The USA is cancer.

It’s the tumor on the world.

It started out as a racist, capitalist, tax-dodging-slaver state and went downhill from there.

#USians

The enemy of my enemy is STILL my fucking enemy.

The Bookwall.

Like the book in the previous post I have recently re-read these. Whilst I may.

Helpfully someone pointed me to audiobook versions online so that I could read along; I've had bad reader's block. Horrible.

Featuring The Immanent Grove on their covers, The Other Wind and Tales From Earthsea both came out in 2002. In the alleged UK they were published, somewhat ironically, by Orion’s Children’s Books. They grew with their audience; those who’d read - or been read - A Wizard of Earthsea, decades earlier. Tales… in particular has some downright nasty content.

The Other Wind managed to become my favourite Earthsea novel, supplanting The Tombs Of Atuan. It succeeded in closing the series more satisfyingly than the slightly disappointing Tehanu. More importantly it righted an egregious error-of-story from The Farthest Shore. Something that really needed addressing. And it did it so well.

Ursula K Le Guin. Woman author. Wrote a series of books about a boy who goes to wizarding school and has adventures all over as he gets older. In 1968. Didn’t use her influence to terrorise a minority.

#UrsulaKLeGuin #Earthsea #Books #Dragons #TheOtherWind

All the faces/all the voices blur...

It has been longer than most of you have been alive, since I last read this book. It was one of the first books to make me cry.

I have been staring at my greatly-reduced bookshelves, and am left wondering how long I can hold on to even these. The things I managed not to have to sacrifice to circumstance. Yet.

I heard the song before I read the book. It made me curious enough to grab a copy of the hardback from the remaindered school supply, at the county library where I was working at the time; before it fell to pulping. A building later found - long after I had left - to have ceilings made of asbestos.

#CharlotteSometimes #PenelopeFarmer #TheCure #RobertSmith #Libraries #Books

First of all, thank you to Erik and the crew for allowing me onto this instance.

I have major reservations about Mastodon.

I spent four years becoming VERY disillusioned, over about as many instances, with what Mastodon actually IS, as opposed to how it is PRESENTED, by those promoting the site/software. There is a vast disconnect between what many proponents say Mastodon is and the reality of the experience.

By my second instance I had already blocked mastodonDOTsocial wholesale. This was a problem as frankly most of the people I had originally followed on Mastodon were located there. I considered it the Twitter of the Fediverse and I wasn't wrong.

I was appalled that - exactly as with Twitter - when people on that instance found out how repugnant it was and how questionable those in charge of it were, they didn't leave. Clicks, numbers, maintaining their profile and their endorphin spike was clearly MUCH more important to them than principles.

I was appalled, but not surprised. I'd learned a long time back - being an early adopter on Facebook who subsequently burnt every bridge to that place in 2012 - that Social Media itself is an absolute horror. As a lens on humanity - especially the parts of humanity who see themselves as somehow moral - it is very unforgiving and highlights every hypocrisy, every exercise in privilege and minute-but-clung-to power, in exacting detail.

My opinion of humans, already barely above ground, grew gradually subterranean.

Mastodon is very much NOT free from the faults and flaws of the vile corporate social medias. It is simply this; it's not them. It does however contain the same people a lot of the time, and where they aren't present elsewhere I'm not seeing much in the way of them trying to be better. Still the authors linking to Amazon. Still the high-follower accounts posting selfie after selfie. Still the sport fans. Still the corporate shills.

They're not going away. I'd say people have short memories (particularly about what they have said previously online), but really, they just have no principles. None.

In 2007 I bought a LiveJournal account. My birth name. By 2012, when I dumped all things Zuckerberg, LJ had faded vastly in the west, though it remained popular in Russia and was indeed eventually bought by the Maffiya. I rarely posted there, as there was no-one left to see me. But I did later carry on using it as a diary, of sorts, especially as I kicked every other single corporate entity to the gutter.

At the end of December 2025 the crooks running LJ banned public posts. If one wanted to make a post visible to those without accounts, one had to now pay. As I'd already bought the account eighteen years previously I was not inclined to give in to blackmail.

So I lost my diary as well.

Since 2013, before Yahoo! bought it, I'd had a Tumblr account. The sequential nature of text/image/audio posting it enabled appealed to my nature. Of course it went downhill almost immediately and by 2016 I'd given up. After LJ went tits up I reactivated my old Tumblr account so I'd have somewhere to continue sporadic diary entries.

Oh sweet fuck.

I was unprepared for HOW repugnant it had become. I mean, I should have expected it but ..ugh. I just couldn't do it. Every time I posted something there I made the mistake of looking at the algorithm tab and it left me thinking only in terms of orbital mass drivers. And lots of them.

I considered Mastodon again. I needed somewhere to simply post stuff that I had to say 'outloud.' Without going bananas (..more bananas). So I applied here and was granted a place.

I'm not here to follow people (though I probably will) or be followed by them (though some may). I just want somewhere to write things down. Like this.

I'm not interested in numbers, clicks, mob approval at all. The over-reaching tenet of social media is "NEVER MIND THE QUALITY! FEEL THE WIDTH!" And I have absolutely zero interest in that.

#Mastodon