For Texans who might be reading this, Houston digital library is available to all in-state residents.

Because I don’t even know if jitterbug phones even exist anymore…so they’re getting something “like” a jitterbug smh. It’s pretty audacious for you to go around around telling people to “try not to use” certain parlance or online speaking trends just because you don’t. Not everyone is a grammar prescriptivist.

You know people don’t use double spaces to start a sentence anymore, right? How about you try not using them anymore?

If we are talking about changes made when filming a movie based off a book I think it completely depends.

Is the film an adaptation, inspired by, desired to stay faithful or desired to take liberties.

I think it's a case by case scenario. Completely dependent on the works and intentions.

If you are directing a by the numbers secrete agent spy story, it doesn't really matter what the race of the main character is, unless the race has true actual impact on the story.

If you are doing an epic fantasy that has various rich detailed, races, classes, worlds and its own set of rules and politics, you cannot just willy nilly change whatever you want just because you want more diversity. One could argue that world already has its own diversity. You cannot take your own political ideology and change the context of what your filming just because you want to.

It's just completely dependent on the story, the director, the intent and the goal.

I have a student who, putting it mildly, was a reluctant reader. I started asking if he might be dyslexic from kinder- and I kept being told, "no, I am trained in reading intervention, he is with age-typical ranges." It is not until he was at threat of failing the state test did they screen him. Yup, mildly dyslexic. One year of intensive intervention with a fantastic educator, and now I can't get books out of that kids hands. Some of his favorite to read are processional references for computer programmers. I doubt he has full reading comprehension, but loves it. And that is all I care about. Does he love what he is reading? Great, read.

And then we ignore the homework that says, "after your 20 min at home read time, write about how the setting influences the story."

Pratchett did diversity well in his depiction of Ankh Morpork. So did Guy Gavriel Kay in Lions of Al Rassan. I get annoyed when authors don't provide a reason for diversity, or a back story, unless the setting is an immigrant country like Australia or the US. But I am not going to publicly complain about it. It's just a pedantic nitpick in my head cannon.

Oh awesome! Thank you so much for the info!

No I'll check it out!

Related to limited resources, a second-hand story. A friend had a high school daughter who was graded on how much her reading level improved each semester. The daughter was a great reader, yet was at threat of receiving a failing grade. The friend had to go in and and demonstrate that the entire darn school library only had -three- books above her daughter's reading level, so how did they expect her to improve when there was nothing challenging left to read?

Well, there are a few things to unpack from your comments. Australian academic libraries have had an E-preferred collection development focus for a long time now, and several of the companies working on the technology to make that happen were Aussie start-ups in the early 2000s. So it's been a big part of the ecosystem for a long time now. Our Universities are pretty much all publicly funded, and we do a lot in the distance-education space - my University does the whole "open university" online education thing, we deliver remote Vocational courses throughout Australia, and we have partner campuses in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. It's not at all like the American "college experience" of living on campus and living that whole lifestyle. In fact in many other countries we would be called an advanced research polytechnic instead.

Our collection policy follows from that - there's no point keeping outdated concrete engineering standards documentation on the shelf, or having user guides to Windows 95 taking up space.

"So, if we check out more books, the libraries have the data to show that there is a need and desire for such books, then you can take those numbers and request even more money?"

There isn't a "more money" tap that you can switch on sadly, or rather those discussions happen at the Dean and Vice-Chancellor level, far far above my pay grade. We get an allocated chunk of money for the year, then we have to try and guess what the foreign exchange rate will be at the end of the year, and then have to negotiate with the vendors about their price rises.

At that age, my classmates and I were into Playboy and stuff.

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The kinds of people who complain about this usually aren't big on reading.

They prefer their books at 451 degrees.

I think most average readers are intelligent enough to tell the difference between self-aggrandizing virtue signaling and diversity in a story because that is the way the author wrote it. I think the issue that most people had with The Rings of Power was that the writers were incredibly lazy in implementing their forced diversity, rather than using the already established world and history of Middle Earth to write in the diverse characters.

Instead of having it make anthropological sense they are asking the viewer to suspend their disbelief that there is only one black elf, one black dwarf, a couple black hobbits and no explanation as to why this is the case. Tolkien wrote extensively about different peoples of color inhabiting his fantasy world. All the writers had to do was use this already established backstory to write in these characters in a way that made sense anthropologically and historically within the world. Instead they would rather pat themselves on the back that they are "woke".

This is the same reason they felt the need to announce the genitalia of all the directors for the second seasons episodes. As if that had anything to do with their ability to direct. It's the writers that care more about their political agenda than staying true to the source material and actually writing a good story. The idea that anyone who questions this incredibly lazy writing must be a neck-bearded basement- dwelling racist incel would be comical if it wasn't so sad and pathetic. These kinds of dismissals are made by people who have zero defense of all the honest constructive criticisms of the show. I can't help but feel like that's what the OP was referencing even if he didn't come right out and say it.

Literally no one cares about racial diversity in fantasy writing. What people care about is not having their intelligence insulted by incredibly lazy writers who care more about their political agenda than they do about remaining faithful to the foundations of the entire fantasy subgenre.

Shouldn't need to be said, but it does. Alas.

If we're talking about things that they change from books to movies or something of that nature I'd say that the race of the characters is one of the least egregious changes they can make. At most they get any form of description on skin color in a couple fleeting descriptive passages with no bearing on the story whatsoever, and I am much more concerned about staying true to other, more important parts that actually make the story

You gotta do it in Goodreads format where you fill it with gifs and refer to the author like they are your friend like

"Steve, Steve, Steve... You've done it again ya brilliant bastard

Random gif

The Shining may have been your best one yet buddy. "

I don't know. The excerpts I read from the book are quite comedic already, I'm not sure if a parody book could do it better.

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The logical reason might be, that "people of different races" - by this I guess you mean humans, not dwarfs of elves - just don't exist in a fantasy world. I mean, if you look at human history - the reason why human "races" exist at all is because of migration to different parts of the planet where different types of features were better for survival. In a fictional universe, this might not have happened (yet).

'Don't worry sweetheart, she is still thinking about The Book Thief'

This is such low-tier bait that you should frankly be ashamed of it.

Well, he didn't have much choice in the matter!

It's important to try and approach the texts from a scholarly position, the prose Edda for example is one of the most complete and comprehensive records of Norse mythology but was written with the intent of providing a framework for court skalds in Scandinavia, written by a Christian for a Christian audience. one thing it's important to understand is that the Norse mythology was almost certainly not practiced on a comprehensive and thorough scale, stories and practices would have varied widely from area to area and over time as well. It's why I find reading the sagas interesting because the mythology is sprinkled through, and presented in a more day-to-day fashion

Personally, I would rather read something that an author actually wants to write about and convey whatever message it is they want to and not what everyone wants them to write. And if I don't like it then I won't read it. Don't you think that pushing some sort of check list on an author in what belief, views and perspective they need to have is taking away from their art and making it more about what you want?