No company of any size is going to care about its people. Individual managers might, and leadership may talk about it when times are good, but all of that will go in the bin if it means less profit for the company.

I think the same is true of smaller companies as well; there it is just maybe a little harder for management to be assholes because they are so much closer to the actual people they are treating like shit. Employees are always only a means to an end.

When I was writing the other day about Bookshop.org’s new ebooks offering, I said ebooks aren’t really my thing and I vastly prefer reading real books.

While that is mostly true, I do tend to keep an ebook on my phone so that I have something to read if I find myself waiting somewhere. I have found it’s a good way to keep myself from the Endless Scroll.

Since I try to avoid—as much as is practical—buying anything from Amazon, I use Libby from the local library system. There are two problems with this strategy, though. The first is that the selection of titles is not great and wait times tend to be really long. The second is that most of the ebooks on Libby can only be checked out for two weeks and I am almost never able to finish any of these books before they are due back.

🔗 To Read or Not to Read Romantasy - by John Warner:

Many of my students had been passionate participants in online fan fiction forums, a genre I’d held in low esteem until reading a student’s paper years earlier (circa 2009) which provided background and critical context that allowed me to see the sophistication and dynamism of the culture churning away in the form of literally millions of words. The fact that fan fiction derived from very specific subcultures and was expected to adhere to particular precepts didn’t make it any different from any other genre, really. Also, the fact that a lot of fan fiction wasn’t very good didn’t make it different from any other apprentice writing either.