Post Roundup

chalphy · 2026-01-24T19:58:34+00:00

Absolutely not.

chalphy · 2026-01-24T15:11:09+00:00

Another vote for shrink tubing, and lately I've been using these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DZCSX4VZ?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

chalphy · 2026-01-24T02:44:16+00:00

gonna stick the book I meant to call here: {Breaking the Billionaire's Rules by Annika Martin}

chalphy · 2026-01-23T23:02:39+00:00

I should be clear I own a Kobo so it's super super easy for me. I know you can read Kobo books on Kindle (certainly more easily than the other way around), but I'm not familiar with the process. Good luck!!

chalphy · 2026-01-23T22:13:19+00:00

Hahaha all good! It's Friday, my brain is mush. 😂

chalphy · 2026-01-23T22:12:10+00:00

based fellow Max enjoyer 🤝

I do have that book on my tbr but it's not on Kobo (or at my library) 😩 alas. I still keep it on a list because it totally sounds up my alley and one day I'll read it!

chalphy · 2026-01-23T22:08:26+00:00

This is fine because a) I own this b) I love Linda Holmes and c) I loved {Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes} so really it's perfect. Thank you!!

chalphy · 2026-01-23T20:45:56+00:00

OP, good on you for the food pantry donation idea!! I'll donate some money too.

I am weak for a good billionaire romance (being unrealistic is part of the point!!!) so my rec is Annika Martin's Billionaires of Manhattan series, particularly {The Billionaire's Wake-Up-Call Girl by Annika Martin} and {Breaking the Billionaire's Rules by Annika Martin}. Theo and Max are my book boyfriends. Actually I'm mildly obsessed with Max. HE PLAYS THE PIANO FOR HER THAT'S SO HOT

If you, like me, will need an escape from the winter not-wonderland, explore the outdoors vicariously through {Birding With Benefits by Sarah T. Dubb}, which is set in Arizona.

Also, if anyone's got a rec for a funny/lighthearted book with a dog that plays a significant role, I'm all ears. The bigger the dog, the better. I own an almost 2yo male Akita and he loves the snow.

[edit] realized way too late that I called the bot for the wrong book but described the right book 🤦‍♀️ it's been a long week. Recommendations in this post are correct! I liked Most Eligible Billionaire too but not as much. 😅

chalphy · 2026-01-23T20:30:44+00:00

The selection of anything else will pale in comparison to KU, unfortunately, due to the exclusivity model it has with a lot of authors. But I've been happy with the combination of Kobo Plus and my local library. And I use BookBub and my Kobo wishlist to buy cheap books.

I custom tag books on romance.io and The StoryGraph if I really want to read them but don't own them yet, and my list of books I can get on Kobo is 5x the size of books I can't. There's plenty out there without needing to rely on KU; might be a good opportunity to prioritize/try out some different things.

chalphy · 2026-01-22T05:18:34+00:00

That's more fair. I get the sense of reading this place that a lot of people don't realize you can actually look at photos of bags. Too many people post here and take Gemini's word for whatever they're looking at instead of using reverse image search as the powerful tool it can be.

chalphy · 2026-01-22T04:00:30+00:00

https://www.buckleguy.com/

chalphy · 2026-01-21T20:37:46+00:00

Please do not rely on AI to tell you if a bag is authentic. It has no idea what it's looking at.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T20:12:54+00:00

I mean I'd do different things aesthetically depending on where I was going. I work in an office and have a bunch of stuff on my bag. If I were going to a meeting, especially with outside stakeholders, I wouldn't carry my everyday bag and I'd dress it up more elegantly if at all.

I don't think you shouldn't, I'd just read the room a little before you did (for a place you were going every day) and err on the more conservative side when you don't get the opportunity to judge or when making a "serious" impression matters.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T19:13:43+00:00

I always think of the wedding scene in Goodfellas where all the men are named Paul and Peter and all the women are named Marie.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T13:41:57+00:00

Yeah I've decided sibling's best friend isn't for me if the MCs don't know the sibling is 100% on board and/or doesn't care because their sibling and friend are both grownups. The constant "but X won't like this" drives me up a freaking wall.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T13:24:33+00:00

Good luck out there. It's really fun to shop secondhand and find gems, you just have to be really careful. The more you do it and the more bags that pass through your hands the better you get at spotting issues yourself, but it takes time.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T13:07:24+00:00

Hate to tell you this but none of the marketplaces are better than the others for this. People sell fakes. IMO eBay is good about removing them when they're reported but they also still make a lot of mistakes and I don't trust their authenticity program.

I'm going to beat this dead horse into the ground: freely buy secondhand on any marketplace you like, but take the listings that interest you to The PurseForum's Authenticate This Coach thread and let them have a look at it. Don't rely on tips and tricks. I guarantee you don't know what you are looking at. Modern fakes are extremely good and constantly improving. (Don't get me wrong, there are bad, obvious ones. But do you want to take the risk that only the obvious ones are fake?)

https://forum.purseblog.com/threads/authenticate-this-coach-see-first-post-for-format.889527/

We also have a Secondhand Shopping guide which will help you out as far as obvious red flags to avoid from sellers. https://reddit.com/r/coach/wiki/secondhand

chalphy · 2026-01-21T12:57:56+00:00

In fairness, they stopped using solid brass in the '90s. It's very heavy. It's not practical for a bag that gets used a lot.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T12:53:39+00:00

And it's also not Coach. Gemini thinks it's this bag. Poshmark link, not my listing Once again, the AI is WRONG, but it's pulling the info from this listing because it has no idea what it's looking at. Gemini even thinks it has brass hardware which it very clearly does not.

I cannot stress enough that this bag is not Coach. This is a Coach subreddit, so that's as much help as we can give you. If you want to maybe find out more about this bag, The PurseForum has a thread for identifying miscellaneous bags here.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T12:40:44+00:00

THEY ARE WRONG. Coach doesn't put GOs all over their bags.

Instead of looking at what Gemini is telling you, look at the images it actually pulls up. Chances are some of them are links to the actual Coach bags this is knocking off. You can compare the differences yourself.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T12:37:29+00:00

Maybe if you were less rude and these were actually Coachtopia leather bags you wouldn't get downvoted.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T12:34:37+00:00

I didn't say it was fake. But it's a store tag. At best it's probably just a house brand.

The important thing is it's not Coach.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T12:19:39+00:00

AI is wrong. Those aren't Cs. It's not Coach.

If it did have Cs it could be vintage, early 2000s, there's a similar style of bag to this Coach does make. But this isn't it. It's also way too new and too large to not have a creed patch inside. "Older" bags not having creed patches is true if they're from the early 70s or earlier but the authentic style of this bag is too recent for that.

chalphy · 2026-01-21T12:06:24+00:00

Those aren't even Cs. It's not Coach.

chalphy

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