I’m starting to put my Professor Black onto AO3. It’s here that you’ll be able to read it clearer and find it far easier than on here. After I upload the chapters I’ve already written I’ll start on the next block.
It’s been a while but I’m back on the bandwagon - I’ve uploaded a few new chapters here. And I’m really happy with the first recent update!
an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks
the scarlet ibis
marigolds
the diamond necklace
the monkey’s paw
the open boat
the lady and the tiger
the minister’s black veil
an occurrence at owl creek bridge
a rose for emily
(I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)
the cask of amontillado
the yellow wallpaper
the most dangerous game
a good man is hard to find
some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15
add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed
The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gift of the Magi, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County, Thank You Ma'am
the box social by james reaney. i remember we all had to silently read it in class, and you would hear the moment everyone reached the Part because some people would audibly go “what”
wHat did I just put my eyes on
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury
Not quite a short story, but read in class: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from The Twilight Zone
Harrison Bergeron, Cat and the Coffee Drinkers
“Where are you going and where have you been” by Joyce carol oates
“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury
the lottery by shirley jackson
i can’t believe Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” wasn’t already mentioned
and also it’s not so much unsettling as more absurdist but “The Leader” by Eugene Ionesco definitely made me go wtf
Ett halvt ark papper. I cried so much.
Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов
A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, by Donald Barthelme
I read Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day” in seventh grade (it wasn’t assigned, I was just going through my textbook for new stuff to read) and as a bullied kid with SAD, it Fucked Me Up.
An Ordinary Day with Peanuts, by Shirley Jackson
Eh, this was more like community college, but The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
and this story that I can’t remember the name of and can’t find, though it might be by O. Henry? it’s about a bunch of demons who want to stop Santa Claus from going through with Christmas, and he must travel through the mountains they inhabit to escape their vices? (good christ I can’t remember the name for the life of me)
Ok but the laughing man and a good day for bananafish but j.d. Salinger
The City (195) Ray Bradbury. An intense commentary on colonialism and space exploration. I read it for a sci fi survey class.
Another short story I read in that sci fi class was Vaster than Empires and More Slow (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin. A commentary on humanity and how human we believe ourselves to be. Also, an interesting commentary on mental health.
In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom, written in 1947 by Ango Sakaguchi. It made my skin crawl the first time I read it.
I didn’t read it in a text book, but “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” haunted me for life.
Adding to the list of Bradbury: “There Will Come Soft Rains”
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke. (I never re-read it and suspect if I did, I’d find it had issues, but I still think about the ending.)
“W.S.” by L.P. Hartley
“Lost Hearts” by M.R. James
“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
My Father’s Hands
by Calvin R. Worthington
In the Vault, by
H. P. Lovecraft.
The Feather Pillow, by Horacio Quiroga
What a Thought! by Shirley Jackson
There Will Come Soft Rains - Ray Bradbury
It’s been mentioned multiple times but have to say it again: I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream (also there is a video game go play it).
My additions:
The Damned Thing by Ambrose Beirce
Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant
The Repairer of Reputations by Robert W Chambers
The Repairer of
Reputations by Robert
W Chambers
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
I’m really sorry - I don’t remember it’s name - but hopefully someone can help. The one where the girl where’s a velvet necklace because if she doesn’t
Ah, they’re probably coming up next! I don’t recognise the performance off the top of my head, but doing ballet is HELLISHLY INTENSE and doing it without your muscles througly warmed up is just asking for injured tendrons. In between scenes the dancers literally can’t sit still for too long or their muscles will cool down, or worse, cramp up, and if they’re not changing costumes they’re usually stretching, vigorously massaging their legs and, like here, bouncing around to the tune.
So this is a perfectly natural ballerina behavior. They’re just keeping warm and bonding. 👍
I love how the last line has the exact cadence of a “is the ballerina video cute” blog
these ballerinas are not distressed and this in fact good enrichment for ballerinas when confined outside their natural habitat (the stage)
This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…
Listen, this is serious.
Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid
I miss when library books used to have little paper pockets inside with a list of all the people who borrowed it and when… I hate that this is now exclusive knowledge of librarians. I do care that a miss Mariana borrowed this book in 1985 and then Dario in 1997. They’re my brothers and sisters
but really, there’s a million reasons why it’s an issue for users and staff of the public library to have immediate access to a record of who has borrowed a specific item and when.
and that’s not even about keeping the information “privileged” to the library staff, these days they don’t even keep a digital record of an item’s history of borrowers; once you return a book, there isn’t a list of everyone thats ever taken that book out that your name gets added to (though they probably take a tally of how many times it is checked out for circulation statistics).
i think the card system is a remnant of a culture that could only exist in the world before the internet as it exists today, where this identifying kind of information wasn’t always readily at your fingertips, even for those at the “information professional” level.
don’t get me wrong here, i do understand the nostalgia factor to it as being part of a different time, but i think it’s always important to understand why this kind of system has its flaws and has been (at least in north america) taken out of practice
bear in mind that US public libraries spent most of the past twenty years fighting off lawsuits that they were prohibited from disclosing to the public because when 9/11 happened the federal government wanted a list of every person who read certain books and the librarians had a really bad feeling about where that kind of policy would end up going, for some reason.
not keeping the records in the first place is a way for the libraries to protect themselves when they stand up for your privacy.
This was a thing in multiple libraries. We really want to protect your freedom to access information.
Certified Library Post
Anyone have sources on this in Canada? Those little borrower list things were common here too (a lot of old books still have em) and I’d be interested to read if something similar happened in Canada post-9-11 since the US has such a large influence.
Canadian librarian.
So the little borrower list things were basically an artefact of technology levels.
The pouch had the borrower-list card in it and it lived there; you’d take the book up to the desk, and they’d take the borrower-list card out, put your name on it, put it in wherever they stored the cards for checked out books, and then replaced it with the due-date stamped card (often a different colour) for you to take home.
They were primarily about being able to get the book back from you. They had significant risks, but they were also transient; once that little card was filled up it’d get thrown out and then a new card would start. If you were worried and also could work yourself up to ask, many libraries would destroy the borrowing card and move immediately on to a new one if you didn’t want to be on record. (Some libraries, run by people who weren’t as smart, would instead keep records. While we have always TRIED, as a field, not to suck, sometimes we failed.)
We moved to computer-based ILS systems primarily because that card-catalogue system was a labour intensive bitch, gods bless barcodes. And some places had a transitional period where you had a library card that had a number on it and they only recorded the number in the slip, and so on. But we shifted to computer-based ILS.
Which are theoretically so, so much easier to keep a record forever, and at that point we started getting a lot more aware of the Risks of that. This pre-dated 9/11 especially in larger libraries; not everything is traceable to 9/11.
At the same time, as well, the profession got much better connected to each other and some of our principles started getting a lot more emphatic and a lot more profession-wide. And we started talking a lot more about privacy, and we were already having conversations about “wait what is our purpose especially if it’s not to be the patronizing Civilizers of the World that asshole Dewey ahem some predecessors thought we should be?” and that brought on THOSE conversations. They were already happening.
… .and then, yes, 9/11 and its rampant vehement increase in attempts to actually make use of the potentiality of these systems, in the US and elsewhere, threw the whole thing into really, really sharp relief.
Now it’s definitely worth checking with your local library, as well: librarians are human, and library systems are human systems, and as a quick glance at the notes will see there are a few places where (and I’m gonna be judgemental here) some systems are stupid enough to think that being able to track damage to an object is more important than keeping people safe, because, well, sometimes humans are stupid.
But the dominant ethos is very, very much that what you check out and read, and your reasons for doing that, are yours and they are private and your right to that information and the right not to have to justify your information needs to strangers is absolute and yours to control. At my library system this sometimes frustrates patrons as we patiently explain that no, if you’ve lost your barcode or never set up an email for the online system and don’t have your password, I can’t do fuck all about it until and unless you show up in person* with your photo-ID because I cannot give any access to account information without confirming your identity, so no I can’t do this on email/over the phone.
And it’s not just the government; it’s everyone. So.
[*yes, there is Complicated Exceptions for those who are housebound, which can literally include the domain librarian visiting.]
You’re not creating real people, you’re creating the illusion of real people. You don’t have to mention their favorite food if it doesn’t come up, you don’t even have to know it, though if they were actual people they’d have one. You can throw plot events at your characters to force them to take certain actions, or you could just rewrite the characters to be the kind of characters who would take those actions anyway. Your characters have a life of their own in their own little world, but don’t be afraid to play god to get what you want out of them.
In the vast majority of cases, a character’s strengths and flaws should be the same thing. There are exceptions (you can have a character be clumsy for the lols without needing to find some way that it’s an advantage), but for most character traits, the difference between a flaw and a strength is the situation at hand and learning when to indulge it.
desire is the source of action, so your characters should WANT things. all of them should have something they want that’s good for them, something they want that’s bad for them, and something that’s just a little silly, for spice.
ALT
