Leraje

I love the aesthetics of hardback books, a beautiful Victorian-era library looks (and smells!) great but my own library is all ebooks. I don’t have the space for over 2k physical books and as I get older and my eyesight worsens, the ability to adjust font size, line-height, borders, contrast etc becomes invaluable.

I won’t buy from Amazon at all, ever. I prefer to buy DRM free but if its not possible to buy DRM free then I buy a paperback copy from a local indie bookstore if possible which I immediately donate to a library or hospital or prison or whatever and, ahem, ‘source’ a DRM-free version from elsewhere. I do it this way because DRM is cancer but I also want to support small and/or new authors so buying and passing on a print copy is good for everyone and having a DRM free copy is good for me.

As for subject matter, both fiction and non-fiction but more fiction than non. I like historical novels like the Aubrey/Maturin series, or the Shardlake series, Madeline Miller’s greek retellings, Hilary Mantel’s stuff, fantasy/sci-f- like Ursula K Leguinn, NK Jemisin, Margaret Attwood, Robin Hobb, Lois McMaster Bujold, Susannah Clarke, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Horror/Thrillers by writers like Peter Straub, Catriona Ward, Shirley Jackson. Non-fiction books tend to be popular science that are ‘popular’ enough I can grasp what they’re on about but ‘science’ enough they’re not just dumbed down crap.

The only slightly surprising thing about this is that Musk didn’t commission a gold plated car with a TRUMP#1 vanity plate.

Built in, pre-launch enshittification. Novel.

The MMR vaccine never contained thimerosal. There were two separate claims by antivaxxers. The first was Wakefield’s money making scheme to invent an alternative MMR vaccine by claiming the existing MMR vaccine caused autism.

The second, entirely separate, claim was that thimerosal in other vaccines was also causing autism.

The two claims then got conflated into a general ‘vaccines == bad’ by idiots like Kennedy, Jim Carrey, Jenny McCarthy and a whole quack industry of autism ‘cures’ such as chelation, HBOT etc.