kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
I got linked the other day to Bookshop.org, as a way to shop for books online while supporting independent booksellers in the UK -- to which my immediate question was "wait, how is this different from, and is it better than, hive.co.uk?"

And then, with a little more prompting, I managed to do some digging through the website, and found:
If you want to choose a specific bookshop to support, choose them from our map and they’ll receive 30% of the cover price (or almost all of the profit) on your orders for a year. Otherwise, 10% of the cover price of your order will contribute to an earnings pool that will be evenly distributed among participating independent bookshops each month. (https://uk.bookshop.org/pages/about)
... versus...
Whether you order books, films, music, games, or anything else, your chosen bookshop will receive commission. They will receive a minimum of 10% on the net value of all book orders, rising to 25% when you select store collection. We pay 8% on eBooks and 3% on entertainment products. Bookshops receive their commission monthly. (https://www.hive.co.uk/WhatsHiveallabout)

The other really crucial point from my perspective is that Bookshop.org isn't currently doing ebooks, but I'd been completely unaware of them otherwise, so here is a note. :)
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
Kintsugi Oxford have been great (and very fast!) about repairing a pendant for me; I am expecting it to arrive back with me tomorrow and am delighted by the photos I've been sent in advance.
kaberett: A green origami stegosaurus (origami stegosaurus)
Planned Obsolescence

(Today has been a Migraine Day, and I am consequently fighting the sense that I have Done Nothing even though in fact I have done Several Things, including but not limited to: dealing with Yet More Viva Bureaucracy; Attending Part Of An Academic Workshop, in the process establishing that New Pen is in fact A Good for everyday use; Laundry Wrangling; and some enjoyable Yelling About Austen. Have a link to a story about dinosaurs.)
kaberett: A sleeping koalasheep (Avatar: the Last Airbender), with the dreamwidth logo above. (dreamkoalasheep)
Would you like a small friendly sheeplightbulb to look disappointed in you when you don't take regular typing breaks? workrave might be just the thing for you!

This message brought to you by Just How Bad typesetting is for (also) setting off RSI flares, which is quite clearly in no small part because every time I'm prompted to take a microbreak I go "but if I just finish this sentence/paragraph--"

-- and so I am enforcing, rather more than the hyperfocus would actually like, taking Breaks When Prompted.

(Today I have gone through chapters 1-3 for consistency of style and first on-screen proof-reading, and have naturally caught a whole bunch of typos. Tomorrow: 4 and 5, maybe, with breaks for typesetting chapter 6...)
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
  • Springer Verlag academic text(book)s (via [personal profile] sebenikela): wide variety of topics, where I've grabbed a mix of chemistry and sociology and psychology and programming and physics
  • Project Muse (ditto): a frankly... overwhelming... number of academic presses (with a landing page that makes it clear when the texts will be available for download until)
  • An Introduction to the Rock-Forming Minerals, or -- as we collectively refer to it -- "DHZ" (via my supervisor): this has pretty much everything you could ever need or want to know about the structure and properties and identification of, well, the rock-forming minerals
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
Pluto Press are offering 40% off their Black Studies catalogue for Black History Month! Ebook and hard copy. (Spotted while looking up some of the terminology bell hooks uses that felt like it meant a specific thing I wasn't understanding.)
kaberett: photograph of the Moon taken from the northern hemisphere by GH Revera (moon)
[personal profile] purplefringe did Good Omens to Vienna Teng's Gravity and it's perfect

all of it

is perfect

it has gone straight back on and I'm crying some more

this is a song I come back and back to, about feeling peripheral and broken and irrelevant; I think I didn't meet it until after I'd written Only This, but oh, the echoes are there.
kaberett: (the lost thing)
I am currently in the process of reading Tales from the Inner City, one of Shaun Tan's picture books. It's a collection of 25 illustrated short stories, about (sort of) the relationship between urban environments and non-human animals and, also, humans.

Shaun Tan is an Australian who creates odd and beautiful books. I first came across him in the context of The Lost Thing, which is also an Oscar-winning short animation that I highly recommend seeking out.

A few days ago, elsewhere on a Dreamwidth, a call for prompts went out; I left a list, including shaun tan's picture books, and in exchange received a snippet of fic. At a recent party, one of my guests asked if anyone had recommendations for diverse children's books. Oooh, I said, and pulled all my Shaun Tan off the shelf.

It turns out my sense of what constitutes a reasonable children's book is slightly skewed.

They're not exactly for children, but they're not not for children, either.

They are beautiful and wistful and kind, sometimes in a distant sort of way. They are intricately detailed. They tell stories within stories within stories, in the text (where it exists) and in the art (which always does) and in the weaving in between. Some people seem to think they're unsettling; I find them soothing. They're complicated -- they're not going to give you an easy moral -- but they're peaceful, and they're generally fairly hopeful if you squint, and they are each of them a self-contained world or worlds that spread far beyond the pages that catalogue them, and invite exploration.

I love them dearly.
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
Danez Smith is Black, Queer, and Poz (HIV+); Danez is an astounding poet. Don't Call Us Dead is amazing; I don't have good words for talking about it, but please please please consider looking it up. Here's a sample.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
The Full Circle Fresh Air compost caddy is genuinely the least vile compost caddy I have ever met. It doesn't disgorge horrible slime! It doesn't smell vile! Flies are genuinely astonishingly minimal! I would not have bought it had there not been one missing its base knocked down to two quid in TK Maxx, but I am very glad I did.
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
... and while grumpily looking for a place to buy the ebook, preferably DRM-free, I finally discovered Rebellion Publishing, who carry DRM-free multi-format ebooks under the 2000AD, Solaris, Abaddon Books and Ravenstone Press imprints. Here's the direct link for Revenant Gun.

My process for finding DRM ebooks has previously been a grumpy trawl through Smashwords (if self-published), Weightless Books (DRM-free, has very little), Foyles (which mostly doesn't seem to sell ebooks any more, though it did for a while, even if they were mostly DRMed), Hive (entirely DRMed, supports independent booksellers at your discretion, I was pointed at them by my favourite SF bookshop in Edinburgh), and finally landing up at Kobo (not linking because it's Big; has almost everything; sometimes DRMed and sometimes not, depending on the publisher/author request). Rebellion is... going to be my default for Solaris imprint books, from now on.

I am very excited about this.
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
you might also like Heartstopper, an LGBT comic about a British grammar school, which I have just inhaled this evening after one of you all reblogged it on the tumbls xx

(comment I left on the Patreon: 3-2 came across my dash earlier this evening, I have just read EVERYTHING (with laughing-out-loud and misting-up and making-my-partner-read-bits), thank you *so much* for this. -- I am 27, I was in Year 9 when Section 28 was repealed, I was the only out queer in my secondary school of 1000+ students, and I recognise these crushes SO HARD. Thank you so, so much for making this be a thing in the world, and I am really looking forward to reading more. <3)
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
... because I have just made P read it, and then we stayed up til 1am talking about it, and I haven't talked about it here yet because Too Many Feelings, which I will now attempt to sketch.

(Spoilers within!)

Read more... )
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
Strong Female Protagonist, which I've recced before and will rec again, is a webcomic that has consistently thought hard about definition, regulation and registration of super-powered humans, and about morality and ethics and how to make good choices. It doesn't have answers; it does have compassion. I like it a lot.

(... this is not exactly a CA:CW hate blog, but I do think it's sort of tragic that a freak meteorite destroyed the Marvel studios after GotG was released, so they never got a chance to fulfill the potential of the storylines they'd set up up to that point. But hey, your blue-eyed boys is canon.)

eta I take it back, this is a Civil War hate blog, I had not at that point seen this (trigger warning, I seriously cannot work out how to words things beyond that in ways that aren't ~~a spoiler~~, but please do note that I distinguish between "content note" for "bad things happen" and "trigger warning" for "this is handled abhorrently")
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] jedusaur told me about it, of course, and [personal profile] staranise has just started writing fic about it, which in turn means that I've been flailing about headcanon.

Read more... )

I DON'T EVEN GO HERE, etc etc etc.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
(Announcement of its availability, and list of sources; DRM-free epub from Smashwords.)

This book is my new best friend.

It's about botany and the dreams of plants. It's about language and words, words that are like fish, and you catch them and you get to keep them. And it's about, elliptically, how girls are taught to accept shitty behaviour from men as profound and meaningful and worth it, and about some of the ways one might be able to go about unlearning it.

I REALLY ENJOYED IT OKAY
kaberett: a watercolour of a pale gold/salmon honeysuckle blossom against a background of green leaves (honeysuckle)
Tuesday afternoon I went to Otherworlds with [personal profile] sebastienne -- an exhibition of space landscape photography -- and it was so good, people, so good. It was so good I started crying less than fifteen seconds after entering (good little space robot). I accidentally left with a scarf and two postcards. I am going to drag [personal profile] me_and along and let him wander the hall while I sit and cry over my favourites. I am willing to take absolutely anyone else along at all to wander the hall while I... sit and cry over my favourites, with breaks for getting loud and overenthusiastic at you about how geology is fucking FANTASTIC, okay, BECAUSE, right, [a totally relevant and utterly enthralling fact]. The curation is brilliant (you get to see reflections of other photographs in the black backgrounds of the ones you're looking at). I just -- I had a lot of feelings, okay, and then they leaked out of my face.

(And then we went and recuperated in the Members' Room for fifteen minutes before braving the thronged hallways of It's The Natural History Museum And It's The Easter Holidays once more, and a small child sat thoughtfully on the sofa said to its mother, "I wish the WHOLE WORLD was made of candy... except for us," and then in the queue for the accessible loo I had a fantastic chat with another three small children about why I use a wheelchair, and how it's polite to ask people before you touch their wheelchairs, and how they could give me a quick push to see how easy it was, and how I could do wheelies. OFFICIALLY COOLEST GROWN-UP IN THE TOILET, okay.)

And then! An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail! This month's -- it is a monthly thing -- featured Tom Scott (talking about emoji), Morgan and West (the time-travelling magicians), and a couple of other people [personal profile] sebastienne and [personal profile] shortcipher were actively interested in, I think; it was a show in three thirds, each third being subdivided into three acts; there was one act I Actively Disliked (a whole bunch of misc oppression-perpetuating not-actually-very-funny jokes strung together as a thinly-disguised ad for an upcoming show), but the other eight + MCing were great. I am now actively into Helen Arney and Marian Call (particularly Good Morning, Moon), and I also learned a great deal about how to cook in hotel rooms from [twitter.com profile] georgeegg (it had not occurred to me that balancing a cereal bowl on top of the kettle would give you a double boiler, e.g.).

Meanwhile I have been reading a lot of excellent short fiction. Over the past few days I have particularly enjoyed John Chu's Hold-Time Violations (the politics of physics; content note for ill mothers) and Restore the Heart into Love (orthography); SL Huang's By Degrees and Dilatory Time (transhumanism and aids and vision; content note for cancer and surgery), and the diptych Hunting Monsters (content note for abuse) and Fighting Demons (... I mean this also has content notes but I am struggling to word them); and I have finally got around to starting T Kingfisher's The Raven & The Reindeer, which thus far I am finding very comforting.

And there is sunshine, and I am basking in it.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
Helen Arney and Marian Call are fantastic geek songstresses -- I saw them both perform last night, at An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail, which was great -- and over the next week they're playing Bath (today), Edinburgh (tomorrow), Manchester (1st), London (again; the 2nd) and Cambridge (the third). More details at the link; I hadn't realised I needed the Elements Song filked about unobtanium and phlogiston but I really did. More info
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
CN Lester is crowdfunding their new album, Come Home. I wasn't able to attend the first performance of it but I've heard the live recording: it's lush and lyrical and sharp, as all their work is, and is something I end up identifying with a lot, very frequently.

There's a pair of songs on their last album, one from the perspective of an audience member and one from the perspective of a performer. The former features the lyric I forgot my perpetual moving/because he marked time with a pen in his hand, which stills me and settles me and, well, it's not a wonder that fades with distance or knowing how it's done/it's hearing my thoughts, unspoken, on someone else's tongue: I have had that crush, more than once. The other -- well, the other is called You. That video has content notes for slurs and abuse, but it -- the pair together -- make me cry, every time.


Dave Hughes, about whom I am written before, has a memorial EP available for pre-order: all proceeds go to a specific charity (content notes: cancer; death).

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