csevet replied to your post “oh man i just

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csevet replied to your post “oh man i just finished ancillary justice. there’s a lot of…”

imo the worldbuilding starts to make more sense in the later books, when you get to see more of the radch in action

csevet replied to your post “HA Ancillary Justice is available as an ebook from Buffalo/Erie Co…”

i am. a normal amount of excited for FRIEND READ BOOK

I feel like I was starting to get the gist of it by the end. 

I also feel like I probably shouldn’t have returned it right away, but rather should have reread it. But I also think I’ll probably devour the entire trilogy and then want to go back and reread, so. 

I’m so behind the times, it won a Hugo in 2014, that’s… part of me thinks that was last year but it uh, wasn’t. 
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ha the library has ebook copies of numbers 1 and 3 in the Imperial Radch trilogy but does not have..

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ha the library has ebook copies of numbers 1 and 3 in the Imperial Radch trilogy but does not have an electronic copy of no. 2. I can borrow the physical book but they have to send it from the central branch of the library. 

so I am going to have to practice self-restraint after all. I shouldn’t have returned the first ebook, I could have reread it. But I want to read all three before I try to reread. Maybe I’ll just see if they have physical book copies of all three, and get them all? From my perusal of their catalog I actually have a suspicion that they don’t have a physical book copy of #3… 

I can’t read physical books at work, though. ebooks, no problem! It doubles my productivity because I don’t get bored and wander off from what I’m supposed to be doing, but can rather get into kind of a rhythm of doing the thing, waiting for the computer and reading a bit, doing the thing, reading a bit, doing the thing, instead of just getting frustrated. 

Anyway. I mean, maybe nobody would care if I read a physical book at work but I bet they’d notice. 

What’s funny is that to distract myself from wanting to read more, I actually managed to write a bit on a stuck project last night so there’s that. 
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Army Strong: A gay soldier’s life of service

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Army Strong: A gay soldier’s life of service:

vietnamwarera:

During his career, he served as a platoon leader and a company executive officer in Vietnam. He received two Bronze Stars, one for valor, a Purple Heart and an Air Medal. He was chief of military education for the Army Reserve in St. Louis and an inspector general in California. His final assignment was as an engineer war plans officer at Fort Hood, Texas. After a fire at his home there in 1996, an arson investigation uncovered video that indicated Loomis is gay.

More than 14,000 service members have been discharged in 16 years under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. “That’s enough to form an entire Army infantry division,” Loomis points out.

His case went to Federal Court, and he won by arguing the Army did not follow its own regulations and discharge procedures. “The judge was looking for the easiest way to decide the case,” he says. Nine years after he was kicked out of the military, Loomis got his retirement. He returned home to New Mexico and joined the state’s chapter of American Veterans for Equal Rights, of which he is now president. Last year, members marched in the Albuquerque Veterans Day parade for the first time.
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1) Dude wants to borrow a book from the library. Yes, he copycatted me and got a library card,...

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1) Dude wants to borrow a book from the library. Yes, he copycatted me and got a library card, though in his defense (i guess?) he wasn’t paying attention when I did, and then he joined a work-related groupchat where they were talking about books like a book club, and he wanted to read along and lurk and realized the library was the solution. Now the next one is in Closed Stacks, but it’s not non-circulating? but? IDK, it means they’ve got it at Central. Which MEANS, he has to go there ANYWAY, so while he’s THERE, he can get me MY BOOKS. So maybe that’s awesome. We’ll see; I’m still not sure which location has the book I want and how long it would take them to get it there. Despite growing up going to libraries constantly, working in libraries all through college, and spending the last three years taking Farmkid to the library all the dang time, I still don’t really know how libraries work. Yes, my idiocy is amazing. Listen they didn’t have ebooks when I was last current, so I didn’t know.

2) I don’t have a book for today so I think maybe I’ll try to write a short-short story (HA) about somebody doing something goofy at a farmer’s market. I’m torn as to whether to write it as a fanfic AU in the tiny handful of fandoms I actually have any idea who the characters are in, or whether I should just write OCs. IDK if anyone would read OCs but shit, IDK if anyone would read an A/U either, so. I’m just worried it’d backfire. 

3) the other thing is that I finally wrote the scene where the solarpunk mammoths main characters actually meet and it worked a lot better than I’d expected; I hadn’t managed to envision it because I was so concerned with the overarching Mysterious Plot, but the scene I wrote last night involved the female character encountering the male character a little too drunk and in hmm, impractical but extremely stylish shoes at a party being hassled by someone bigger than him, so she pushed the big dude out of the way and picked up Our Hero over her shoulder and physically removed him from the scene so he could recover somewhat, because she is a shepherd and he is an electrical engineer and as a shepherd she has a great deal of experience at picking up incapacitated 150-pound animals and removing them from bad situations, and as an electrical engineer he’s not so great at people. The only problem is that he was supposed to be not very friendly to her at first and as written, this character’s actual response is to fall into a gibbering heap of lust at her feet, because wouldn’t you that’s awesome, so I don’t know how to get that dynamic unless maybe he’s somehow ashamed of how Into That he is. Listen, she even managed to deliver a cutting parting shot with Our Hero over her shoulder, and pick up her drink on the way out. I can’t help it if she’s fucking awesome. 

So maybe I should just go back to writing that and save my niggling Farmer’s Markets Don’t Work Like That (Except That They Do) idea for when I’m finally struck by a pairing it would work for. 

(the following snippet is not them meeting, but it’s the lead-up.)

She didn’t look like a city dweller. The tattoos saw to that; city dwellers favored small decorative tattoos, if they had any at all, not the heavy strong lines of the herders. But Ula wasn’t ashamed of what she was. She just didn’t want to wear her stinking leathers from the long trip, and she hadn’t brought any nice festival clothes.

She had a couple of drinks, got in some good people-watching, but inevitably discovered that there was a posse of drovers here, with their scalp tattoos and their coarse ways. One of them spotted her clan tattoo and immediately came and tried to start a fight with her, because he was from a rival clan, or thought he was; it wasn’t any feud she knew about.

“Do I look like I came here to fight?” Ula asked, avoiding his ill-timed attempt at a shove, and unconcernedly drinking from her mug. “I don’t even have a knife, I’d have to beat you with my hands, and why would anyone do that at a party?”

“You think you’re so tough,” the drover said, slurring a little.

“I mean,” Ula said, and shrugged. “I don’t spend my winters in a soft city. I just got here.”

“What are you saying?” the drover asked, shoving himself up to his full height, which was a bit taller than Ula, sure, but he had absolutely spent his winter in the city, drinking and not doing much else, and his midsection was thick and his arms comparatively thin. Ula eyed him speculatively. Yes, she could take him: she was not only fitter but also much more sober than he was. But surely he was here with friends, and she wasn’t sure her cousin and friends would back her up.

“I’m saying I didn’t come here for trouble,” Ula said, and very deliberately turned her back on him, because her cousin might not back her up if she got in a fight, but absolutely would if she were jumped.
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librarychick94 replied to your post“1)

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librarychick94 replied to your post

“1) Dude wants to borrow a book from the library. Yes, he copycatted me…”

If you placed a hold and asked that you can pick it up at a specific branch/location, the library that has it will run their holds (likely once per day) and ship it to the pickup library. Our system has delivery 5 days per week between branches. When your branch gets your item, you’ll be notified. They would have asked you how you wanted to be notified when you got the card. You usually get a choice between phone, text or email.

Once you get the notification, you can go pick up your item(s). Often other people can’t pick them up for you unless you have specifically given permission. This is for privacy, mostly. But also, in your case, the item is on hold for you, not for Dude. If you give permission, he should be able to pick it up for you. Self-check may also be an option and you can give him your card. but he might need to know your PIN or password. Complicated, I know!

I had sort of figured it all would work approximately this way, but I keep getting confused by the library search database, which every time you refresh the page or go to a different tab and come back, it resets itself entirely and you gotta start over. I’m also confused by the search being the kind that gives a lot of false positives, so when I look for something, there are a lot of junk search results. 

So I told Dude I’d have to come back to it, I couldn’t figure out what it was that I wanted. I’d figured he could just borrow things for me on his card, but of course, I’m logged in as me, and he’s logged in as him, and my card isn’t yet approved for physical media, it’s ebooks only and I need to upgrade it by going in person.

But he solved it by just– requesting the stuff himself, and he’ll get it when he goes in. Since he drives, and also is walking distance from the central branch, that’s a lot easier than me doing it since I walk to work but am not within easy walking distance of any branch so I’d have to walk home and then drive, or walk to the Kenmore branch and then walk home and it’d take me an extra 45 minutes or so. 

So– good, and I still haven’t figured it out, but it’s got to not be that hard. 

And the delivery schedule is what I was sort of wondering about– I can’t imagine they don’t drive a lot of stuff around every day, but I don’t know for sure. So I guess we’ll see. 

(LOL I knew I had some librarians in my mutuals somewhere. Have I talked on here about how I always assumed I’d be a librarian and only decided against it when it was time to apply for grad schools and I saw how much debt I was already in, and also realized semi-consciously that I was kind of running up against the edges of how well i could continue to compensate for my never-diagnosed ADHD in an academic setting? Well, it’s true, and I still to this day am a little mystified at how I never did end up overcoming that. In some alternate reality or layer of my subconscious I’m a librarian and live a completely different life in a different place than I do now.)
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missbuster replied to your post “i would bullet

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missbuster replied to your post “i would bullet point this but i don’t have that kind of mental energy….”

I love hearing about your goings on even when they aren’t pleasant. I think it’s nice to get a slice of life in the tumblr hellscape. Are you still writing or is life too busy right now?

Ha, why thank you!

I realized a long time ago writing for Livejournal that I do have a propensity to complain about my life– honestly, i noticed that long before, during high school writing exercises, and I also noticed at that point that you can go two ways with that. One, you get so dull nobody cares to read your writing, or two: you attempt to make it either amusing or relatable, and you wind up having people enjoy reading your writing. 

So, in my lengthy tenure on Livejournal, for an Internet audience for really the first time, I spent a while honing my craft of bitching about my life in ways that got good reactions from commenters. IDK if I could have learned it as well on Tumblr; you get a wider audience, but fewer engagements of any substance. So… 

That’s not to say that I don’t just bitch a lot, but I do have a long resume of attempting to carefully hone my annoyances into entertaining reading material. Which is what I’ve been trying to do, here.

Am I still writing? I am, intermittently– last week, at the office job where I can keep a Google Docs page open in a tab behind my legit work, and steal a healthy hunk of time to tinker with it, I did make some more headway on the Thing Based Off The Other Thing, which was nice. 

I had the Solarpunk Mammoths project, right, and then I got stuck on it because, really, I didn’t care about the characters yet, so I took Young Kes Dameron from my Lost Kings series and plopped him into that world and then spun him around a few times and gave him a different name, and that was fun and interesting but had no plot, so I back-burnered that for a while and then took all the parts of that character that weren’t Kes at all, and made a new character from that starting point, and a new plot and stuck it elsewhere in that same world, so I’ve been working on that and it got to about 30k words before I realized that honestly everything I’d written was backstory and I should start the story after all of this was done. But, I’d come that far, so last week I dug back in and extended that story a little farther, because the problem is I’m still not sure what should happen at the end of the backstory to set up the actual story, and I can’t figure out how to figure that out without just– writing it.

So…. I’ve got 35,000 words now that I know will have to be entirely thrown out, but I need them to know where the novel starts.

This is why I can’t write short stories. *headdesk*
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