look I know being an engaged citizen IS the work of democracy but it is also the work of elected officials not to create situations where everyone has to be mobilized all the time to prevent them from allowing some kind of Dickensian horror on a Sunday night while you're in between loads of laundry

1994: To Love a Dark Lord, Anne Stuart.

Curtain: it’s 1775, we’re ’just outside London’ and Emma has just killed her uncle.

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

Time to go back to my Unhinged Reading Project. For pub year 1993, we have Untamed by Elizabeth Lowell.

The other Elizabeth Lowell I’ve read was a contemporary Harlequin where the hero identified the heroines pregnancy by smell. I can’t imagine her Historicals being any *less* unhinged.

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes.
#romancelandia

sometimes everything is a lot

"There’s somebody in your community that is scared right now. Or tired, or alone, or broke. What they need most isn’t a politician who has suddenly gotten good at social media and loves all the attention it’s bringing him. They need a neighbor."

I’m convinced every consumer level use-case where LLMs are actually kind of ok is something that could have been done for a fraction of the computing power and cost, without having to have fed it every copywritten object in history. Like, the “next iteration of transcription and search”-type shit.

Cher in CLUELESS saying "and may I remind you it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty" is officially left of the Democratic Party

while it is certainly thrilling for all the erotica buckaroos to see my rise into mainstream success, i find THIS direction of starting at horror and then discovering tinglers to be VERY fun. GODSPEED BUCKAROO

I’m not doing anything else here, so maybe I’ll just share some gems from my current read: a 1991 historical romance, Till Dawn Tames the Night , by Megan McKinney

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

Oh, shit. Seriously: oh, shit.

“As Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, stared at the young woman who had just barged her way into his London residence, it occurred to him that he might have tried to abduct the wrong heiress last week at Stony Cross Park.”

- Devil in Winter, Lisa Kleypas #firstline

“When the promise of spending hours in the presence of hot, fit, and famous naked men fails to excite me, it’s time to concede that I’ve hit a new level of apathy.”

- The Hot Shot, Kristen Callihan #firstline

“The death watch was over.”

- The Bride, Julie Garwood #firstline

“Right here, right now, I am singing to you. Yes, you. Will you listen?”

-Song of a Blackbird, Maria van Lieshout #firstline