the class went well and they asked if i wanted to do another one in a couple weeks and i said yeah, and they’re taking uh… fuck, what’s the word for inventory when it’s people?? attendance?? whatever, they’re trying to see who’s interested to get a feel of if it’d be 1 three hour class again or if there’s too many kids so we’d do a couple classes. anyways, i love the emails from Concerned Parents.

“will there be knives involved?”
we are baking cookies.

“what temperatures does the oven get to/will it be hot enough to burn?”
we are baking cookies.

“will there be [insert ingredient used in cookies]?”
we are baking cookies.

“are you using fahrenheit or celsius?”
??????? d-does it matter?? it’s going to get Hot. (also celsius; this is ontario)

“are the ovens childproof?”
no?? i’m assuming you’re asking if i’m going to let your kids reach into the ovens while i’m staring out a window in another room. i will not be allowing your children to use the ovens. they will not be left unattended. 

“why is the library baking class taking place at the high school?”
the library does not have 10 ovens. the library does not even have 1 oven. the high school has many ovens.

“what if i don’t want my child to have cookies? can you let her make muffins instead?”
this is a baking class for cookies. we are baking cookies.

“cookies aren’t healthy. why don’t you make [insert whatever]”
do you know how many cookies i can make with a $40 budget and a trip to the bulk store? we are making cookies.

“who needs a class to bake a cookie, why not teach something more valuable?”
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE COOKIES, KAREN, IT’S ABOUT FAMILIARIZING CHILDREN WITH THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BAKING/COOKING/FOOD, ABOUT TRYING NEW THINGS, MAKING MISTAKES AND REALIZING THAT THE MISTAKES ARE NOT ONLY OKAY TO MAKE BUT VALUABLE IN AND OF THEMSELVES, FAMILIARIZING THEM WITH INDEPENDENCE, THE UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THINGS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM A NEW AND BETTER WHOLE, ALL WHILE HAVING TRYING TO INJECT A MODICUM OF JOY INTO THEIR LITTLE LIVES. SORRY THAT THERE ARE CONCEPTS AT PLAY YOU CAN’T SEEN TO UNDERSTAND HERE. MAYBE YOU SHOULD COME JOIN AND I’LL LET YOU MAKE A FUCKING COOKIE.

Funny that was your first thought whereas i thought "surely we can make the hole a lot more comfortable"

you lack my resolve

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this is the full quote.

It's worth noting also that while this has been doing the rounds again recently, he said it well before the current plague of generative AI slop was upon us. The clip is from a 2016 TV documentary. The specific bit of animation he was reacting to was a demo of the computer animating a ragdoll-like model body to try to find ways to move it forwards. While a living creature will normally try to avoid injuring itself as it moves, the computer algorithm had no such inhibition and so the virtual ragdoll would flail around and drag its face across the ground. The team working with it thought it would be a good way to animate creatures like zombies for horror movies because it was so inhuman and bizarre. Miyazaki was reacting to the inhumanity of it, and the fact they thought it was clever to create something so grotesque with no greater point to it than "Isn't this gross and weird?" I'm sure it was a painful criticism to receive, especially if they were all excited to show animation legend Hayao Miyazaki what they were working on, but I think he gave them something really important to think about.

I can scarcely imagine what he'd have to say about the lifeless plagiarism machine that is gen AI.

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!

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

• Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and
• Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and
• Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

Honestly Im shocked this isn’t more well known, especially with how digital everything’s become

I only just found out about this, but I can already tell that a lot of English teachers would especially love this since it would be a good way to provide students with classic literature (Shakespeare, Frankenstein, Little Women, etc) without costing them or there school.

Which would be especially handy for public school teachers who often have to buy things out of pocket due to how little of a budget they are allotted

it really is crazy how hearing the word "aphobia" makes the compassion just immediately drain out of people like a plug got pulled in the soles of their feet. ace people can talk about our experiences with ostracisation and medicalisation and corrective rape and abusive relationships and assault and conversion therapy and familial rejection and societal pressure and self-hatred and loneliness and erasure and lack of representation, and everyone agrees that those things are bad. but the second the word "aphobia" is mentioned people are instantly just falling over themselves in their desperation to Commit To The Bit