Seen A Lot Of These With Your Favorites, But Reblog With The CURRENT Book You Are Reading, Show You Are

EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP SCIENTISTS AT THE SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE HAVE FOOTAGE OF A LIVE COLOSSAL SQUID FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑

some fandom disagreements are like "I see your point but I think this other aspect of the narrative is more significant," and some are like "I don't think you can read."

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries

By Heather Fawcett

Genre: Fantasy

Tl;Dr: 5/5

Synopsis: An epistolary story about a professor who travels to an isolated mountain town to study the Fae for her encyclopedia, but she learns about love, friendship, and community along the way

CW: Mild violence

Review: (Minor Spoilers)

5 Star TL;DR: believable and charming characters, a grumpy yet completely endearing MC, and a strong use of the journal format.

I found this book so immersive and charming. Scientific discovery as an ongoing narrative theme was relatable (as a scientist) and stayed relevant throughout without being grating. The other themes of coming to trust and rely on others and the importance of community, grew in intensity over the story. In that way, we were able to watch Emily’s heart soften and the world open up to embrace her. This is a slow paced fantasy, so we mainly get to watch Emily coming around to the idea of making friends and building meaningful relationships, alongside the magical action.

Emily was complicated and nuanced in such a beautiful and honest way. Although it is not confirmed by the author, Emily reads as autistic. I’m not autistic, so I can only speak from my outside perspective, but it felt real and not heavy handed (please let me know if I am way off here!). Because Emily was so realized, I found it easy to relate to her and root for her.

The Fae mythos was well thought out and integrated into the story. I don’t have a background in the Fae, so maybe I missed a few inaccuracies (ie. me not realizing that changelings are often used as a harmful allegory for transness, oof). However, as a package, the light magic system and fae mythos were compelling and fun to read about.

The romance was a big hit! Wendell and Emily are complete opposites, yet they function as perfect complements to each other. I love the level of tenderness that Wendell expresses for her and the resolute and pragmatic honesty that Emily brings in return. I was kicking my feet in delight. But remember, dear reader, I am a silly little goose.

Overall, I would recommend this to everyone, but especially people who like the Fae, light fantasy, or sweet romances.

Writers on a random Tuesday: Sits down, locks in, giggles, writes 10k, does not sleep

Also writers on a random Tuesday: writes one sentence and then stares into the abyss for five fours

firm believe that not everything happens for a reason, sometimes things are just cruel. and they shouldn’t have happened and it’s not supposed to be a lesson because we never deserved such thing.

My top books of 2024!

This is a tea checkpoint.

Is your tea getting cold?

Did you turn on your kettle and forget about it and now the water is cold again?

Is the tea bag still in?

Did you intend to start the tea making process and forget?

Congratulations! You remember now.

Continuing on from here my personal take on writing romance is there are three essential components: care/affection, profound mutual understanding and intense mutual admiration.

If you have all three you have the bones for something not just functional but aspirational. If you have the first and second but not the third, you have something that may be more of a deep, strong friendship but I can understand and appreciate the romantic overtones. If you have the second and third but not the first that's classic archenemy-shipping. If you have the first and third but are struggling on the second you have the bones of a painful tragedy. If you only have one, then what you have is probably not a romance, and my real quarrel is with people who think you only need the first.

ed zitron, a tech beat reporter, wrote an article about a recent paper that came out from goldman-sachs calling AI, in nicer terms, a grift. it is a really interesting article; hearing criticism from people who are not ignorant of the tech and have no reason to mince words is refreshing. it also brings up points and asks the right questions:

if AI is going to be a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?

what does it mean when people say that AI will "get better"? what does that look like and how would it even be achieved? the article makes a point to debunk talking points about how all tech is misunderstood at first by pointing out that the tech it gets compared to the most, the internet and smartphones, were both created over the course of decades with roadmaps and clear goals. AI does not have this.

the american power grid straight up cannot handle the load required to run AI because it has not been meaningfully developed in decades. how are they going to overcome this hurdle (they aren't)?

people who are losing their jobs to this tech aren't being "replaced". they're just getting a taste of how little their managers care about their craft and how little they think of their consumer base. ai is not capable of replacing humans and there's no indication they ever will because...

all of these models use the same training data so now they're all giving the same wrong answers in the same voice. without massive and i mean EXPONENTIALLY MASSIVE troves of data to work with, they are pretty much as a standstill for any innovation they're imagining in their heads