I like these guys and want them to stick around so I've decided to post this.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-andys-brain-tumor-recovery

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2025-may-sale/

https://press.princeton.edu/sale/50-off-sale-faq

Just wanted to share. 50% is not bad and it's not Amazon.

I just feel we live in times where this is still relevant.

First : didn’t find a comic instance so here it is Second : Warren Ellis is a sex pest, so don’t buy his comics

Ministry of Space is a cool twist on the « what if X was first on the moon/space and not the American ». In this case : Britain

Edit : also any good comic suggestions is welcome

Anyone read this work? Or other Pynchon? The only other thing I’ve read by him is Inherent Vice.

It would be a little fun to sneak the symbol in a few places. Kinda reclaiming conspiracy narratives for fun. That the purpose is mystery and what could be, not actually taking it seriously.

I’d love a return to classic conspiracies - to the world of something like the Illuminatus trilogy. “Aliens kidnapped me and my wife and we did weird sex stuff” and “there’s a war between ancient aliens and draconians*. Stuff like Whitley Strieber’s Communion or that silly “Spirit Science” channel on YouTube where it’s clearly someone’s world building passion project.

Instead we live in a twisted mirror of Fowler’s The Magus. Fowler shows some really twisted erotic understandings of class - the id complex that powers “the elites are sex criminals” types of conspiracies. The desire that is counteracted by repulsion; the unstable equilibria where hatred and desire can explode in either directing. The climax (literally) of the book is forced to watch one of the young women he has been erotically pursuing enthusiastically consent to sex with a black man. It’s a deep violent insecurity, that seems to underlie the world right now.

It might be fun to fight for more of that kind of fun insanity. To chase down secretive mailmen? To follow red herring after red herring until the end?

It might be fun to leave this symbol around places. And to read Pynchon.

I have volume 1 of Kim Il Sung’s works in English - printed in North Korea in the 70’s. I don’t know if the Foreign Languages Publishing House survived long enough for a Volume 2. They did put out some of Jong’s thoughts on film, if I recall correctly.

This is probably the prize of my collection. I have a first American printing of Lolita, which unfortunately has a bit of cat vomit stain on it or might be in that spot.

Hello everyone!

Have been pretty busy with life, so haven't been reading much, other than some random web novels when I have some time.

Just got back to my usual reading from today, hope will be able to stick to it now. I was reading Streams of Silver by R. A. Salvatore. Book 2 of the series.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29595648

Feeding Ghosts is a good read, glad she won the Pulitzer!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601652/feedingghosts/

NPR Interview here:

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1196979443/nprs-book-of-the-day-draft-03-21-2024

Interesting bit: She doesn't consider herself a graphic novelist, this just seemed to be the best way for her to tell the story.

I've tried a couple times over the years to use Calibre to de-DRM my library. Previous attempts ended in failure. This community helped me find a way to fix my audio books, which inspired me to take one last shot at my kindle library.

I was able to follow this post comment and use a couple other comments to troubleshoot. Sorry for the Reddit link, but it's what worked for me. I'll include the text of the post in the comments below.

This method requires using Windows, but does not require a physical device as other methods that I'd found. The key points that worked for me we're using the correct program versions linked in this post and comments.

Another comment noted that changing the library download location in Kindle was a key to this outcome. I don't understand why that would be, but it turned out to be the case for me. The first try did not work, but once I changed the download location, deleted the old downloads, and re-downloaded the library everything went smoothly. Even the comic books worked!

I finally own the books that I've purchased over the years.

Hi all,

I have the pretty classic backstory of playing lots of video games when I was young, plus being forced to read books I didn't want to read in school making me dislike reading.

Until about 2 years ago, I hadn't read a book for pleasure in quite a few years, probably before high school. And even before then, I didn't read that much.

I'm making this post because... when I first got back into reading (2 years ago), I don't think I really understood how fun reading could be. I viewed it as a healthy hobby (which it is of course), and don't get me wrong I did enjoy reading, but it always felt a bit like something I was doing for health reasons instead of really enjoying it. Sorta like a chore that I was forcing myself to do.

If you're in my position... Just keep trying different authors, different genres, different series. I think I accepted reading as being only a slightly enjoyable thing because that's just what I thought it was.

6 months ago I finally read a book series my brother had been recommending for a while, and it completely changed my relationship with reading. I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I could. I didn't have to convince myself to read anymore, it was the main thing I wanted to do. I think in one day I read about 250 pages. I was almost too obsessed with it, I nearly cancelled plans with friends because I wanted to read haha.

I'm not trying to advertise this specific book series or anything, but if you're curious it's Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.

TL;DR - if you're newer to reading and feel like it's a chore, don't give up hope, keep trying new authors or genres and you might find something you really enjoy. there's almost certainly something out there that's made just for you, and you might have to sift through a couple "okay" books until you find it.

So "genderpocalypse" is a typically postapocalypic, but not always sci-fi subgenre where one gender survives and another gets some disease, turns into a zombie, disappears, etc. Sometimes there's meaningful reflection on the relationships between men and women. Sometimes it can be really trashy.

I noticed among the books I'm aware of, I can't think of any where trans women are treated the same as other women, whether through the established rules of the story or through specific confirmation in the book. So this typically means that if an author wants to explore a woman-only society, they inadvertantly or otherwise depict all the trans women dying in the process. I have those listed below to head off those being suggested. That doesn't mean I think any book that establishes the genderpocalypse based on birth sex is inherently problematic or anything -- I think The End of Men handles it really well. But I was wondering if anyone knew about any stories in this genre that bases it off of gender and not sex.

Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King: The sickness tied to women falling asleep is tied to chromosomes, so trans women would stay awake based on the establed rules of the story.

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan: All the trans women die with the men.

Afterland by Lauren Beukes: All the trans women die of prostate cancer along with the men.

The End of Men by Christina Baird: The virus in the book targets trans women and men, but there is a trans woman character and it's depicted sympathetically, in terms of the dysphoria that would come from a y-chromomosome disease targeting them.

Manhunt by Gretchen-Felker Martin: Men and trans women turn into mindless zombies, unless the trans women eat licorice, for some reason.

The Men by Sandra Newman: All men and trans women mysteriously disappear one day, despite the title.

Femlandia by Christana Dalcher: A non sci-fi apocalyptic example. The premise is that society and economics collapse at the hands of men, leading men and women to segregate and form separate societies. In the book, trans women are kept out of womens' societies.

As a huge BTTF fan, I'm really excited to read this! I just added it to The StoryGraph, and you can shelve it for your TBR here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c02ec440-d907-4c9d-b13c-6bc967207a0e

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy.

I found this notice on the copyright page of something I bought at a recent used book sale. I can't recall seeing a warning so overtly hostile to book borrowers and hope I never do again. I know about the first sale doctrine, and that this is completely unenforceable, but it still offends me. Should I contact the author for instructions on returning it unread?

I'm finishing up The Golden Enclaves, the last of the Scholomance Series by Naomi Novik. It fulfills The Jerk with a Heart of Gold square, but in getting in to it, it also fits the LGBTQIA+ representation square. I've gotten started on so many great series in the last few years doing reading challenges and this year I'm going to try and get caught up with a bunch of them. I'm super excited!

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial Book Bingo, and its Recommendation Post. Links are also present in our community sidebar.

Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' (permalink)

Pyramid schemes are as American as apple pie. If you doubt it, just read Little Bosses Everywhere, Bridget Read's deeply researched, horrifying, amazing investigative book on the subject, which is out today from Crown:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/715421/little-bosses-everywhere-by-bridget-read/

Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the "industry," which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who found companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the "opportunities" they are creating for their victims.

In Read's telling, there's only two kinds of MLM participants: suckers (who lose lots of and lots of money) and predators (who rake in that money). MLMs pretend that they're doing "direct sales," cutting out the middleman to peddle vitamins, household cleaners, cosmetics, tights or jewelry. But the actual sales volume of these products rounds to zero. The money in the system – tens of billions of dollars per year in the US alone – is almost entirely being spent by "salespeople" who are required to buy a certain amount of "product" every month, either as a condition of membership, or in order to attain some kind of bonus or status.

The "salespeople" in these systems are effectively in a cult, and the high-pressure techniques that Read describes will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with cultic dynamics, or even just a casual listener to the Conspirituality podcast:

https://www.conspirituality.net/episodes

And, as with other cults, MLM members are tormented endlessly by other cult members into trying to recruit their friends and family-members. Sometimes, they succeed, and the cult grows a little – but usually not for very long. Most people who get recruited into an MLM quickly figure out that it's impossible to make any money – indeed, it's impossible to avoid losing a lot of money – and bail.

The meat-and-potatoes of the MLM industry are the minority who don't see through the scam. They believe that they are deficient, because everyone else is reporting such incredible returns from "the program." They charge more product to their credit cards, insisting to their "uplines" that they are selling machines (and not that they are filling their garages and attics and living rooms and kitchen cupboards with unsold, unsellable junk). What they don't understand is that all the "successes" in the cult are either scammers who are getting rich off people like them, or they are people like them, going deep into debt and desperately trying to pretend that they're selling as well as those uplines.

The US government and various law enforcement agencies have taken various runs at these cults, but the cults have always won. That's down to enforcers buying into the cult leader/scammers' essential lie: that, at the end of the day, MLM is a system for selling things to people. That isn't true, has never been true, and never will be true. But by crafting rules and tests that attempt to sort the "legitimate" MLMs from the "scam" MLMs, enforcers fall into the scammers' trap. The scammers welcome rules that distinguish "good" MLMs from "bad" MLMs, because it's trivial to create the superficial appearance of adherence to these rules while flouting them. For example, if the rule says that "independent sales representatives" must sell to at least ten outside customers, they can simply make up the names of ten people and charge it to their card. This happens routinely, but there's no auditing, and besides, the MLM victims are all "independent business owners," so if there were any penalties for these violations, they would fall to the victims, not the cult.

Meanwhile, the scammers know it's a scam, and the failure of their victims to sell the useless "product" the cult is nominally organized around is a feature, not a bug. The hordes of indebted, cost-sunk, self-castigating failures are suckers for yet another scam: selling victims "training" to improve their sales technique. After all, if everyone around you is selling this crap without breaking a sweat, the failing must be your own. You need coaching, training, seminars, cassettes, books, retreats, all of it piling debt on debt.

The internal operations of these cults are shrouded in mystery, but Read lifts the veil and makes masterful sense of the horrors lurking beneath. In this, she is somewhat aided by MLM cult leaders' propensity for suing one another, as various sub-bosses build up massive followings of their own and seek to usurp the cult leader by founding their own parallel cults or sub-cults. These lawsuits sometimes drag the cults' dirty laundry out in public, and Read sorts through these court filings very carefully. Unfortunately, the cults' propensity for suing also helps suppress a lot of dirty laundry, because MLM leaders love to sue ex-cult members who participate in online forums where they document their expenses, and they use these cult victims' own money to pay for the court cases that silence them.

MLMs aren't just cults, they're religious cults. Since the very earliest days, pyramid scheme runners have declared themselves to be engaged in an extension of their Christian (mostly Calvinist) faith. The engine of a pyramid scheme needs social capital for fuel: to bring in new recruits, a cult member has to draw on the bonds of trust, fellowship and solidarity in order to convince their targets that this is a bona fide enterprise (and not a cult). Faith groups – especially fringe faith groups – have this kind of capital in spades. This goes double for faiths that demand large families (which is why we see such deep penetration of MLMs into Mormonism and orthodox Judiasm). If your faith demands that you produce a "quiverfull" of mouths to feed, then the chances are that you will not be able to survive without being enmeshed in a mutual support network with your co-religionists. MLMs convert this trust, generosity and mutual dependency into cash (at a ruinous exchange rate) and then funnel it "upline" to the cult leaders, who reap billions.

Of course, those kinds of bonds are not solely forged on the basis of faith: racialized people, women, and other groups who face systemic discrimination depend on one another for mutual aid, which makes them vulnerable to another MLM pitch: "predatory inclusion":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

Predatory inclusion is when scam artists adopt the language of social justice to pitch their cons – think of all the crypto bros who sold their ripoff schemes as a way to "achieve independence for women" or "build Black wealth" (thanks, Spike Lee):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/spike-lee-made-an-ad-for-cryptocurrency-atms-and-its-bizarre/

Predatory inclusion is parasitic upon the bonds of solidarity forged in adversity, and this goes double for the MLM variety. As MLMs cut away the strands of the web of mutual support, the cult leaders replace them with rabid anti-Communism, the kind of far-right rhetoric that brought Christian conservatives into the Reagan coalition and ultimately led to Trump's fascist takeover.

Here's how that move works: "You are a small, independent businessperson, the backbone of America. You will realize the American dream through your own backbone and work ethic (and therefore your current failure is due to your own lack of both). People who want to shut down pyramid schemes say they want to protect you, but really they want the government to decide who can and can't own a business. They're Communists, and in coming for MLMs, they're coming for America itself."

Some of America's richest family dynasties owe their wealth to pyramid schemes. They are dynasties of fraud, and they funneled their criminal gains into far right political projects. The Heritage Foundation – the authors of Project 2025 and Trump's master strategists – got their start with money from Rich DeVos (father in law of Betsy DeVos, who served as Secretary of Education in the first Trump cabinet). The far-right dark money machine runs on MLM money.

In fact, there's a good case to be made that everything rotten in today's world is built on the tactics of MLMs. Take the "gig economy." Companies like Uber promise drivers a high hourly wage. A small number of drivers are randomly allocated extremely large payouts by the system, in order to convert them into Judas goats, who fill gig-work message boards with tales of their good fortune. As Veena Dubal documents in her seminal work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," this tactic is devastatingly effective, convincing other Uber drivers to put in extremely long hours for sub-starvation wages, and then blame themselves for "being bad at Uber" – just like the downlines at Mary Kay and Amway who think the problem is with them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Trump, of course, is the ultimate expression of the MLM grift – and not only because he licensed his name to two different pyramid schemes. Trump embodies the MLM ethic of lying about how rich you are so that marks send you their money to get in on the "opportunity" and then blame themselves when the promised riches never materialize.

Erik Baker once described MLMs as a kind of bizarro-world version of unions. In the world of labor organizing, success lies in finding the people with the most social capital, the ones who are trusted by their coworkers, and teaching them to have a structured organizing conversation. This is exactly what MLMs do – but the difference lies in the goal of that structured organizing conversation. For union organizers, the goal is build solidarity as a means to improving the lives of everyone in the community. For MLM organizers, the goal is to destroy solidarity, atomizing the community, shattering its bonds, leaving its members defenseless as they are fleeced by the cult's leaders and their henchmen:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

Neoliberalism's war-cry is Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society." The past 40 years have been a long process of tearing us away from one another, teaching us to see one another as marks, to mistrust systems of mutual aid as Communism. Read's Little Bosses Everywhere is a brilliantly told, deeply researched history of the past and present of the ultimate business model for late-stage capitalism: destroying the lives of everyone around you while pretending to be a small businessperson.

The book is about the mathematical concept of dimensions, but in a fun way with over 170 illustrations.

I'm not affiliated with the author. I just think her message and her enthusiasm is something admirable in these times. She's also completely self published and that's why I pre-ordered the book.

The announcement video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y53AXT4IBew

Excerpt from the website:

Hello friends, I wrote a book! I've spent the last 2 years thinking about dimensions and have collected all the most interesting ideas into this fun guide. I am so excited to finally share it with you!

This book is bound to make you think, teach you something new, and inspire you to continue playing with science and mathematics for many years to come.

Featuring color illustrations by Martina Pepiciello.

No prerequisite knowledge is required.

The website
https://tibees.com/

I have to change the page colour and usea ruler or I can't see it properly

I don't know what it is but I feel like there is something especially enjoyable about reading on a train or bus. Like I would be fine with making my commute longer because it dosen't feel like wasted time since I am reading. Also its just nice to be stuck somewhere for a bit with nothing to do but wait and be forced to read.