📌 #makethisrecipe

The original argument is about fake service dogs, which only makes my point that curb cuts have been normalized.

(Also, Ask a Manager has had plenty of letters about “people don’t believe my service dog is really a service dog” so maybe adding to disability burdens isn’t fucking helping.)

Oh, that’s in my TBRs! I couldn’t resist that setup.

Please do!

If you just want some straight up historical fiction - nothing supernatural, no jump scares, just a slice of another time - then try Moyes' _Ship of Brides_. It's 1946 & over 600 war brides are sailing from Australia to join their British husbands - unless they get rejected. Based on true stories

Prefer your thrills closer to this side of the veil? Unger's _Close Your Eyes and Count to 10_ was a roller coaster ride. Wanna play a social media hide and seek show for money?

Even if it's in an abandoned building on an island with a hurricane bearing down?

If you're into ghost stories, you'll never go wrong with Simone St. James. Start with The Broken Girls or The Sun Down Motel.

If you prefer your fantasy Asian style:
- Yambao's Water Moon; the owner of a shop where you pawn your regrets is sent on a lyrical quest through a fantastical world
- Tsujimura's Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon. The title is the premise. If you could meet 1 dead person for 1 night, who? Why?

If you want more books like Good Omens, run-don't-walk to pick up TJ Klune's _The House in the Cerulean Sea_ & _Somewhere Beyond the Sea_. Supernatural creatures, evil bureaucracy, queer love, and a gang of children including the Antichrist. So! Incredibly! Good!

The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. The best description I've seen is "deus ex machina from the point of the view of the depressive, anxious machina." In a hellverse where corporations run everything, one security cyborg has freed itself.

Now what?

(Also rec the Apple TV series)

And finally, if you know anyone into history and/or photography, Flashes of Brilliance by Burgess is an exploration of the history of taking photos.

An important and useful book, if a depressing one: Anatomy of a Con Artist by Walton describes the 14 red flags of being the victim of a con job - as he experienced them personally.

For my fellow taphophiles (look it up) I rec:
- Melville's Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the History of America's Cemeteries (pretty much what it says on the label)
and
- Grant's To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes (also pretty much what it says on the label)

Do you love The Gilded Age? Do you love social scandal? _Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time_ by Wright is the story of Maimie Fish. A criminial lack of pictures is offset by the audiobook being read by the actress who plays Fish on The Gilded Age, who is having the time of her life.

In what I can't help but think of as "the shipwreck twins," I recommend:
- Bacon's _Gales of November_ about the history of shipping on the lakes, the Edmund Fitzgerald, & the song it inspired
- Stone's _Sinkable_ about the Titanic's life as a wreck, finding it, & people who wanted to raise it

Can nonfiction be a cozy, heartwarming read? Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton sure is! I've read it twice this year. Stuck in her country home during lockdown, Dalton rescues an abandoned newborn hare. This is the story of its first years.

(Sherlock fans, the audiobook is read by Louise Brealey)

The last edgelord before now did lump Mexico in to the generic “all Americans” bucket. IIRC, edgelord was British.

It was not appreciated when I said I wouldn’t take the argument seriously until I heard it from a Mexican or Canadian.

I'm very much of the "If you love something, keep it" camp; but I acknowledge also sometimes the thing you love has rabies and needs to be segregated from the existing story so they can both live. Don't put down your darlings! Just quarantine them and give them their own narrative to infect!

That is exactly the argument being made.

Funny, but in all the years edgelords claim that it’s hubristic and geographically incorrect for people from the US to call themselves Americans, I have yet to hear an actual Canadian say they want to be called anything other than Canadian.