![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
notalwaysright_feed(My brother recently started dating a new guy. He was nervous to tell me at first because, as the older sibling, I get full rights to interrogate any potential partners. When he finally opened up about the new boyfriend, he was very reticent to provide details. The following happened over text. Names have been changed […]
slashdot_feed
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
smartbitches_feedWelcome back!
We’ve reached November, but I’m still going to sneak in some spooky reading suggestions. This time, we have an anthology, some nonfiction, and a witchy romance.
Have any recs to share? Leave them in the comments!
What an atmospheric cover! If you’re looking for a unique witchy romance that taps into a sense of place, check this one out.
It’s early fall, 1975. The war is over, ABBA recently released their spectacular third studio album, and Gretchen Marigold is having the time of her life.
Making her way lovingly through the wanna-be witches who live alongside real magic users in her coven, Gretch is leaving a trail of broken hearts but satisfied lovers in her wake. Her life in the small town of Starbridge, Massachusetts is fun, carefree, and enchantingly delicious.
Across town, rushing to a lecture on the Religions of Precolonial Mexico, Jace’s life is the opposite of carefree. Though she too is a witch, and a far more powerful one at that, she’s less than two semesters away from finishing her PhD at Wellesley College, and her schedule is jam-packed. As a black woman in academia, she has to work twice as hard for half the credit. As an ambitious woman with goals of helping others like her gain access to a quality education, Jace works three times as hard.
When these two very different witches meet, their opposing viewpoints and attitudes towards magic proves eruptive. In more ways than one.
But just as their unrelenting attraction towards each other begins to blossom into something deeper, a charismatic and thoughtful visitor comes to town and everything changes.
Is the passion between Jace and Gretchen enough to supersede their differences, or will they be torn apart by the opinions of others and the shadows of their past?
Sarah and I have talked about the rise of horror romance and how both horror and romance feel like two sides of the same coin.
A romance editor looks for love where you’d least expect it—and discovers what our favorite horror films can tell us about sex, society, and ourselves
If Sinners and the 1999 cult classic The Mummy taught Emma Cole anything in the year she spent bingeing scary movies, it’s that we love to swoon, sweat, and scream. We seem to crave the uncanny and the transgressive. Emma would know: her day job as a Harlequin book editor revolves around steamy stories that ruffle feathers and rip bodices. In Love Never Dies, she shows how our favorite horror films flirt with familiar tropes and themes to give us romantic subplots that are just as spinetingling.
Cole takes readers behind the scenes of films like Tod Browning’s Dracula and Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes, exploring how and why movies blur the lines of horror and romance.
The books dives into:
– The “Dark Moment” and how it signals an HEA (Happily Ever After)
– Why not having a lover (spoiler alert) saved Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in Halloween
– Rosemary’s Baby, Interview with the Vampire, and Gothic horror’s comeback
– How romance, especially monster romance, is often a stand-in for uncomfortable truths
From vampires and monsters to slashers and psychological thrillers, Love Never Dies explores the enthralling nature of horror romance films that are full of heart. It’s just that sometimes, those hearts are on the outside.
Atmospheric horror reading doesn’t have to end just because October is over!
An instant USA TODAY bestseller! • A Barnes & Noble Best Horror Book of 2026 • 2026 International Latino Book Awards Gold Medal Winner for Best Collection of Short Stories—English
“Insightful, humane, and original, Something Followed Us Home features the most exciting voices in dark fiction today and is a must read for any weird/lit/horror fan.” —Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts
Dive into the chilling depths of Latiné horror with this groundbreaking anthology, edited by Bram Stoker Award winner Cynthia Pelayo, where each story reimagines immigration, colonization, faith, and folklore as the fears we inherit and carry across borders and generations.
Something followed us home. It crawled in with our prayers, slipped into our beds, watched from mirrors, waited in water, and learned our names.
Gathering chilling work from some of today’s most acclaimed Latiné voices, this horror anthology moves through haunted households, brutal landscapes, sacred spaces turned dangerous, and bodies claimed by forces both ancient and intimate. The dead murmur behind locked doors. Bones rebuild themselves under merciless suns. Love becomes a doorway for demonic hunger. Blood, devotion, and memory intertwine as the past presses back with teeth.
Something Followed Us Home is an unnerving, visceral, and impossible-to-shake collection that proves that what is carried forward does not remain quiet, and what follows us rarely leaves without taking something in return.
Featuring stories Agustina Bazterrica, Isabel Cañas, Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Zoraida Córdova, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Mariana Enriquez, Carolina Flórez-Cerchiaro, Xochitl Gonzalez, Leopoldo Goût, Ananda Lima, Juan Martinez, Mónica Ojeda, Daniel José Older, Cynthia Pelayo, Lilliam Rivera, Diana Rodriguez Wallach, Alex Segura
Pick this one up for its quirkiness and humor, and not for any in-depth medieval history.
Live, laugh love and die in the Middle Ages with Weird Medieval Guys!
Explore what your medieval life would have been through a choose-your-own-adventure full of quizzes, how-to guides, diagrams and flow charts that takes you from your birth to your gruesome end, revealing your patron saint, the fate of your love life and the trials and tribulations you faced along the way.
Then, discover everything you need to know to survive the natural world, from stripping naked to survive a wolf attack, decoding the signficance of birds visiting your sickbed and brewing love potions all while learning about the magical gemstones found in the heads of toads, horrifying basilisks and saintly hounds – all illustrated with the very best ancient drawings of beasts, birds, fishes and serpents from all four corners of God’s creation, drawn by people who definitely saw these creatures with their very own eyes and lived to tell the tale.
Chock full of hilarious, mad and bad advice for surviving and thriving on the mortal plane, this complete guide to life in the dark ages is guaranteed to make you laugh.
notalwaysright_feedI used to work as an IT field tech. Many of our clients were very large, well-known retail chains with lots of brick and mortar stores. It wasn’t cost-effective for them to have in-house field techs despite their size, so their IT teams contracted with us. Thus, one our biggest nemeses was the ubiquitous cash […]
notalwaysright_feedThis happened during my senior year of highschool, at the beginning of the school year. Emergencies and fire drills have always been difficult for me. During a drill or emergency or if the power goes out, the emergency lights automatically kick on. The emergency lights are bright, flashing red lights that line the hallways. This […]
slashdot_feed
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
slashdot_feed
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
crooked_timber_feedOne of the recurring themes of the 2024 election campaign was the argument that “democracy is on the ballot”. Trump had attempted to overthrow US democracy, and regularly mused about the desirability of dictatorship, but had nevertheless been renominated by the Republican Party. That argument went nowhere, and hasn’t been seen in the current midterm campaign.
The optimistic interpretation is that the threat to democracy has faded. Talk of Trump running again in 2028 has diminished, and the SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise millions, has stalled in Congress and won’t apply to the current election. A further reason for optimism is that Trump is now so unpopular that he would lose even a rigged election, as long as there was some attempt to preserve a pretence of electoral competition.
These points may be correct, but they are contingent and circumstantial. The bigger lesson of 2024 is that a plurality of American voters are willing to vote against democracy, and a majority are willing to vote against or abstain. That’s a depressing conclusion for believers in democracy, and one that runs against a lot of previous evidence.
Although there have been many previous periods when government crises have produced a demand for a “man on horseback”, most voters have almost always rejected such candidates. Democracies have been overthrown by coups or (in Germany’s case) by governments which lacked majority support, but rarely in free elections.
So far, we have seen no such rejection. Trump is massively unpopular, but mainly for reasons that apply to many previous presidents: he promised lower prices and instead delivered higher inflation, and he promised to keep the US out of Middle Eastern wars, but started them instead.
By contrast, his attempted overthrow of the constitution in 2021 is barely mentioned. His immigration policies, with masked secret police, concentration camps and deportation of people who have lived in America since infancy, are disapproved of by a slender majority, but remain by far his most popular policy position.
In these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that Democrats have chosen to focus primarily on “affordability”. Relative to the “cost of living”, this framing at least has the merit of implying that wages might be part of the problem. But it does not provide a basis for a repudiation of the Trump regime.1 Rather, the implied model is one of normal politics, where the Republicans will return to power when and if the economy performs badly under the Democrats.
The one bright spot has been the last-minute shift to focus on Republican corruption. While concerns about the future of democracy are abstract, corruption is comprehensible and hard to conceal. Viktor Orbán’s crushing defeat owed a fair bit to aerial photographs of his country estate, complete with two swimming pools (trivial compared with Trump, but Hungary is a much poorer country).
The difficulty is the (historically well-founded) belief that “both sides do it”. American politics has long been characterised by practices that would be regarded as dubious or unthinkable in many other countries — ambassadorships for some wealthy donors and pardons for others, pork-barrelling on an industrial scale and much more. And, although the US is not alone in this, there has been widespread toleration of sexual harassment and worse. Trump has extended these precedents and gone much further, with leading Republicans following suit. But for someone not paying attention, it’s easy to imagine that this is balanced out by the feckless Hunter Biden, or by fraudulent welfare claims.
Nevertheless, recent surveys suggest that corruption is emerging as a major concern for voters, and that more people perceive the Republicans as the party of corruption. Assuming that the Democrats win control of at least the House of Representatives, and that Trump does not succeed in overturning the result, a central focus of the remainder of Trump’s term should be investigations aimed at establishing universal awareness of Republican financial and moral corruption. The broader view of an “Epstein class”, with complete immunity from any consequences, is part of this.
To be successful, the perception must match reality. That means Democrats must not tolerate any such corruption on their own side, regardless of the political costs of action. This seems to be happening. Although he was given the benefit of the doubt for too long, Graham Platner (widely seen as an ideal candidate) was dumped once credible accusations of sexual harassment emerged.
The elephant in the room here is Bill Clinton, not only for his numerous instances of sexual assault and harassment, but for his corrupt pardon of financier Marc Rich. Democrats as diverse as Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders have condemned his actions, but he is still generally regarded as a “party elder”, regularly invited to campaign for Democratic candidates. That needs to stop.
The next step is to extend the critique beyond Trump and his immediate circle to Republicans in general, to the billionaire class that backs them and to the Supreme Court, most obviously Thomas and Alito. There’s ample evidence here, but it will take time to establish it.
Harder, but crucial, is to establish the link between Republican corruption and subversion of democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression, billionaire financing and, of course, the insurrection. Only when the majority of Americans, including former Trump voters, conclude that voting for Republicans was not just a mistake but a moral failure and abdication of democratic responsibility, will it be possible to undertake a serious reconstruction of US democracy.
1 Unless affordability is linked to corruption. We can’t have nice things because Trump and the other billionaires have stolen the money. 
slashdot_feed
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
crooks_and_liars_feed
It being Halloween, it seems only right to conjure up a good goth artist. Let’s go with Peter Murphy.
He’d never fronted a band before his old school friend Daniel Ash recruited him for the band that became Bauhaus, but considering how he looked and moved, Murphy couldn’t have picked a better genre than sexy, brooding vampire music.
After Bauhaus met its death, Peter Murphy rose again with a solo career that’s lasted nearly 40 years, with a few Bauhaus resurrections along the way.
If there was ever any question about his vampire credentials, Murphy put them to rest in 1983 when he appeared in the opening scene of The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie. He performs “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” from behind a cage while Deneuve and Bowie stalk their prey through a nightclub. (Pick me!)
“Cuts You Up” may not be as dark and mysterious, but it’s seductive enough to make you invite him in.
Trick or treat indeed.
crooks_and_liars_feed
Scott Bessent doesn't want the peasants asking him any pesky questions about their $495.6 million ICE prison boondoggle during a presser where he was pretending this administration cares whatsoever about fraud, abuse, and wasteful spending.
From KARE 11 in Minnesota: KARE 11 Investigates: Private prison was on sale for $75 million; ICE paid $495 million:
New records obtained by KARE 11 show the company that owned a vacant private prison in Appleton, Minnesota, offered to sell it to the state in 2025 for $75 million.
One year later, the Trump administration agreed to use taxpayer funds to buy the same abandoned prison from CoreCivic, Inc., for $495.6 million.
The price difference, $420 million, is more than taxpayers are estimated to have lost in Minnesota’s much-publicized Feeding Our Future fraud scandal.
[...]
Records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show CoreCivic sold it to the federal government for nearly half a billion dollars ($495,639,588.00).
That amount was more than six times the price CoreCivic was offering to sell the same prison to the State of Minnesota a year earlier, according to records obtained by KARE 11 through an open records request.
crooks_and_liars_feed
Kellyanne Conway wins the award for one of the dumbest things said on Fox this week, which is hard to do given the competition.
During a discussion on this Friday's The Five -- where most of the propagandists on there defended Trump's obnoxious attack on a reporter who dared to ask him why he was going to skip a rally for Roger Marshall, and pretending there was anything normal about someone who looks like Trump telling someone else to "put yourself in shape" -- Trump's former SpokesLiar Conway spouted this nonsense about why the attack was justified.
Here's the back and forth after her co-host Jessica Tarlov noted that Trump ought to be discussing real issues voters care about in Kansas instead of attacking the press and talking about men's asses.
TARLOV: I'll tell you right now, the race is at best tied That's what Donald Trump should be talking about.
CONWAY: He's going there Sunday.
TARLOV: To call reporters fat, to talk about John Husted's butt.
GUTFELD: That's what Trump does while doing the job.
TARLOV: A job that he is failing (crosstalk)...
dailykos_feedAll of the polling data, along with where Republicans are campaigning in the final days of the 2026 race, is indicating that the GOP and President Donald Trump are headed toward a bad night. Sure, Trump keeps arguing that everything is fine and dandy but he is a serial liar who says that all the time. But if even the political Armageddon does come to pass for Republicans and they lose control…
dailykos_feedA cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Musk’s massive election spending has an ugly motive…
notalwaysright_feedRead What’s Scary Is This Happens Every Year
It's Halloween, and a customer is huffing and puffing in the seasonal candy aisle.
Customer: "Is this all you have left?!"
Me: "Yes, ma'am."
Customer: "You don't have any more in the back?!"
slashdot_feed
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
boingboing_feed
TL;DR: When you buy refurbished, you can get the Apple MacBook Air (2022) 13″ for just $834.99 (Reg. $999) plus a gift with purchase.
Tis the season to refresh all your electronics. Whether you're shopping for work, school, or for a loved one, now is the time to seek deals. — Read the rest
The post This is your chance to get a free gift when you purchase a refurbished Mac appeared first on Boing Boing.
notalwaysright_feedRead Trick Or Beat
I'm a police officer. My partner and I are reviewing our assigned shifts for the week ahead.
Partner: "Ugh. Halloween. I hate working Halloween!"
Me: "Yeah, the costumes make it interesting."
Partner: "It doesn't make patrolling easy when half of everyone is actively trying to look like a serial killer."
Read Trick Or Beat
notalwaysright_feed - (no subject)slashdot_feed - Meta Discussed 'Whisper Strategy' to Discredit Social Media Critic Jonathan Haidt, Files Shownotalwaysright_feed - (no subject)smartbitches_feed - Get Rec’d with Amanda – Volume 126notalwaysright_feed - (no subject)notalwaysright_feed - (no subject)slashdot_feed - America's Clocks Are Still Falling Back Tonight Despite Trump's Daylight Saving Pushsmartbitches_feed - Sunday Sale Digest!slashdot_feed - Xbox Manager: AI Already Being Used In Xbox Game Development - And Throughout the Game Industrycrooked_timber_feed - Democracy is not on the ballot, affordability is not the answerslashdot_feed - Binance Replenishes 90% of Stolen $6.3B, Pledges They'll Cover It All, Reopen Sundaycrooks_and_liars_feed - C&L''Waste Of Our TimeCuts You Up"crooks_and_liars_feed - C&L''Waste Of Our TimeCuts Youcrooks_and_liars_feed - C'Kellyanne Conway C''"Cuts You Up For Not Eating Mashed Potatoes Up For Not Eating Mashed Potatoes:dailykos_feed - Why Republicans never learn from their election lossesdailykos_feed - It’s the principlenotalwaysright_feed - What’s Scary Is This Happens Every Yearslashdot_feed - Computer Simulations Suggest Building Blocks of Life Didn't Arrive on Prehistoric Cometsboingboing_feed - This is your chance to get a free gift when you purchase a refurbished Macnotalwaysright_feed - Trick Or Beat![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}