so last fall i somehow stumbled upon instafreebie and things slowly snowballed out of control from there and now i’m just drowning in free books all the time. not the worst problem to have for sure. and they’re ebooks so they take up virtually no space! anyway i thought i’d put together a list of all the resources i’ve found over the past several months in case anyone is interested. Yes, the quality varies, but honestly you can say that with ‘best seller’ books as well and some free series i’ve found are actually really good.
book rebel – this one is relatively new and i only joined it maybe a month or so ago but i’ve already downloaded a few books they’ve shown me. after you sign up you tell them the genres you are interested in and which sites you buy books from and they will send you a new list of popular free or reduced price books every day. i’ve noticed that this one has more 99c books than actually free but it’s a good resource nonetheless.
cheap thrills books – scroll down a little bit on the page to sign up. this one also sends you an email every day with free and reduced price books. there are usually at least two free ones and all of them are under $4. oftentimes there are boxsets as well. most of the book are mystery/thriller but there are some good scifi/fantasy ones in there as well.
daily free books – this is by far the largest and most comprehensive one i’ve found. you can sign up and pick up to 15 genres to track, meaning that every day you will get an email telling you all the new free ebooks in that genre. you can also just browse the site to see ALL the free ebooks they have and there is a ‘top rated’ category as well, in case you’d rather not take a chance on something that only has like two reviews. i’ve found entire series for free through this site because often an author will make the first novel free one week then the second free the next and things like that, so if you keep a close eye on it you can really snag some good stuff.
instafreebie– this site will send you an email every weekday with 3 featured books in a certain genre [monday is romance, thursday is YA, etc] and will also link you to giveaways where several authors are listing free books all on one page that usually fit a certain theme. every time you download a book from instafreebie you are signed up for the author’s newsletter, but you can easily unsubscribe if you don’t want your inbox to get too cluttered. if you like the author and they don’t send a ton of emails i would recommend keeping the subscriptions though because often they will offer exclusive freebies and ask for beta readers through their newsletter, as well as linking you to free / on sale books by other authors. the prolific reader currently lists 300+ books you can download from instafreebie if you aren’t sure where to start.
library thing – this one is a little bit different than the others i’ve listed so far because they give away review copieswhich means you actually need to read and review them on their website. every month they give away a certain number of copies of several books in their early reviewer section so you aren’t guaranteed to get one but i’ve only been doing it for a few months and i’ve got every book i’ve requested. really the trick is to pick something that sounds good but also has a lot of copies or not many requesters. there’s also the member giveaway section [top left, under the logo], where there are other giveaways that don’t run on a monthly basis, and i’ve gotten a few books from there so far as well.
netgalley – this site also does review copies. once you make an account you’ll want to go to the read now section and get some books from there, because you can read them immediately without having to be accepted by the publisher. once you have read several books in this section [and linked your goodreads and amazon review pages in your bio] you can start requesting books from other sections to read. another catch with netgalley is that you have to read the books before they are ‘archived’, usually on or shortly after the publication date, and also that the files you download are only good for a certain amount of time before they expire and you can’t view them anymore. also some publishers [like tor] won’t accept you if you don’t have a book blog, but don’t worry there are still a lot of books you can get just by reviewing on goodreads and amazon.
reading addicts – this one sends you a weekly email with free and 99 cent books. it’s basically like the ones i listed at the beginning except it’s once a week instead of every day.
seriously you can get so many free books this way i’ve got literally hundreds that i have yet to read and i download new ones every day. you’ll never run out of things to read. these are all the ones i use currently but i’d love to hear about others that i’ve missed!
note: i have signed up for edelweiss but it’s such a confusing site that i haven’t really done anything with it yet, so if anyone has some guides on what is going on over there i’d love to see them. it looks to have a lot of overlap w/ netgalley but i know a lot of people say they get denied on NG but approved on EW and vice versa so maybe something to check out.
Jesus Christ was a brown Jew in the Middle East, conceived out of wedlock in an arguably interracial if not interspecies (deity and human) relationship, raised by his mother and stepfather in place of his absent father. He may not have had a Y chromosome. He spent his early youth as a refugee in Egypt, where his family no doubt survived initially on handouts from the wealthy (You think they kept that gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the wise men? Hell no, they sold that stuff for food and lodging). He later returned with his parents to their occupied homeland and lived in poverty.
Trump and his administration are xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, fear-mongering, warmongering, tax-dodging, anti-Semitic, anti-choice, anti-welfare, anti-equal pay, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, support tax cuts for the rich, support Citizen’s United, want to keep refugees out of this country, want to limit our ability to speak against the government, plan to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and they wrap all of that up behind a banner of “Christian family values.” If you support them, you have no right to call yourself a follower of Christ.
it’s so rare, yet so fulfilling, to see the J-man on my dash
One of my friends is literally the most religious Christian I have ever met. What does that mean in regards to her lifestyle and outlook? She loves everyone. EVERYONE. Unconditionally. And she supports healthcare and education and birth control and everything that’s necessary to have a healthy, stable society.
teacher: write a 5 page essay analyzing this
me: it’s not that deep 🏊🏼
I swear to god they’re so dramatic. Even in art history they read into what an apple or fly means like BICH maybe they’re just in the painting chilling. Y DOES IT NEED A MEANING
Yo, makes me laugh that you say this. Because you’re actually right
At the time artists started painting still life (early renaissance), painters didn’t bother with meanings at all. It was a technical exercise. Seeing how good their techniques were
But painting is expensive as fuck and you gotta pay for pigments and shit, so you had to be able to sell your shitty still life, to the people who pay for your pigments and shit. But they didn’t want still life paintings, because it was… just food….. They wanted Jesus and bible scenes and such. Not apples and shit. Because rich people loved religion. And were pretentious as fuck. Why have an apple painting at home when you can have men freaking out over zombie Jesus
So artists were like ok, see, you don’t get it. The apple refers to the original sin, and all the fruits represent your wealth and such. But the skull’s there to remind you that your wealth doesn’t matter, you’ll die someday anyway
Because that was a popular thing at the time, being rich but having symbolic stuff that remind you that you’ll die someday despite being rich. Rich people were weird. And pretentious
So painters BULLSHITTED all that symbolic stuff around the things they put in their still life paintings to make the boring painting exercises appealing to the gullible (and pretentious) rich people that commissioned them. And rich people gobbled it aaaalllllll up
And that’s how we still have still life paintings from most famous renaissance artists today and that they’re in such good condition, because still life paintings became THE shit amongst rich people and they bought them and kept them at home. Instead of remaining stuck in a dusty, shitty painting workshop, to be forgotten beneath tons of other stuff and rot
And there was this whole lexicon and symbolism dictionary created around still life paintings at the time, like each object was meant to represent something and there began to be conventions and stuff
But they only ever were technical painting exercises
A super girly and peppy blonde girl who wears bright pink dresses and skirts everyday is best friends with a quiet goth girl who of course sports all black clothing and big lace up boots. Someone jokes and yells to them “Hey look, a fairy and a vampire!” The blonde turns around and flashes a fanged grin and says “She’s human actually.”
This has been done before, I’m sure.
Brilliant.
What’s awesome about this is that “blonde” doesn’t automatically =“White” like it usually does when it’s used to describe someone.
IM FUCKING SURPRISED TO SEE THIS ON MY DASH IM SORRY I KNOW THIS ISNT THE RIGHT BLOG AT ALL BUT LOOK AT THIS DAMN THING I DID LAST SUMMER LOL FUCK
So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.”
Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.” YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.
Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.
Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.
Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.)
And THIS, this is hopepunk:
HOPE AND HONESTY IN A SOCIETY THAT VALUES CYNICISM AND DECEPTION IS SUBVERSIVE AND THEREFOR PUNK
I AM HERE FOR THIS MOVEMENT. HOPE AND HONESTY ARE DEEPLY PUNK ROCK. KINDNESS IS GOTH AS FUCK.
I-want-my-IWTV 