Random Headcanon: That Federation Vessels In Star Trek Seem To Experience Bizarre Malfunctions With Such

March 2017 Book Discussion Challenge, day 9

Guilty Pleasure

I was well into typing this post about my consumption of Sophie Kinsella books in my teens, when I realised two things:

First, it’s been years since I read those books, so they’re not really my guilty pleasure, or any kind of pleasure for that matter.

Second, I don’t think chick lit as a genre really needs any more hate, even if a good portion of these books perpetuate heteronormative gender roles and idealised fantasies of what romance is.

Consequently, my question is this: why should anything you read be considered a guilty pleasure? If you enjoy it, why should you feel guilty? And if you feel guilty for reading it, maybe you shouldn’t be reading it at all?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”

“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”

J.K. Rowling

“Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.”

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”

John Green

“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”

“If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.”

“In spite of it all, hope is not misguided.”

Ernest Hemingway

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”

“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.” 

Marilyn Monroe

“Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” 

Dalai Lama

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”

Unknown

“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.”

“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them.”

“Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.”

“Adventure may hurt you, but monotony will kill you.”

inspiration

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away fifteen vintage, ‘60s-era Penguin Classics by Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Voltaire, Plato, and others! It took me three years to accumulate these books one by one, and I’m already starting to have separation issues. *sigh* But I know they will go to a good home. Won’t this collection 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 choose a random winner on August 27, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: Thanks to the generosity of @harperperennial, we’re giving away all eight of the new, limited edition 2016-17 Harper Perennial Olive Editions! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these books, 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 December 15, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Harper Perennial has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Easy, right? Good luck!

basically, i think the general rule of thumb is: if someone REALLY wants the blood that’s inside of your body, and they’re like… a vampire, or a dracula, or some sort of mansquito, then that’s probably okay. a dracula and a mansquito are made for removing things like blood and swords from inside your body. that’s basically fine.

if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out. 

unfortunately this will not deter a really big frog, because a really big frog is full of things like prizes, and value, and quite a lot of hatred, and it would REALLY rather like to replace any and all of those things with your blood, and basically by any means possible.

when you sitting there staring at a fic wondering what happens next and then you’re like oh shit i’m the writer

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, George Orwell, Richard Wright, 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 January 22, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

- Stephen Hawking

she raised an eye indeed to the beauty of Gilgamesh, or, Ishtar did nothing wrong

One of the canons I follow just introduced its version of the goddess Ishtar as a character. From what little I’ve been able to read translated so far, I like her a lot. But a lot of the fandom has been kind of losing its shit over what a horrible character she must be based partly on very limited and biased in-universe evidence but mostly on cherry-picked selections from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Did I mention Gilgamesh in this canon is a huge fan favorite? Yeah.

Anyway, I’ve spent most of the past year researching the mythology surrounding star goddesses of love and sovereignty in the Ancient Near East, starting with Inanna and her near-counterpart Ishtar. So I am well-placed now to explain why, in fact, Ishtar did nothing wrong in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

I mean, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. She’s a goddess, and ancient deities are frequently assholes just in general. But it’s not entirely untrue either. See, you can’t divorce stories from their culture entirely; you need to know a little about the culture of ancient Babylon to understand the Epic of Gilgamesh. It turns out that in context, the whole matter of Ishtar’s advances on Gilgamesh and subsequent reaction to his rejection of her is way more complicated than it appears.

Under the cut: a brief lesson in ancient Sumerian and Babylonian religion and the explanation of why Ishtar did nothing wrong.

Keep reading

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.