Racing Turtles

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain.  You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free. 

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this.  I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this.  Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this.  When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here.  It’s a great resource.

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

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The reason the culture of ‘depression meme humour’ got big was because it was a rebellious backlash against a dominant social attitude that You Just Weren’t Trying Hard Enough which deliberately swept mental health issues under the rug. Turning ‘positivity’ into the cool new meme is a noble idea, but in practice, unless it’s done with care and understanding instead of just a desire to perform what people in your social circles seem to want to see, all it’s doing is recreating a culture of artificial cheerfulness, where deviation is punishable by ostracization. And that’s not a healthy or ‘positive’ environment for anyone. 

I’m usually a big proponent of positive bandwagons - even if people only join them because they see it’s popular, they’re still getting exposure to a thing they might not have otherwise - but if the only reason you’re jumping on ‘positivity’ is so you can make snarky comments about all those losers still wallowing in last year’s meme, rather than out of genuine care and concern for people’s well-being, then there’s nothing at all positive about what you’re doing.

God, thank you… so much for this post.

We really need to start thinking about the intention and motivation behind other people’s posts when we respond to them. No, it’s not good to create a culture of normalizing suicidal ideation and rewarding people for refusing to take steps to help themselves or work on how they treat others (“not everyone can be neurotypical Karen” “I literally just said to be nice to people Anthony”). But sometimes you just gotta let a vent post be a fuckin vent post. Sometimes scolding or even well-intentioned positivity only has the effect of silencing someone who really, really needs an outlet to talk about how they’re hurting.

Legolas has no idea how old he is. None.

He has a general, ball park idea of his age, he can (usually) guess it within 20- 30 or so years. But that’s all.

He lost count somehwere in his first thousandth years of life and never bothered to figure it out again.

However, if you ask him his age he will tell you WILDLY different answers that seem to be randomly selected out of thin air.

Pippin: Legolas, how old are you?

Legolas: I am 8987 years.

Aragorn: Okay no, Ada isn’t even 8000 years old yet. Try again.

Legolas: I am 72 years old.

Aragorn: And you certainly arnt younger than me.

Legolas: I am 678 years old.

Aragorn: I also feel like that is incorrect.

Legolas: I am 3000 years old.

Aragorn: Much more plausible, but still, I think, incorrect.

Legolas: I am exactly 8 years old.

Aragorn: why are you the way that you are

Legolas: :)

Elves actually count time in a period called a yén iirc, equivalent to 144 of our years.

So it’s not that Legolas doesn’t know how old he is. He just wants to put things in measurements his friends can understand, but he’s very bad at math.

#lord of the rings #listen lots of gays can’t do math don’t roast my boy like this (via @greenmonstermash )