tag:dreamwidth.org,2011-04-04:714361ambrmerlinusambrmerlinusambrmerlinus2011-08-05T15:58:33Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2011-04-04:714361:9324first-world problems2011-08-05T15:58:33Z2011-08-05T15:58:33Zpublic1Remember <a href="http://jessicaverday.blogspot.com/">Jessica Verday</a>?<br /><br />If you don't know who she is, she's the author who was told by an editor for the "Wicked Pretty Things" anthology that she needed to make one of the characters in her boy/boy romance a girl. Her response to this request was, essentially, <a href="http://jessicaverday.blogspot.com/2011/03/being-gay-is-okay.html">EFF</a> <a href="http://jessicaverday.blogspot.com/2011/03/wicked-pretty-things-running-press-and.html">THAT</a> (she was more polite/verbose about it), which immediately endeared her to me and led me to buy <i>The Hollow</i> in the first place, a purchasing decision I sincerely wish I didn't regret.<br /><br />Anyway, she pulled her story from the anthology and has published it on Amazon's Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005FJP4MA/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_alp_nOapob01T6X2A">Flesh Which Is Not Flesh</a>.<br /><br />I want to read this story. I have wanted to read this story ever since the drama started, because I love drama and I have a weakness for queer fiction and another weakness for supernatural YA lit. <br /><br />More importantly, I want to give Jessica Verday money for her story because I am thankful to her for standing up for queer characters and, by extension, for the visibility of queer characters in fiction.*<br /><br />So we have her story, and we have my money. Kindle is the middleman. Therein lies my problem. <br /><br />I do not own a Kindle. I do own a Mac, but it's running OS 10.4 Tiger, and the free "Kindle for Mac" program that Amazon offers is only for OS 10.5 Leopard and up. Ideally, I could buy the story and find some way to convert the file to a .pdf or something my computer could read, but Amazon won't even let me buy the story without having a Kindle program installed.<br /><br />And now, we come to the point:<br /><br /><b>Does anyone have any ideas for a workaround that still lets me pay for the story legally?</b><br /><br />---<br /><br />*Why is this important? Short version: bigots find it harder to be bigots when the targets of their bigotry are humanized. Some queerphobes may never [knowingly] become acquainted with a queer person outside of fiction, ergo queer characters in fiction are an alternative way to let queerphobes know that 1) queer people exist and 2) they are not big scary monsters/weak pathetic sub-humans. Not all queer characters succeed on the second point, but still.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ambrmerlinus&ditemid=9324" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2011-04-04:714361:8390lol life2011-07-04T21:44:29Z2011-07-04T21:44:29Zpublic0THE BAD:<br /><br />My laptop, Princess MacPrincess*, recently suffered a case of "everything works but the screen." The Mac Store's solution to this was to replace the logic board, which means I lost everything that wasn't in my <a href="http://db.tt/uPWKYaS">Dropbox</a>. So while my fiction and <i>Moby Dick</i> stuff were saved, I lost my music collection (over 5,000 songs carefully sorted into 20+ playlists), all the .psd files of my non-<i>Moby Dick</i> art, all the high-quality copies of every <a href="http://dilligaf-comic.blogspot.com/">DILLIGAF</a> strip ever made, my legal (!!!) copy of Photoshop, and several gigs worth of stock/reference images. This also cost me over $300. Whee!<br /><br />Because of this, I've been offline for about a week and have WAY TOO MUCH SHIT to catch up on. Also, while I have been drawing on paper, I miss my Photoshop like burning. I would share the paper-drawings with you but 1) they are bad and 2) without PS I can't clean them up and resize them for internet posting.<br /><br />THE GOOD:<br /><br />I got a job! I work at an antique store now. Good times.<br /><br />In addition, my friend Hannah is offering <a href="http://explosive-toaster.deviantart.com/journal/41960811/">commissions!</a> She's an incredibly hardworking and talented artist with a super cool style, and she's also a totally awesome person, so you should go check out what she's offering. (She is offering AMAZING DEALS.)<br /><br />*So called because, much like a princess, she is expensive, high-maintenance, and weak in body thanks to inbreeding.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ambrmerlinus&ditemid=8390" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2011-04-04:714361:321Hey all, Ken here.2011-04-04T23:50:27Z2011-04-04T23:50:27Zpublic0Oh God the internet knows my name the mad axe murderers will be here any minute D:<br /><br />That aside, hi. Just moved here from <a href="http://ambrmerlinus.livejournal.com/">livejournal</a>, based on two factors. <br /><br />One, LJ has been suffering from DDoS attacks as of late, and has consequently experienced an annoying amount of downtime. Boo on that. <br /><br />Two, several nifty-keen people on LJ have also come here, which leads me to believe that dreamwidth is ~the way of the future~. I figured I'd be on top of this sort of thing for once.<br /><br />What you can expect from this journal:<br /><br />- book "reviews" galore! (I use the term "review" extremely loosely, in that it's usually just me frothing at the mouth about how totally excellent or irredeemable something was. Alternatively, I go on at great length about classic literature, using a lot of quotes and some paraphrasing and some diagrams and a lot of missing the point.)<br /><br />- art! I draw things! I am getting a degree in drawing things, and hope to draw better than I do now someday soon.<br /><br />- writing! Some original fiction, some nonfiction articles, most of the latter will be hosted off-site and I will probably just link to.<br /><br />- a ridiculous amount of queerness, because I am ridiculously queer.<br /><br />So, yeah. That's me, what I do, and what I plan to keep on doing.<br /><br />How do you do?<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=ambrmerlinus&ditemid=321" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments