ai tarpit, free books, citrus con

[tozka]

Hello, happy Wednesday! I saw a family of quail come out from some shrubbery earlier and I've been floating on a high of bird-happiness all day.

Citrus Con is a free online BL/queer fan convention happening June 20-22, 2025! Grab your ticket before June 19, 2025.

Tumblr (or rather its parent company Automattic) is having some recent troubles (also here) and laid off 16% of its staff.

A few new guides posted to newcomers recently:
soc_puppet wrote a guide to mood themes, how to back up your Tumblr account and alternatives to talking in the tags

ysabetwordsmith wrote about how to post fiction or other writing-- a really good resource for people who are used to only posting on AO3 or other similar websites-- and how to find your Tumblr friends on DW

I've really been enjoying rachelmanija's book review posts, and have added several of them to my wishlist/TBR list. (She writes really good books herself, too!)

Here's a few recent releases on Project Gutenberg that're available for free download:
1. The intelligent woman's guide to socialism and capitalism by (George) Bernard Shaw, yes that GBS. Here's the Wikipedia article about the book.
2. "This was a man" : A comedy in three acts by Noël Coward
3. A doctor enjoys Sherlock Holmes by Edward J. Van Liere
Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky (Helena Petrovna Blavatsky) Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Wikipedia entry here)

A few AI-related links:
erinptah posted a great LLM (AI) news roundup from the past few months.

From Bloomberg: The AI Romance Factory, about an AI startup trying to flood the romance book market with dreck. (h/t The Rec Center)

You can fight AI in indie publishing by leaving reviews from hazeldomain (h/t dduane)

And an article from Ars Technica: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt:

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

A few RSS feeds I've added to my reader this week:
r/Frugal
r/Composting
Low-Tech Magazine (English feed)

Interested in more links? I've compiled all previous linkspam posts here on my website.

Comments

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I appreciate the signal boost. :D

Re: Thank you!

[tozka]

You're welcome! Thank you for writing an excellent guide for us all. :D

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm glad people appreciate it.

I just posted a couple more resources in newcomers -- one is about Tumblr outages and the other about alternatives to Tumblr.

[volkameria]

Ooh, these are great! Thank you for cataloguing these, I've started following r/Frugal.

[tozka]

You're welcome! ♥

[thrilleddumpling]

That Bloomberg article pissed me off so much, I'm gonna follow hazeldomain's advice and start leaving a shit ton of reviews on my favourite books D:< Thanks for both links! <3

[tozka]

Excellent!! Me too, honestly. Most of the indie queer romances I read don't have a ton of reviews, especially on LibraryThing, so I'm making it a goal to at least write a few sentences for each book I read.

[thrilleddumpling]

indie queer romances >> I wish to subscribe to your newsletter, tell me more! Favourite queer romance you've read lately? :D

[tozka]

omg, well I've really been enjoying Lily Mayne's Goliaths of Wrestling series-- it's funny and sweet, and she did a really good job making each book's couple sound totally different from one another, while still having the same tone throughout the series.

And for a fun popcorn book I loved Jaclyn Osborn's Sent To A Fantasy World and Now All the Men Want Me series! The latest book maybe has a tiny bit too much crying, but overall still good. There's been some recent surges of spoke-and-wheel romances which interest me because they're so different from the usual romance plots (which mainly only go up to maybe 3 people max).

Oh! And I've been reading more KL Noone books recently and really been liking them, too-- queer fantasy romance is my favorite genre. I'm about to start reading The Snails of Dun Nas, actually.

And I read this one ages ago but I want to plug it because it's so funny and cute: Isabel Murray's Gary of a Hundred Days and sequel! She writes very funny books-- not slapstick, but sort of like PG Wodehouse where the protagonist is a bit silly and the other non-silly characters are fond of them (or else they're silly, too, and then they get into trouble together).

[thrilleddumpling]

I know exactly zero of these authors and that! Is! Amazing! *squees* You just added so much stuff to my reading list, thank youuu <3 There are never enough romance books (u_u)

[thrilleddumpling]

Okay, I stayed up until 1am reading Isabel Murray's Gary of a Hundred Days, best rec ever! I can's wait to read the sequel, Gary is fantastic and Magnus is so patient <333

[tozka]

Yay, that's so great!! It's honestly one of my favorite books from last year; I wish I could find more like it but publishing (even indie) seems focused on other book styles. The closest match I can find is Jeeves and Wooster fanfics, and that's only because Wooster is a similar personality to Gary in the first place.

[thrilleddumpling]

Hmm, have you ever read Arden Powell's Flos Magicae series? I think the protagonist of the first second book, The Bachelor's Valet, is similar to Gary: floating through life without realizing a lot of things about others and about himself. He doesn't have the same humour, though *sigh* I like these characters that are a little bit clueless, lacking self-awareness, but Gary is also funny, which is what made him special to me <3

[tozka]

I've read several within the series, and I do have The Bachelor's Valet in my library, but yeah, the humor part is missing (altho I do love his books otherwise).

I'm always keeping an eye out for more romantic comedy type books, and I do have a few more recommendations if you want them: Devon Doe's Am I the Problem? series (which are based off of Reddit AITA posts I think), Jennifer Cody's Murder Sprees and Mute Decrees series (this one has fun paranormal stuff in it, too), and Lily Morton's Mixed Messages series. Also the first couple books in Joel Abernathy's Bro and the Beast series made me laugh SO HARD, though unfortunately he didn't keep that up for the entire run.

[thrilleddumpling]

Adorable protagonists <333

Please do keep reccing stuff! *unrolls reading list like that Crowley gif* Edit: found it!



I thought I had some books by Joel Abernathy in my library but nope, he's a new one for me, too *gleeful*

[tozka]

I went on a Kindle Unlimited-reading binge last year so I have a LOT of recs for more recent indie stuff. (My subscription expired last month so now I'm trying to read other books that'll been languishing in my library ;_; )

However!! I get most of MY recs from r/MM_RomanceBooks (they also have threads for non m/m (but still queer) books) and they're great at getting recs for specific tropes or whatever. I highly recommend checking them out if you're not already familiar with them!

[thrilleddumpling]

Thank you for that reddit link, I opened it and the first post I saw contains this delightful pun: "Knot Your Love Language". These are my people XDDD

[tozka]

You're welcome! My TBR has grown SO MUCH since I started hanging out in that subreddit; I also find it super helpful for navigating through the Kindle Unlimited books in particular (when I have a subscription of course) because they list tropes and specific plot points, which usually aren't on the Amazon page. Like if I want a bunch of books about himbos, I know to look for rec lists in the subreddit first. ;D

[thrilleddumpling]

Ah, himbos *dreamy sigh* I'll admit I got a bit lost into browing that subreddit and when I re-emerged it felt as if my tbr list had doubled XD No worries though, it was already infinite so everything is totally fiiine!