Do People Actually Read Books While In The Bathtub

þ!

A feature of English which I think is stupid,

If we’re carrying on with this game,

Is how we abolished the thorn and replaced it,

With two letters that meant the same.

The þ was a letter, amazing, astounding,

Perfect in every respect,

Representing the ‘th’ sound and shortening words,

The one thing it didn’t expect;

One day T and H went and burgled its meaning,

And then, thanks to the printing press,

Its symbol mutated and morphed into Y,

Which is pointless, I must confess.

Þoughtlessly, the þ was forgotten,

Þreatened as the language evolved,

Þankful for þose who knew of old English,

A topic where it was involved.

It only survived in Modern Icelandic,

In English it’s treated with scorn,

And as barely anyone knows it exists,

Please try to remember the thorn.

Hard Times, Charles Dickens

This is 1 of 15 Evergreens editions by Alma Books you can vote on with your likes/reblogs. The five Alma Classics that receive the most notes will comprise our next giveaway, generously sponsored by Alma Classics! (Here’s our current giveaway.)

Literature Asks

Quotes from literature to inspire you when writing!

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” - J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”

“The curves of your lips rewrite history.” - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.” - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I took a photo of us mid-embrace. When I am old and alone, I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful.” - Joe Dunthorne, Submarine

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” - W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Who, being loved, is poor?” - Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” - Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.” - Alfred Tennyson

“I’m watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.” - Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“I don’t want you to miss all the things that someone else can give you.” -  Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“You can love someone so much… But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.” - John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” -  Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Just… isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?” - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“I’m just so thankful for our little infinity.” - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I hope, or I could not live.” - H.G. Wells

“I hadn’t expected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.” - Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel

“Your eyes are full of language.” - Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters 

“You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture.” -  Junot Dìaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone.” - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea: A Novel

“I’ve never had a moment’s doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life.” - Ian McEwan, Atonement

“You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.” - Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

“I like flaws. I think they make things interesting.” - Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.” E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.” - Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” -  Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.” -  P.D. James, The Children of Men

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.” - Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong 

“Above, the starts shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe” - Stephen King

“The mouth is made for communication, and nothing is more articulate than a kiss.” - Jarod Kintz, It Occurred to Me

“If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it” - Nicole Krause, The History of Love

“I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world…” - Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke With You

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Dear Fandom, 

I’m writing this because because there has been drama. I am not writing it aimed at of the specific root of the drama, but at the sick oozing puss that has seeped out of that drama. I’m writing this because of the hate. The hate that’s spread from that drama and touched the lives of so many people I know and care about. 

I don’t like discourse, anyone who’s followed me for a while knows I like to stay out of it and promote the more positive side of things, but it’s gotten to the point this time where I’m angry. I’m angry for friends and I’m angry because none of this should have happened, and yet here we are sitting in a pool of anger and frustration and hurt. 

So I have a few things to say. I have some questions and I have some thoughts, and lastly I have a challenge for you: Fandom. 

This probably does not apply to most of you, and I’m unsure if it will sway those of you perpetuating the hate, but I need to say it and I hope you will at the very least listen. 

I have to know, Fandom, when did you forget why we were all here? When did you forget that Fandom is about community? That community means a melting of ideas, personalities, and most of all a meeting place of People? When did you allow the flood of images and text to erase the fact that behind all of that are real, living, breathing, humans? Of different ages, races, genders, and personalities? 

I joined fandom because I didn’t want to be alone. I joined for the joy of being able to share in this experience (and in my case it’s Batman) with you all. I sat down and said “I love this and I want to talk about it with people. I want to get excited about or whine about or simply engage in this thing with others”. We all did, right? We all wanted to see someone else’s excitement burst out of them. Wanted to see what others would create. Wanted to create for others. Wanted to have a group to talk to about this cool thing we’ve found. 

We came here for passion, and in many ways I think that has become warped. I think that somewhere between passion and engagement we forgot that Usernames/Icons = people. It’s an easy thing to forget. It’s something I’ve forgotten and I’ve regretted that. I have to remind myself every day that the people I interact with online are like me, they’re someone excited to share in this adventure that is fandom. I also think this forgetting is a cause of the grumblings that bleed from a fandom. We forget that it’s another person on the other side of the screen and lash out. 

What I don’t understand is the utter venom with which some people spread that anger. What drives someone to tell another person to kill themselves? What drives them to threaten harm or wish rape upon someone? How can this hate be so visceral? What good does it do to anyone? 

In looking at these question, I find myself looking at the reason for Discourse. I believe that a lot of discourse comes from good intentions. I think that many times one person enters into discussion with another with the intent to converse, and then it snowballs into something worse. And I think that internet culture has created a space where we gang up on a single individual for being “wrong”. Call it purity culture or cancel culture or whatever term you have for it, it only serves to take good intentions and turn them sour. It only serves to hurt. 

We have somehow lost wanting to talk about what’s right in the face of needing to be the one who is right. And I think that’s created a lot of the trouble we have. 

I think that we, in this wide world of letting everyone see everything, have lost the blessing of personal conversations. I think we have forgotten that some people know less. Some people are young. Some people will never be swayed. And sometimes, yes, we are wrong. 

Something we have gained–to our detriment– is the idea that the internet is here for us. That creators are here to give us what we want, when we want it, and how we want it. And the thing with that is that it’s backwards. 

It’s up to you to curate your online experience. Websites are built in with age restrictions (not that anyone follows them, but again: up to you). Most creators I know are good enough to tag things properly. To give warnings. To tell people Hey! Lookout! But even if they didn’t it’s not up to them to curate your experience for you, Fandom. That’s your job. That’s what the unfollow button is for. That’s what filters are for. That’s what the block button is for. That’s why that sweet bunny Thumper said all those years ago “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”.

If you don’t agree with/like/enjoy something, then why on Earth are you engaging with it? 

Let’s say you like a creator and honestly do want to engage with the content, and still disagree. Why on earth are you sending hate? Why send threats? Why be so cruel? If you want to talk about something: Talk. If you’d like to sway a creator’s point of view: have a discussion. Before you go and tell someone they’re wrong, consider how getting that ask would feel if it were you. Be aware that that person is a Person and maybe they will never agree with you.

This isn’t me saying don’t engage, and don’t converse, it’s me saying that when do, do it the right way. Do it considering the other person. Do not do it so you can have the pleasure of knocking them down a few pegs (even if you utterly disagree). Do it with kindness, not hate. Perpetuating hate against someone is wrong and not the answer. And if you absolutely cannot message someone respectfully, then yes this is me saying don’t message them at all. 

Here’s the thing about hate. It’s toxic. Hate is gross. Hate only breeds worse things. Hate turns misunderstandings into Discourse. Hate turns attempts at peace into floods of anons in inboxes and the screaming voices of (one or two maybe three) people into a repetitive thud thud thud of thunderous terror and fear and that sick swimming pit in your stomach. 

Hate brings out the dregs of humanity and it puts them on a show for their own benefit. Hate online, (on tumblr, but probably everywhere) is for the benefit of the one spewing the poison. It is so the hater can sit back and crow about how they have hurt how they have won how they have conquered over the little back text on the little white screen and how their words have become the victor.  

Hate does nothing good. 

We are all different and have different opinions and that’s okay! It’s good to be different, and challenge each other (in a positive way). Just remember that no one is perfect and no one should be held on a pedestal. 

So here is my challenge to you, Fandom: 

Be kind

Be gracious 

Respect others

Give someone the benefit of the doubt 

Remember that we all came here for the same reason

Do not spew hate, pause a moment and consider your words

And because it bears repeating: Be kind 

Every post just makes this better

A Holiday Story

So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.

So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.

Well Shit!  goes my grandfather,  them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one.  So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.

They’re gone for a LONG time.  according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.

Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise!  they have a Pheasant.  Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant.   Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen. “TOM!!”  She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point.  “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”

They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.

“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?” “We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.    Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages. Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot.  They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods.  They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.

And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.

Money Cat is the soundest financial investment you can make!

Reblog him now and money will find you (probably after payday). Remember to pay your new found wealth forward and share your own Money Cat experience!!!

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on April 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

If you’re European, in a couple of weeks you will be denied any and all access to fandom contents on Tumblr and everywhere else on the internet. Here’s why.

On June, 20th the JURI of European Parliament approved of the articles 11 and 13 of the new Copyright Law. These articles are also known as the “Link Tax” and the “Censorship Machines” articles.

Articles 13 in particular forces every internet platform to filter all the contents we upload online, ending once and for all the fandom culture. Which means you won’t be able to upload any type of fandom works like fan arts, fan fictions, gif sets from your favourite films and series, edits, because it’s all copyrighted material. And you won’t also be able to share, enjoy or download other’s contents, because the use of links will be completely restricted.

But not everything’s lost yet. There’s another round of voting scheduled for the early days of July.

What you can do now to save our internet, is to share these informations with all of your family members and friends, and to ask to your MEP (the members of the European Parliament from your country) to vote NO at the next round, to vote against articles 11 and 13.

Here you can find more news and all the details to contact your MEP:

https://saveyourinternet.eu

Also, sign and share this petition:

https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet?recruiter=50668942&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial

We have just a couple of weeks to stop this complete madness, don’t let them dictating the way we enjoy our internet.

#SaveYourInternet now!

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

Anaïs Nin (via macrolit)

This was the result of the time my mother yelled at me that my “feet were in the clouds”, an insult? so strange I was more baffled that hurt.

This is Feet in the Clouds