Highlights:

Today I learned

99 legal sites to download literature

The Classics

Browse works by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and other famous authors here.

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

Textbooks

If you don’t absolutely need to pay for your textbooks, save yourself a few hundred dollars by reviewing these sites.

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

Keep reading

me as a writer: Oh no I can’t write that, somebody else already has

me as a reader: hell yes give me all the fics about this one scenario. The more the merrier

Friendly reminder that Snape is NOT a good person as he did the following:

Immediately started to single out Harry on his first day of school. It’s unacceptable that he allowed his anger towards James determine the way he treated Harry.

When he had to teach the DADA class for Remus, instead of continuing where they had left off he jumped straight to learning about werewolves and set the class an essay on how to kill them.

Wanted to watch Sirius get the dementor’s kiss. That’s messed up.

He only came back onto the good side after Lily was murdered. If she had stayed alive he would’ve stayed on Voldemort’s side.

He, a man in his 30s, unnecessarily bullied students. He was Neville’s boggart and continued to make fun of Hermione’s appearance and intelligence throughout the series.

And yes, he was bullied by the marauders as a teen, but they grew out of it and he clearly didn’t.

He didn’t care if Harry and James died, as long as Lily lived.

Called Lily a mudblood, became upset when she refused to speak to him afterwards and tried to apologise and say her blood status didn’t matter despite the fact that the organisation he was a part of believed the opposite

Ignored James’ body and Harry crying so he could cling onto Lily’s corpse. Creepy? Very.

Showed favouritism towards Slytherins to a ridiculous level

Has no personal hygiene. Wash your greasy hair please.

Forced Neville to use his potion on his toad, assuming Neville has messed up the potion and it would poison his toad.

As a teenager he created a spell to slash up his enemies??

Didn’t respect Lily’s choice to be with James and not him and then became obsessive towards her.

Became a DEATH EATER

Yes he was bullied and didn’t have a great childhood, but do you know who else didn’t have a great childhood? Harry. And he turned out fine because he is a good person.

He never showed remorse or regret for anything mentioned above.

Now, I’m not saying he isn’t a good character, because he is certainly a very well written character. I’m also not saying that he never did anything good and was never a victim. However, the fact is that the bad easily outweighs the good.

Please, please, please don’t ever let yourself believe that you don’t matter or that the people in your life would be better off without you. You’re so much more loved, so much more valued than you know. Your existence matters and the people in your life are lucky to know you. Don’t forget that.

I was rewatching Nailed It on Netflix, which is a baking competition show except instead of competent bakers it’s just normal people trying to make highly detailed and complicated cakes with not enough time and it’s hilarious

And now I’m just thinking of Stephen and Tony as a couple team

Stephen is trying to take control, but he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing and his hands don’t allow him to do detail work well, so he’s just yelling at Tony trying to get him to do it right, but Tony is even more incompetent

Stephen- “WE’VE WATCHED THIS ENTIRE SHOW TWICE, HOW ARE WE MESSING SO MUCH UP?!”

The other teams are Thor & Bruce and Bucky & Sam

a lot of people on this site are like, deeply existentially freaked out that they haven’t been in love by 19 or whatever, and are desperate for any explanation for this that might make it ok. i just want to say, you are completely ok, no explanation needed. this is MUCH more common than you think, especially if you’re not straight. you’re very very young. you’re 100% fine. if you want it, it will happen in its own time.

“WRITE IT BADLY. Write it badly, write it badly, write it badly, write it badly. Stop what you’re doing, open a Word document, put a pencil on some paper, just get the idea out of your head. Let it be good later. Write it down now. Otherwise it will die in there.”

— Brandon Sanderson on overcoming writer’s block to create a first draft as a professional author

After three (3) years since the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) dir. Anthony and Joe Russo, I still don’t understand why the Captain America exhibit was held in the Air and Space Museum. Steve Rogers is not even a pilot. The only time he ever manned a plane, and he nosedived it straight into the Arctic. 

I want to write but I never know how to start something. Any tip?

As silly as it sounds Darling, I suggest you just start writing. You don’t have to have a concrete plan, or even a hint of a plan, just start writing and let the story take you for a ride. You don’t even have to start at the beginning.

As an example, even if you have no idea what to write, just come up with a key word or the beginning of a sentence.

“grandmother” can turn into “You’ve always looked up to your grandmother”

From there you just keep writing, ask yourself why the character looks up to their grandmother, what reasons could there be, both mundane and fanciful. Just like that you keep on building, and eventually you have something to run with.

It sounds silly enough, but I’ve found that no matter how hard I’m struggling to come up with something, if I just start writing, something’s going to happen eventually.

Hope that helps you a little Darling. I have more advice under the advice tag, some of which is more in depth than this, if you decide you want more.