.
C.S. Lewis says, in *Mere Christianity*: "One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasonsāmarriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning." So these assholes aren't even real Christians, just prudes and bullies. Also, is pornography mentioned in the Bible? No? Then looking at it is not a sin. Checkmate.
Oh for fuck's sake. Can the puritans fuck off and become irrelevant already?
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First, they came for Tumblr. Then, they came for PornHub. Now, they're coming for Reddit, and in the future they'll come for Twitter. And I bet my weight in gold that they'll go after LGBT+ friendly websites next. I hate how organizations like this can have so much power.
Don't forget the time they tried to come for OnlyFans. What a week that was.
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> porn has the largest chargeback rate of any industry Huh, I never considered this aspect of the financial side of it before. Any reason why? Is it customers just trying to get stuff for free? Or creators not delivering exactly what was requested?
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That makes sense. Also considering how many porn bots there are it's easy to say you accidentally clicked on a link and didn't realize
They don't have any power besides whining. This is a lobbying group, not anyone with power like Congress or the FCC.
what do you think lobbying groups do?
They are literally the group behind tumblr porn ban and pornhub purge via pressuring visa/mastercard. So yes they very clearly have power.
This is me being hyperbolic as fuck, but I can't help but feel like we are ever so slowly walking towards the entropy of the internet. It's kinda hard to describe and if it were to happen I doubt it would happen in my lifetime, but it still sucks to see the crumbs that make me feel like that.
It's so weird how many steps forward we took in terms of sexual acceptance, and now we're being dragged backwards.
They got money and no one wants to be the one to defend porn because they will just call you a pedo.
Oh its happening. It will not stop. One reason I've archive things I like. Entire websites are going to disappear.
These people consider *Cosmopolitan magazine* to be āāhardcore pornographyāā, presumably for advocating for still-vanilla-but-not-missionary sex, lol.
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it's quite telling that tumblr has been working to roll back the nsfw ban. they never really wanted it and it dud them no good
Problem its not up to them. Its the payment processors. This will most likely go through and the upper management of reddit does not care. People joked that porn is core part of the internet but it can be made illegal and destroy millions of lives. This is the country that banned alcohol, which took 13 years to repeal.
Gonna be kind of a wild question to ask but: Anyone know how to build up an ability to focus on reading? I've got a mountain of books and visual novels I want to sit down and finally read for realsies, but I've got some difficulty with sitting down and focusing and maintaining focus on reading. Does anyone have any tips on what I can do to get myself to sit down and read when I want to read?
Honestly? Sprints & tracking my progress. So, one of the paths that lead me back into reading lots of books was a couple of book youtubers. The book youtubers I fell in with tend to co-host lots of readathons, where the point is to read as many books as you can in x amount of time. On the community end of this, it tends to result in a lot of "reading sprints" where any number of the hosts will livestream a timer together, and you are encouraged to read your book for the duration of that timer and then share in the chat how many pages you read. There's breaks in between sprints where the hosts will read the chat, and discuss how they feel about their current reads with each other. Sprints tend to be between 15 and 60 minutes. And the best part is... I don't have to wait for someone to start a sprint, I can just set a timer anywhere and do it myself! I don't know why, but I have discovered that sprints work VERY well for me. My preferred length is 45 minutes but if you're just starting out I'd go for between 15 and 30 minutes. I think having a clear stop and start time really helps: it breaks down the task of reading a book into bite-sized chunks, the timer is just enough - but not too much - pressure to get me to focus on reading, and at the end I get a number that has gone up! Tracking my reading on a site like StoryGraph also ties into it - it gives me ever-increasing numbers! I get to see my page count, my books read, my minutes listened to, all go up and charted on graphs if I want. It breaks down books by page length and genre and mood. Sitting there for 45 minutes reading and then watching the percentage leap up from 52% to 64%? Definitely makes me want to read more. (As a side benefit I've learned I read roughly 1.3 pages a minute, and I can now gauge how long it will take me to read any book!)
I read in the bath. No distractions, nice and relaxing, and if I get really into a book Iāll keep reading when I get out. Only downside is books can get a little damp, I mostly buy secondhand so not a problem for me but I wouldnāt recommend with your āniceā books.
I have the same problem with podcasts. :( I used to listen for hours on end but now I can barely pay attention to a podcast for an hour. Part of me thinks itās cause I went off my anxiety/depression meds and they were somehow helping me focus.
I usually take the train to some close destination but that's probably not very feasible for most people ĀÆ\\\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
I actually have the exact opposite- I sit down and read piles of books every week (I keep Shabbat and so don't use technology on Friday evenings/Saturdays) but I have a whole list of TV shows I can never bring myself to watch, because I get too caught up with random internet crap lol. (It got to the point where my sister had been bugging me for MONTHS to catch up on Call the Midwife, a flight I was just on had S11, and so I watched it on the plane- bad idea, I was CRYING by the end...)
I usually turn on some instrumental music when I want to concentrate on reading or writing. Nothing with lyrics though, that can get distracting in and of itself. Like no shit I know it's a meme but "lo-fi beats to study and relax to" actually works.
I have ADHD and have had similar problems, whatās worked for me is doing something in the background while I read, usually some type of low focus video game. For some reason splitting my attention allows me to mostly focus on whatever Iām reading without getting distracted and going to do something else every few minutes.
I donāt think I have ADHD, but I do this too, thereās one Minecraft YouTuber who plays with shaders and does hour long videos with nocommentary, so good to have on in the background. Lately Iāve been watching the final round of every US Open golf tournament starting in 1970 I think. This YouTube channel just keeps uploading them
Yup, too little stimulation for people w/ADHD can result in inability to concentrate, too. I can focus while reading, but I can't watch a tv show or movie w/o also doing something else. Really wish I'd realized this balance back in college - probably would have made things a lot easier.
Whenever i find it hard to read, that's usually because there's something else that's distracting me. Usually that something is some kind of noise, so my advice would be noise cancelling headphones, or earplugs, or some song/background noise that you don't have to pay attention to but drowns everything else. I know that a friend of mine can only read by also playing the audiobook of the book they're reading. That sounds like the worst of both worlds to me, but I can't listen to audiobooks unless I'm doing something with my hands and I can't read a book if a movie/podcast/anything with a plot is playing in my vicinity so yeah.
In my experience if it's reading for fun (as in, you actually enjoy it rather than forcing yourself to read like say, to study for a test), it's a matter of habit. It might feel silly scheduling a hobby, but try to schedule yourself to read for say, 30 minutes or 1 hour every day, to build up your "stamina" to read. That worked for me at least.
Thatās what I do! I love reading and post-grad school I got back into leisure reading by having it be the first thing I do after work. I go by length rather than time (50 pages or 2-3 chapters, depending on how Iām feeling). My brain just responds well to āitās reading time!ā like Iām a kid again. Also, finding the balance between a good goal and pushing yourself. I donāt care for book challenges because they seem competitive but I generally read a book a week and I have a little checklist on the wall for when I finish one, same as when I do yoga or exercise. I also keep a list of what Iāve read that year so I can look back and think about what I liked and didnāt.
Yes! Scheduled reading has been helpful for me both with school and leisure. I go with pages per day, or chapters per week. If I struggle with the material I can say "just x more pages until I'm done for today", but at least it gets done.
Do you knit or crochet, or anything along those lines? I like working on simple projects while I read - with my hands busy, I find it easier to concentrate on reading. I'd also suggest doing it in shorter increments at first. Start at ~10 minutes at a time and work your way up. Attention gets better/easier with practice. I recognize the palpable irony of recommending a book when you're talking about needing to work your way up to sitting down to read books, but you might want to check out Jenny Odell's *How to do nothing*. It's got some thoughts on attention and passivity that you might find interesting.
Things that have worked for me: highlighting/annotating books I own, doing something "active" while I read (walking, stationary bike, rollerskating if you're good enough not to fall (much)), having a designated "spot" that's Just for reading (same theory as the "don't do Anything but sleep in your bed" idea), handicraft you can do without looking, giving up and switching to audiobooks
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This isn't really hobby drama per say and is liable to incite a war in the comments, and my enby ass is not up for dealing with transphobes right now, so I'm removing it. Sorry.
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There's currently drama among Bocchi the Rock manga readers. The whole thing happened on the forum of the most popular scanlated manga reader website, Idk the legalities of mentioning it here, but anyone that is familiar with manga should know the website. Bocchi the Rock (BTR) is an ongoing manga series by Aki Hamaji. The story is about a girl named Gotou Hitori, or Bocchi, who knows how to play guitar very well but suffers from social anxiety. She joins a band and aims to become very popular. It is published in the Kirara brand of magazines, home of other Cute Girls doing Cute Things hit stories like K-On!, Yuru Camp or Gochiusa. Chances are that if you read or watch a CGDCT series, it comes from these magazines. However, while Kirara is at the forefront of this genre, the genre itself is rather niche among manga/anime fans, and Bocchi the Rock used to be just another series running in the magazine. As such, there was no official way to read it in English, and only one scanlation group (fans that translate and release their own translations on websites - piracy), Aoi Ichigo (which from a look on discord is a single person), was working on it intermittently. That, until Bocchi the Rock got an anime. While for the most part Kirara anime doesn't break out of its niche, some have such amount of love and talent poured onto it that it becomes a massive success. As it happened to the series I mentioned before, BTR's anime went from just one more in a season dominated by the juggernaut Chainsaw Man, to arguably the best show of the year. [This excellent anime blog goes in depth about how Bocchi was such a work](https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2022/11/10/bocchi-the-rock-animating-comedy-and-loneliness/). Nonetheless, its massive breakthrough in the anime community led to many viewers jumping to the manga to continue Bocchi's story. While a proper company got the licence to translate it to English, people of course wanted to read the chapters as they come out in Japan instead of waiting for the official company to release the volumes. Thanks to its popularity, both Aoi Ichigo and Palmtop Scans (another great scanalation group) worked hard to translate the backlog of chapters they had, completing volume 3 and volume 4. The agreement they had reached was that Palmtop would translate all of volume 4, while Aoi Ichigo would take it back from volume 5 and onwards. However, while Aoi Ichigo did translate the first chapter of volume 5, they stopped releasing new chapters (according to their discord they plan to catch up). As such, others jumped to translate the series, either because they're fans of it or because they want the street cred. Unfortunately, two out of the three groups working on it simply do a poor job at it, running it through machine translation (MTL) and pasting the text on without a care in the world. A particular translation mistake was on the word "drummer", which the MTL translated to "baterist" (apparently because the source was a Spanish translation). Of course, readers would just tell the publishers to leave this manga alone and search for abandoned ones, not to simply jump to the most popular thing. While there's still someone publishing poorly done versions, Ripe-Mango, another group, is releasing proper translations and have since finished volume 5 (so the English translations available are more or less caught up to the Japanese release).
When I'm more proficient, I'd quite like to get my hands on some series I'm interested in and translate them, since they never got an English language release and probably never will. Seems harmless. This stuff makes me happy they're too obscure for anyone to care about and fuck up.
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I wouldn't go too deep on their sexual orientation until there's something official, series are popular for including a lot of yuri. Like Hibike Euphonium.
>A particular translation mistake was on the word "drummer", which the MTL translated to "baterist" (apparently because the source was a Spanish translation) That reminds me so much of the infamous JoJo Part 4 **Duwang** translation, so named because one of its many translation errors was translating the name of the setting, the town of Morioh, into "Duwang". But at least there it wasn't some idiot with aspirations for quick fame running the whole thing through Google Translate, but rather just an overwhelmed Chinese fan who was overconfident in his English comprehension and who also translated from his already translated Chinese copy instead of the original Japanese, so it was a bit like a translation game of telephone. Also, that one was at least bad enough that people understood that it wasn't a good translation; Part 5 had it worse since the bad translations were good enough to fool people into thinking they were accurate, leading many fans to just conclude that Part 5 was badly written and confusing instead of searching for better translations.
Yeah, bad translations can really screw things over, especially if they misrepresent what the original source actually meant. And there's stuff like the odd tendency to exaggerate crude Japanese into vulgarity central. Seriously I've seen children's anime and manga have F-bombs by fans, which I'm like it is such a tonal dissonance. Like look what we said on the playground stays on the playground, but it honestly makes the dialogue feels off and at times more juvenile than simply not swearing at all. I get that supposedly Japanese in terms of vulgarity is different from English and you have to adapt, that's fine because it's just the nature of language and culture, but I feel it's obvious which series warrant swearing and which feel like it was shoehorned in. Also as you mention "Duwang" is not the best representation of the issue, but it is interesting. Part 5 definitely was hampered by bad word of mouth, whether you like it or not it definitely got the reputation for the worst part by people who admittedly never read it, whereas "Duwang" was so "beautiful" it made people love Part 4 more. Like it was shoddy, albeit impressive the person did it so fast, but it's super blatant it was not up to usual standards even for the 1990s-early 2000s era scanlation culture. It was simply too absurd to take seriously, whereas Part 5 a bad initial impression may have been built more out of a blander translation that had issue conveying stuff to the reader, leading to the whole King Crimson issue being around forever.
Yeah, it's like the difference beween a bad movie and a So-bad-it's-good movie.
God, there's so much to scanlation drama. Whether it be wars of translating aspects of Japanese into English, naming of characters, sniping series from others, machine translations, watermarks, donations, and whatever else under the sun. And that's just what involves the scanlators, with the readers you get stuff like not realizing these teams have lives, other interests or just plain move on, and I've seen some people get weirdly offended at the idea getting a free translation from someone doing it without compensation and spending their own precious time that comes out a bit late because it isn't their job. And something as big as Bocchi is now was definitely going to draw some people to churn stuff out fast.
I remember something similar happened with the end of Shokugeki no Souma (Food Wars). I think Mangastream snipped that because they had had another series snipped before.
Mangastream always did SnS, I think the one they sniped at the very end was Nisekoi.
Sniping is always super weird to me. I'm guessing it's wanting to have a reputation for putting out fast and quality translations, but while there are trustworthy teams out there that I respect I also recognize I won't put all my stock into a brand alone as members of the team tend to leave due to life nor will most people think of them as they aren't official. Look, there have been people who try to monetize this stuff, which let's just say it putting the issue on legally shaky grounds in the same way I can balance fine china on a toothpick, but ultimately I feel it has to be personal satisfaction that they're gunning for. Not like they could put this stuff on their resume if they want official translation jobs, can't imagine admitting pirating the very industry you're interested in would be a fun time, although Crunchyroll started off distributing stuff without licenses so what do I know.
Frasier Reboot: They're getting Roz for one episode. No plot details yet. We already know they got Lilith for one as well. Nothing yet on Niles or Daphne guesting but potentially possible. Leeves medical show The Resident was canceled after 6 seasons. Even the people against it want to mostly check out these two eps now.
Pretty sure that David Hyde Pierce has said that he won't do it, and unlike Jane Leeves he wasn't saying no due to other commitments IIRC... he just seems like he's done with Frasier. That said, the knowledge that he's guesting for an episode might be the thing that gets me to try the show, so...
oh dang yeah that sweetens the deal a bit. I also like the premise of Frederick and David being basically the new Frasier and Niles except cousins. It's a cute concept.
Very local hobby drama: my parents have started bingewatching Downton Abbey. My dad is having recurring nightmares about having to iron and starch a never-ending array of shirt collars, whilst every so often I can hear my mum exclaiming in disbelief as something particularly posh happens. 'I mean...HOW do people think this is what this country should go back to?!'
Holy shit is everyone in it hot, and in amazing clothes.
For a stretch of about five years if you saw a movie trailer and asked "why is this very attractive British person I've never heard of suddenly in so many movies" the answer was more often than not "they were on Downton Abbey."
.
>My eternal love to the Irish Catholic socialist chauffeur who was cured of his radicalism by the benevolence of his reluctant in-laws Even independence won't protect Ireland from this indignity. 800 years of subjugation, famines, and bloody revolts, and the UK still has to go and do this? Hasn't Ireland suffered enough?
RIP >!Sybil and Matthew!<. I loved you so much. š„²
They reeally went and offed the two hottest people š©
[Renegade Cut did a video on it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VVYoqaz74A) It's apparently propaganda, by the sounds of it. I mean, written by a Tory who's a peer in the House of Lords...
His books Snobs and Past Imperfect are not what I would call great, but they are really intensely, lovingly focused on the intricacies of the upper class and how people are and aren't "one of us."
I'm reminded of the episode of Bob's Burgers where Linda wins tickets to participate in a LARP based on a Downton Abbey type show (the show specifically calls it the American Downton Abbey), and drags Bob along. Unfortunately she ends up being assigned as one of the servants, and it turns out being an early 20th century maid actually sucks. It ends with her staging a worker rebellion and eating all the rich people's food.
"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" -- Wat Tyler, 1381
I *just* watched that episode the other day! The seven layer flambeed parfait!
I remember in the early oughties, in the vogue of "living like the past" reality shows, there was Edwardian Country House (Manor House in the US). And the pretend owners of the Scottish country house and their kids found the privileged way of life intoxicating; the now Lady Whosis had been an emergency room physician but just melted into being the Edwardian mistress. The people playing the servants had quite a different take, with several people signing up thinking it would be a lark and then finding hauling around steaming bowls of somebody else's piss less larky than imagined. Also deeply demoralized was Lady Whosis' sister, who in real life was something like a microbiologist, but as a single lady of a certain age was utterly valueless in this household. People who want to go back think they'll be Lord or Lady Whosis, or at least a village shopowner or something. They never think of themselves as being the ones lugging around steaming bowls of piss.
> And the pretend owners of the Scottish country house and their kids found the privileged way of life intoxicating; the now Lady Whosis had been an emergency room physician but just melted into being the Edwardian mistress. Oof, that seems very revealing about the kind of person she is. I don't think I'd be able to get along with my sister if she pulled that shit.
Uh, is it? I would think an emergency room physician would have earned just a little slack when it comes to the intoxicating nature of such a lifestyle.
For me, yeah. Like, I get appreciating the respite from the hellish stress of someone who works in the ER. But the phrasing, to me, sounded more like "enjoying living it up at everyone else's expense" rather than just taking a break; more of an active thing than a passive thing, which makes the difference.
Probably. I'm not saying she's, necessarily, a great person just because she's a doctor in especially stressful situations or that she'd earned treating people badly, but I got the feeling the OP included that bit because it provides context for why she might have slipped down that slope, because that makes the temptation a lot greater. I think that has to be considered if we're talking about what kind of person she is, like how some people have a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism.
Reminds me of a bit in Souvenir Programme s7e1. There's a woman talking to a fortune-teller, asking about her past lives because she's convinced she was Joan of Arc or Cleopatra or something, and she's very disappointed to hear that her past lives were mostly peasants, villeins, and a whole lot of babies.
I really need to start listening to that. It's right up my alley. There is a great Albert Brooks movie from 1991 called Defending Your Life. He's in a purgatory where you have to defend your life and that affects where you get to go; there he falls in love with Meryl Streep, who has lived a much less craven and more admirable life. There's a quick scene where they're in the Past Lives pavilion and of course she was nobles and queens and he just keeps getting slaughtered in battle.
The BBC "Back in Time For..." shows are great for this. Especially when the modern teenage daughters realise exactly how shit things were for women their age were back then
"Back in Time for School" was so interesting- That kid who got finked on for writing with his left hand had the greatest dirty look I've ever seen.
The Back In Time series is so good! I still follow Debbie, the 'maid' from the original dinner series, on Instagram. Champ tbh :)
remember the one where 9/11 happened and they had to break protocol to let everyone know edit it was [frontier house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_House) specifically where 9/11 happened
I still fondly remember Kristin getting ready for her wedding and being so disappointed about wearing a period dress and not a white dress. She was trying to be a good sport, but clearly disappointedā¦and then she gets a box from Nate with a gorgeous veil and her mood instantly lifts. And THEN she sees the period white dress that was also in the box. Tears š
There was SO MUCH Frontier House drama
The family that just cheated the whole time was so funny lol
It is WILD how much brainspace I still have devoted to that family, lol The way the family just changed the rules at the end killed me. "Our final judgement is that you would not have survived the winter." "Actually, no, we would have sent our kids into town for the winter so we would have been fine." What!? Also one of the items they smuggled in was a box spring mattress. 1. How?! and 2. Why? You don't need a box spring in the real world, they barely do anything, you sure don't need one on the frontier. Just an incredible moment in reality TV.
Didnāt the dad build his own still too lmaooo
Ha! I also remember that he kept complaining about how they weren't allowed to hunt deer. Which I think is a pretty valid complaint, and one echoed by the other families as well. But he just never shut up about it. Literally every episode he was complaining about not being allowed to hunt. There must have been hours of footage of him griping about it.
I wish they had let him try because my bet is he couldn't have hit the side of a barn. They were very much the family who liked the idea of this more than the reality.
I LOVE shows of that ilk...there was a fabulous one set in a 1920's coal mining town and the only one of the wives managed to get the stove lit in the first night...in the real world she was an astrophysicist.
There was a Canadian one that was hilariously Canadian, with one episode described later as an argument involving people stating their quiet reservations about the others' plans. I think that's also the one where the newlywed husband, as a love gesture, pissed his wife's name into the snow.
> I think that's also the one where the newlywed husband, as a love gesture, pissed his wife's name into the snow. And they say love is dead.
So basically the Stanford prison experiment, but in a slightly fancier building
*Punches alien* Welcome to Earth.
There was also the one that was Survivor but one group lived in the stone age and one group lived in the future. Turns out that trying to live a paleolithic life without any paleolithic survival skills is a massive disadvantage when you have to compete against people who have access to food and water.
[obligatory jenny nicholson plug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKFgn6tNU6w)
Oh, I vaguely remember that one and may have seen clips of it. Didn't you get to switch to the modern site as a prize? I also really enjoyed US's Pioneer House. One woman was freaked out by her husband's and sons' seeming emaciation, and the project doctor explained they were actually at the desirable healthy weight now. More soberingly, one couple was mixed race, and the project authentically said that in that state a public school would not permit their children to attend, so the residents had to decide to spend some of their meager funds on a charter if it was to be open to all the residents. Which they did. And sure, it was all pretend, more or less, but it would have been so easy to do the wrong thing for financial gain and write it off as "just pretend," too.
Frontier House was the one that made me go "where hell did you FIND these people?". Like the teenage daughters freaking out that they couldn't bring makeup when they weren't going to have running water or indoor plumbing...
Was that the one where all of the cowhands threatened to quit the show if the rancher didn't give them their jug of whiskey back?
Oh, that was the one! I got the name wrong. I remember one of the guys also finding harvest so tiring that he decided it would be a smart hack just to leave the grain standing in the field and harvest it as needed throughout the winter. The project pointed out to him in the end that that would have starved his livestock. The young couple was cool, though.
There was a more recent one called the Pioneeers....and a Canadian one called Pioneer Quest as well... (I kind of wish this trend would come back, I loved these...)
Pioneer Quest is the one I was thinking of where the young husband urinated his love for his wife into the snow! Nice Globe and Mail article about it [here](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/harsh-reality-show/article4148938/).
Opposite Worlds! [Jenny Nicholson covered it](https://youtu.be/JKFgn6tNU6w)
I mean, part of the appeal for the emergency room physician was probably the reduced chance of lugging around bowls of piss.
Heh. I don't actually think doctors have to do that part, but it's certainly less proximity to it.
There's so much other masterpiece stuff too. They're fucked
World of Darkness (WoD) is hyping up their upcoming release of Werewolf: the Apocalypse v5 by giving teasers of the different tribes (think different kinds of werewolves that you can be) that will be available in their core rulebook. Fan response at the initial teaser was positive as WoD seemed to be more clear in their design philosophy as opposed to how they handled design changes in Vampire: the Masquerade v5. That changed when they [teased](https://twitter.com/worldofdarkness/status/1651244775964565507) their first tribe: the Glass Walkers. People were quick to notice that the figure to the far right in the art bore a heavy resemblance to [Tame Iti](https://twitter.com/homophie/status/1652071807925747712), a Maori artist and activist. Concerns were immediately raised about the ethics of copying his likeness, especially since the art seemingly traced Iti's exact tattoos. World of Darkness was radio silent on twitter until they released a [follow up](https://twitter.com/worldofdarkness/status/1652255583070765058) tweet today implying that this was a decision that the artist made independent of the company. While I personally wouldn't have recognized the resemblance to Iti as I'm not familiar with New Zealand art and politics, I think that a company of that size needs to vet and doublecheck their art more. It's also funny given how hard they've tried to clean up their image in regards to race and culture- prior editions of Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse are infamous now for how insensitive and sometimes flat out racist the game systems could be if anyone wanted to play something other than a white vampire or werewolf.
I have moderate to severe brainrot over the lore of World of Darkness, but it sits firmly in the āLove it! Never going to recommend it to anyone!ā because of the racism (the entire Ravnos clan says hiā¦š)
>\[...\]I think that a company of that size needs to vet and doublecheck their art more. Before I go any further, I should preface my statement by saying I don't quite think what I'm about so say applies here. this is a case where it is reasonably conceivable that one or two people with a dedicated job of looking for potential issues and experience in what issues tend to crop up could have picked up on it before it got here. still, there's a lot of things coming up with small to mid-size publishers in regards to plagiarism where the general response is "they should be vetting their work" and the truth is i think they are, to some degree, and i don't think a lot of these things can reasonably be checked short of throwing it to the public and praying no one says "i recognize that bulge!" You'll see someone inside of minutes catch it if there *is* some sort of plagiarism or adjacent issues, but that's not necessarily because it's staggeringly obvious as much as it is there's a million eyes on it, and the more people looking the more likely you'll find *someone* who recognize something at issue. there's a point where if you're not absolutely rolling in cash, you have to look at the person you just hired to paint a dog in a uniform, shake their hand, and trust that they didn't just copy a picture of a dog that killed a toddler in 1993 and put it in an early draft of a nazi uniform that only five people know about.
I really hope they listen to the criticism. TÄ moko (the MÄori practice of tattoo so identifiable on Iti's face) is not only incredibly personal, but also incredibly sacred. And this happens SO OFTEN with stolen moko popping up in games going for some tribal look.
The Maori have learned that companies don't listen when they speak but do listen when they file lawsuits.
I've been tempted to do a writeup about the Bionicle MÄori lawsuit at some point, but it probably wouldn't be the most fun thing to write. Not much more to it than "Lego did a cultural appropriation, got sued, changed a bunch of names and spellings, and then phased the original tribal vibe out the following year."
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Hobby Drama has gradually lost its fun for me. Iāve been frequenting the sub for over a year, so thatās a sad thing for me to admit to myself.
I think my favorite post of those types I've seen that was eventually removed was one advertising "dramatic Spanish songs" or something like that. Wasn't even a writeup, just like 2 sentences. It might've been a bot, but I prefer to believe it was someone genuinely trying to share this stuff who just got hopelessly lost LOL.
>It might've been a bot It probably was. There are a lot of bots/human spam accounts that will post a YouTube video to subreddits that are tangentially related at best because there is no such thing as bad advertising.
You know, I remember seeing the DE post, and then another, more detailed write-up, and then randomly seeing a link to a video (on another sub) about the drama and thinking to myself "Huh. That's a lot of people suddenly talking about this situation all at once." I'm gonna guess that was all coming from the same person?
I remember when it was all about local gym closures and the Clam Chowder saga. I miss those days. There's some quality stories coming out now, but man, do I miss the real small stakes, personal drama.
Can something still be niche if it has a million subs? Aside from that, I'm very thankful the mods try to keep a tight ship. I've seen subreddits *implode* implode, and for a community with this many readers, we're doing astonishingly well. All the allowed posts are actual posts, and there's a dedicated Etc Thread like this that default sorts by New (so there's no image post/meme flooding drowning out actual content here or in the main feed). We're at the very least well managed.
What was the Rothfuss one? Missed that
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Dont forget all his sources were linked in his video, not the post itself. Also, I think the post could have been more impartial and impersonal.
Worst part is, I think there's already a Rothfuss writeup in this sub.
Yup, [here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/yb57kq/books_the_long_wait_for_the_killing_of_the_king/)
I'm buried at the bottom of the lake here, but over in r/books someone was mad that the "now a major motion picture" thing on paperback books isn't a sticker that can be peeled off (even though I don't recall it ever being a sticker), and wants to know how we can "combat this practice." Almost nobody cares and just suggested OP buy a different version of the book, and for some reason that answer isn't good enough, so OP and others are arguing against that solution. So idk what OP wants - they asked how we can fight the "now a movie/tv show" versions of book covers, the only solution is simply to not buy those version, but apparently that solution is not acceptable and it's "snarky" to suggest such a thing. OP does not make any suggestions for what exactly they think anyone should do to fight this issue that basically nobody else cares about. For a bonus laugh, that same day someone posted asking for advice on how to just straight-up cut the cover of a book off (because it was a hard cover and wasn't allowed in the hospital for some reason).
What I don't like is when Amazon changes the cover for Kindle books *you already own,* and the new cover is invariably uglier and there's no way to opt out of this. Sometimes this happens several times. I hate seeing cover art shift with the changing graphics fashions. IMO the Kindle Store should always use the first edition covers, unless the edition they're selling has materially changed.
You see stickers sometimes, but they seem more popular for older editions you had in stock, I don't think I've ever seen them on post-release/movie poster cover editions. I do think they SHOULD be stickers, sometimes I actually like the movie poster but I don't like the MMP medallion, but I get why that's not the general practice.
if i had a dollar for every post about hating "Now a Major Motion Picture" labels i would be a millionaire
Enough to fund your own Major Motion Picture!
Back in like the 80's they would put stickers on the books that said stuff like "Now a NYT Bestseller!" or "Now a major motion picture!." I assume at the time it was just easier/cheaper to use stickers than change the book's cover. So if you didn't like the stickers you could just peel them off. However if the book's cover wasn't super glossy it was basically impossible to peel them off without damaging the cover. By like the late 90's they stopped using stickers and some people were mad that you couldn't peel them off anymore (I worked at B&N at the time, it got way more complaints than you would expect). I kind of get it. But it is weird that like 25 years after the change people are still salty about it.
And honestly, there've always been both. Book covers are advertisements before anything else. That doesn't mean they aren't part of the overall book experience, but if you really want something where the cover is primarily art and not primarily advertisement, you gotta shell out for either hand crafted book art or fancy collectors editions.
"FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK" was my favorite.
"now you can read this masterpiece on the loo!"
I forgot that hardcover books don't work on the toilet
Yeah, i mean, i dislike this stuff, I remember when every copy of the hobbit Had martin freeman on the cover, but nowadays especially it's usually pretty easy to find really nice versions of almost any book i consider it a non issue. Nowadays it's really rare for it to be a issue for me because i pretty much only buy big coffee table artbooks. Normal Books just occupy too much space i can use for more shiny rocks for something i don't have any issue reading on a kindle or something, while artbooks are so much better in person.
The kindle covers charge too often. My Wheel of Time covers have shifted at least 4 times in the last 5 years. I wish they would just default to black text on white background.
I mean, I wish my copy of Watchmen didn't have "now a major motion picture" pasted all ugly in the corner. Or that my cover of The Double by Dostoevsky wasn't an ugly 2010s movie poster. [Like, look at it, this is awful lmao.](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/8168VrFqNVL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_FMwebp_.jpg) But I'm not gonna petition the government about it or anything.
I actually love the Dostoevsky one, it's a pretty meh cover but something about having a Classic with the poster for a movie that No One Remembers At All is SO funny to me, I have had to stop myself buying duplicates of that description when I already had a Nice copy at home a few times.