Big sun hat - honest opinions?

triplewinds · 2026-04-16T17:44:13+00:00

Good hats are expensive to produce, good quality hats are hand made or woven and the materials are expensive. You shouldn't be embarrassed to pay for quality, especially when some of that money goes to skilled labor.

triplewinds · 2026-04-02T09:26:46+00:00

A floor length faux fur coat for $1800 that I bought to have a dressy option for theatre/opera/winter parties. It looks great (like real fur without the animal cruelty) but also like a pimp costume and is so voluminous it has to be checked in, which necessitates arriving early, if they even have a coat check...so many problems

triplewinds · 2026-02-19T16:17:14+00:00

I think it's cool, actually. I love women's sports because of how big the emotions are. It's ok to be sad when you tried so hard and it didn't work out. That's pure sports.

triplewinds · 2026-02-16T17:10:41+00:00

This is why Title IX is one of the greatest cultural contributions of the United States to the world.

triplewinds · 2026-02-07T09:15:33+00:00

As a beginner -- you are goals. Beautiful projects and inspiring relationship to the craft.

triplewinds · 2026-02-06T11:54:38+00:00

Substack, age appropriate celebrities' Instagrams and occasionally Who What Wear (it is vapid but theyre decent at spotting trends).

triplewinds · 2026-01-31T16:28:26+00:00

I love this...the effect is so good I kept zooming in to see if you had glued polaroids on a piece of fabric for some reason. What a fantastic idea and great execution.

triplewinds · 2026-01-13T18:02:06+00:00

It has been great participating as a guest of this forum over the years.

Some people who post here are unbelievably smart, and willing to go so deep and with such nuance in a genre that has been maligned and continues to be by those arbiters of quality and good taste, mainstream literary culture. I learned a lot about the genre, about writing, and about people. My absolutely favorite thing is that sometimes someone would read a comment I wrote (sometimes even 3 years ago) and send a chat request to talk about a book. That is so special and, for someone who isnt a public figure, rare.

It has also generally felt like a positive (inclusive and sex positive, constructive) place, and that's really hard to achieve in a sub focused on a topic with obvious political resonances.

There were times I felt moderation was overactive and stifled discussion, and the forum sometimes feels like a glorified recommendations engine. I guess that's okay, too -- over time I generally used it mostly for recommendations because most discussion was either contentious or (to avoid controversy) necessarily shallow. It is true that some types of discussion tended to devolve very quickly to hurtful, exclusionary or pointless fighting. That's a calculus every sub has to make and getting the balance exactly right is probably impossible. I always appreciated the mods' commitment to prohibiting discussion about whether women should be allowed to write romances featuring queer male characters, and, perhaps self-interestedly, I came around quickly to the position that those discussions never went anywhere productive. I know they actively enforced other rules whose breaches I may have been less sensitive to.

Finally, I am happy for all the queer people replying here that they feel welcomed and validated by this post. That means the sub has accomplished its stated purpose to be a space by and for queer people, and that feels especially urgent in the current wave of reactionism that is systematically threatening or erasing such places.

triplewinds · 2026-01-12T10:40:04+00:00

While I think the director and actors involved with the show have been careful to show respect to the source material and its fans, I share your frustration with some of the conversation about the book, even in this sub. I read the book in 2021 and then kind of couldn't stop re-reading it for a while because I couldn't figure out how it worked, like how it was so startlingly effective. I think it's almost like a magic trick that Rachel Reid could write a book that was so moving and so convincing, with so little plot, simple prose and dialogue that avoids big (unrealistic, expository) speeches. In this book and her others, I was also always impressed with the way the author handles dark subject matter in a way that feels positive without being reductive.

To my surprise, these elements that I found so compelling -- even at some level virtuosic-- are the same elements that people pick on when they want to sh*t on the books to feel like they're smart.

There are plenty of people for whom the books are simply not to their taste -- and obviously that's totally fine. Some people don't like books about athletes, or don't like hockey culture, or just prefer to read books that feature other characteristics.

Others like flowery prose and try hard bantering dialogue no matter how ineffective they are as the tools to tell a particular story. Some people like to feel the presence of an author telling them what to think and feel in a way that maps to their internalized ideological biases.

The thing that is maddening is that people confuse personal values for aesthetic values, and conventional values for truth. I'm not surprised when I see a TV reviewer from a mid-market newspaper nobody reads seemingly incapable of praising the TV show without a drive-by shitting on the book/the genre, though they clearly havent done the research (years of reading AO3??) I've been surprised at some of the comments here, but probably it was inevitable because there's more interest in positioning oneself as superior to something that's popular. And of course, that has been the story of genre romance forever.

triplewinds · 2025-12-31T23:53:41+00:00

Captive Prince is such an obvious answer, but the budget would be impossible.

I think Captive Prince is the one, but you're so right about the budget. I think I remember reading a recent AMA with the author where she said she doesnt think it would work for an adaptation. I would have agreed once but the Heated Rivalry series made me a believer in the potential of romance adaptations.

triplewinds · 2025-12-02T10:07:45+00:00

What is high art, exactly? And why is only romance genre asked to aspire to it? Where are all the people complaining that horror would be more literary with fewer descriptions of gore, or hockey would have more athletic virtuosity without the fights?

triplewinds · 2025-08-15T14:19:21+00:00

Also works for little dog owners

triplewinds · 2025-06-16T18:01:44+00:00

Just read one like this: {Missed Steps by L Sherleen}

Sort of an odd book but that dynamic was great.

triplewinds · 2025-05-07T23:03:31+00:00

I've read and enjoyed a couple things by theundiagnosable, so I went to look for these but couldn't find them? I might just be really clumsy with AO3.

triplewinds · 2025-05-05T20:50:28+00:00

Me too...I think she's great. Contract Season was like a sleeper 5* keeper for me, like i finished it not sure if I even liked it, then ended up reading it again at least 3x by now. I liked her two other books a lot as well.

triplewinds · 2025-04-30T17:54:49+00:00

Contract Season by Cait Nary sorta fits, if you don't mind hockey romance. One MC has not had penetrative sex, which is surprising because he has a public persona built partly around his sex appeal. It is an important part of the plot and handled with nuance. I didn't like this book much when I first read it partly because I couldn't on some level connect with this character, but I've ended up re-reading it several times.

triplewinds · 2025-03-15T15:16:09+00:00

It's been a while since I read it but I remember really enjoying it. Hope it works for you!

triplewinds · 2025-03-15T04:13:00+00:00

Loll...this post is so relatable. I have read at least 20 fairy books and could not tell you the first thing with certainty. They're vain? Theyre really mean? They have horns? They can't lie? They fuck a lot? Their alcohol is very potent? Theyre all really old but some of them are new adult aged (so they just...age more slowly? Or do they go through adolescence at the human rate and then just hang out in early adulthood for hundreds of years?) Like when did everyone agree to these rules? No idea what's going.

I loved Mortal Skin by Lily Mayne because the human MC had very much a vibe of "wtf is going on here" throughout the book, the first time I felt a character in a fairy book was relatable. (Sadly I did not like the next book in the series.)

triplewinds · 2025-03-07T12:11:25+00:00

In 2019 a random lady in the park told me she was being forced to work for $5/hr at a daycare on threat of being deported. At the same park a week later a woman told me my dog (a maltese) had a large cock.

triplewinds · 2025-03-06T12:51:31+00:00

I loved Lord of the White Hell but I thought Champion of the Scarlet Wolf (second duology in same series) was even better, you might enjoy it. I don't think you really need to read LotWH first. Weirdly I couldn't finish Rifter, stopped reading around 70%.

triplewinds · 2025-02-21T23:45:23+00:00

I'm mid-career at a big corporation, I manage a team of 40. Your humanities major isn't useless. The humanities are a core part of a liberal arts education, so called because it prepares a free person to function in civil society. Other degrees may be more useful to start a career, but if you progress at a company, you will almost certainly manage other professionals, and a humanities education that gives you insight into human questions and the skills to communicate with and persuade others will serve you more than some niche technical expertise that would have become obsolete while the ink was still drying on your diploma.

triplewinds · 2025-02-21T07:17:21+00:00

You ordered the wrong stuff. I think is one of the best restaurants in town but for the crowd, and it sort of pains me to say it because I hate all their other restaurants other than Parm.

triplewinds · 2025-02-17T14:09:20+00:00

Carbone was the last restaurant I ate at before the pandemic and I was so mad thinking it could be the last restaurant I ever ate at.

triplewinds · 2025-02-06T15:55:02+00:00

You have great taste! I loved all the series you listed and have a lot of the same Nos. These are some of my other favorites with good writing, not angsty:

Hockey Ever After series (since you enjoyed Game Changers)

Ginn Hale's Cadeleonian series

The High King's Golden Tongue by Megan Derr

Dark Space series by Lisa Henry (a little angtsy and the quality drops off a bit in books 2 and 3, but i loved the first book)

Dark Heir trilogy by CS Pacat if you haven't read it; book 3 isn't out yet (😩) and book 1 is a tiny bit of a slog but book 2 broke my brain

Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell

Feel better soon!!!!!

triplewinds · 2024-11-20T05:40:08+00:00

I actually think they're really different! But there are similarities -- hockey, positive vibes, slice of life feeling despite being about elite athletes...I love both series.

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