![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Greetings. We'll begin with the knowledge that people from areas stereotypically associated with sex-negative religious attitudes and their attendant repressive ideas are buying lots of tickets to the Fifty Shades of Grey movie. Of note is Mississippi, who topped early pre-sale and opening weekend charts and is home to the American Family Association, who invoked the Streisand Effect by calling for people not to go see it. (The same AFA that sponsored a trip for Republican Party leaders to go to Israel and promote Christianity.) Probably not in response to this, the town where the AFA calls home, Tupelo, Mississippi, has sold out showings for the movie.
Much consternation cometh from renewed interest in Fifty Shades and its grafting of BDSM elements into a romance tale, but take care not to police literature choices by women, while at it. A lot of criticisms do or wring their hands about people taking the fantasy seriously as How It's Done.
Finland will join the Century of the Fruitbat in 2017.
The Impossible Missions Force, the Massive Dynamic family, the hobbits of the Shire, the True Organization XIII, the town of Springfield, the Planet Express team, the models that he photographed, and all the other subjects, too, the United States Army, Bruno Mars, the recipients of his poetry and wisdom, whether in his most famous role or not, all those who replicate his benediction, whether famous or not, and in whatever medium suited them best, those who identified with any of his characters, but especially those who saw a representation of themselves in him (a representation he was fully aware of and consciously used for good), and, of course, the crew of the Federation Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701-A, salute and welcome Leonard Nimoy, actor and great example of a human being, to the end of his journey of life at 83 years of age.
Photographs of abandoned locations, capturing moments in time otherwise long gone.
if you want to make progress in mental health issues, work on building the capacity and availability for those with mental issues to get help, as it's not that people aren't trying to get it, but that it isn't there for them. The system is designed to be incredibly difficult to access by those that need it, and measures are routinely proposed and enacted that punish those with mental issues and make it harder for them to get effective help.
Watercolor and ink makes cats on canvas that are strikingly realistic.
it is significantly less likely that a marijuana user will reach a lethal dose of their drug, especially when compared to alcohol.
Another Bush wants to be President. Which would be okay, I suppose, but for hiring a guy who regularly made sexist and homophobic tweets as the chief technology officer (he resigned, after trying to delete the evidence), and publishing thousands of unredacted emails of correspondence with Floridians to promote an upcoming book on the subject of how awesome a governor he is and how he'd make a great President. The featured comment strain when I read that article was a dick insisting that since nothing Jeb Bush did was illegal, nobody should be worked up about having their personal data put out in the open, and they should have known what would happen when they wrote. Which was missing the point, as usual - privacy is not just the technological means of keeping data secret, but a set of social norms where people who may have data agree not to disclose that data where it would hurt someone. So Wheaton's Law applies here.
The death of an aid worker taken hostage by the terror group operating in Syria and Iraq renews the commitment to the destruction of that group from the White House, regardless of the cost needed to achieve that goal. To that end, the President has officially requested that the Congress give him authorization to use military force against said terror group.
Three Muslims, shot by their neighbor over what is officially a parking dispute, but what may turn out to be hate motivations, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The shooter owned a significant number of weapons and ammunition, which is not inherently wrong, but suggests a clue to the ideology of the shooter.
Alabama joins the Century of the Fruitbat...or would be, except the state's highest judge, Roy Moore, issued orders telling lower judges to ignore the federal court order. This is the same judge that refused to take down their Ten Commandments, was tossed out, and then re-elected to a higher court position.
The blizzard conditions are sufficiently tough in the Northeast United States that environmental waivers are being sought and granted to move excess snow into local bodies of water.
People have disabilities, regardless of what they use to accommodate them. So if they're not with their devices, it doesn't mean they're getting better. That said, it appears that we have too many people who think dead is preferable to disabled, and are willing to give parents a pass for killing their disabled children.
Am inquiry investigating whether NBC anchor Brian Williams exaggerated claims he has made about his time in Iraq and during national disasters had resulted in Mr. Williams removing himself temporarily from the job until the investigation is compete. Which is a sound thing to do - for an example of what not to do, we turn to fake news correspondent Bill O'Reilly, who uses exaggerations to try and leverage himself into positions of superiority and then levels attacks that encourage bad behavior against those that fact-check him. which only encourages other organizations to find more instances of his lies - regarding the witnessing of violence against nuns, or his lack of presence at the suicide of a person involved in the JFK assassination. And after the evidence he was hoping would exonerate him didn't, and the heat continued to build on his avoidance, well...nothing. No apology yet.
Author John Green went on an odyssey to try and discover whether a quote being used all over the place to promote a work of his actually was in his book. it wasn't, which meant plagiarism had unwittingly occurred, because everyone thought the quote was in the book. So there's an entire process there of finding the correct author and paying them for all the uses done so far. That the author needed an illegal version of his own work to digitally search it (as all legal copies contain DRM that prevents searching the text of the book) says a lot about the state of copyright and our ability to fact-check.
After several confirmed attacks, owl strike warning signs were installed in a park in Oregon. The signs were suggested by the Rachel Maddow Show as a way of warning potential joggers, and then taken up by the Parks and Recreation Department where the strikes are occurring.
Scandalized in many ways, including seeking to have emails stored on a government server deleted, Oregon governor John Kitzhaber is resigning his post.
The problem of an independent bookstore closing, supposedly brought about by minimum wage laws that made it unprofitable. These are competing issues - the bookstore is being eaten by conglomerates, yet the workers deserve a fair wage for their labor. The store eventually decided to pilot a patronage model, selling memberships to cover cost.
A Kickstarter project intended to provide stock images of people of color or outside the Hollywood standard of "attractive white people. Even if just used for book covers, I can see a lot more authors getting to see their vision, rather than having to avoid it.
Probability is a branch of maths that often makes very little sense compared to what should be right. For example the maths behind the Monty Hall Problem are so counterintuitive that Marilyn vos Savant received a deluge of "corrections" when she initially gave the correct answer. One could make a case that at least some of this was people wallowing in the idea of being able to take a prominent woman columnist down a peg, or being able to say that the really smart person was wrong, and that the fusion of the two (Marilyn vos Savant is undeniably a very intelligent woman) is what generated the large volume of patronizing corrections and comments. Were it to happen today, I would guess that Marilyn vos Savant and Anita Sarkeesian would be BFFs from shared experiences.
Columnist says "men do not have a uniform identity of masculinity anymore", says it's best to forge one's own path, in the context of talking about various forms of identity that are either popular now or are giving way to new fads of masculinity. The good part is that the column acknowledges the basic impossibility of many of those popular forms, much as has been foisted on women, and sees this confusion as a natural conclusion of feminism - the changing definition of what female roles are and the expansion of possible identities naturally changes what masculinity is as well, even if others believe such change must be stopped.
Exhortations for people to leave their comfort zones ignores the reality for most people that already includes sufficient fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Those who truly would need pushing outside their comfort are those with the means to make life more comfortable for many others. The rest of us are still waiting for the time where we can be authentically ourselves.
The hero's journey as an example of Tropes Are Not Good. Contrast with Afrofuturism as an example of Tropes Are Not Bad, and especially so here as The hegemony of white men in science fiction is being slowly knocked over in favor of increasing diversity of writers. Not necessarily at the biggest publishers yet, but it's getting easier to sidestep them anyway. And, as it turns out, due to a shared interest in imagining worlds that were better than the one lived in right now, science fiction and QUILTBAG activism were often able to work together, with the overt interest in science fiction providing the necessary cover.
"Human Resources" devalues humans and puts time-sucking processes that demand every worker justify their continued existence in charge of a company.
The United Kingdom's practical realities of taxation are much like the United States - disproportionate burden on the poorest, not being at full capacity, and the rich doing the most of the tax dodging.
Relentless enforced optimism is a sucker's bet, but there are more than a few powerful forces that want you to be unable to express anything but optimism.
The Regents in charge of UCLA are looking to get rid of a garden gifted to them under an agreement that the University would maintain the garden in perpetuity, citing cost of maintenance as too much. We note that going back on promises does not engender good will...or donations to those places that renege.
The city of Vanport, Oregon, from origins as a place to stash black people to its destruction from dike failure, to the march of gentrification proving to new more adept at displacing the poor and minorities than any redlining practice ever did.
In a world of more people competing for less resources, certain drugs are being used as cognitive enhancers, even if they don't really enhance cognition.
Columnist laments the death of traditional publishing when compared to serial publishing apps like Wattpad. We, over here, are whistling and pointing to all the literary magazines in existence, the crowdfunded projects like "Foo Destroys Bar" and the gentle reminder that parts of the literary canon such as Sherlock Holmes were published as serial instalments initially, only to be given a codex form later.
The A.V. club examines the usage, prevalence and wisdom of the "Will They, Won't They" trope, although they title it as being about the fan practice of (relation)shipping. Shippers are one influence on showrunners, who indulge or reject them at their peril.
Why aren't we taking children's books seriously as literature, asks columnist, not realizing that children's books are automatically considered lesser because children are considered lesser, excepting to parents (limited), teachers, librarians, and those with an interest in censoring literature. While authors of books for kids may go on for a long time afterward, their work is not going to be put up for prizes in literature because the prize definitions of literature and what makes an excellent children's book are often opposed.
Sometimes a prolonged silence between books is good, often times not, columnist writes, then wonders where all the women comeback authors are, speculating perhaps lowered ambitions or a decreased tolerance for a return after bad behavior. More likely is the same phenomenon that affects women who would otherwise climb the corporate ladder - being forced to choose between career and family, being seen first as a dabbler and then a fad, but never seriously, and the general discounting of women writing outside genres considered to be "appropriate" for them.
Unsurprisingly, more than a few men choose to use dating sites as their preferred platform to insist that there are no women suitable for them. They're right, but not for the reasons those men think.
Try spending a year reading authors that are not white, straight, cis men. This is not a thing about staying in comfort zones. Reading good fiction by people who aren't like you is going to push you well outside any comfort zone, but it will also mean you get exposed to really good fiction outside your normal orbits. It might also be a good exercise to go back and read reviews of the books after you're fine reading them - there are a lot of implicit biases toward white and Western culture, which makes books with diverse casts and settings to have to work harder to satisfy those reviewers. Your public library should be able to help you with this pursuit - if their collection and recommendation staff aren't able to fill your requests, that represents a potential bias on their part as well, in the selection and retention process. Not that it's easy to select well - competing interests, ideas, and budgets make selection difficult for the now, much less for the long term, in deciding what should stay and what should go in any library collection.
An attempt at encouraging analysis and discussion of fanfiction started as a student-run class at Berkeley... well, backfired spectacularly. Link is to a good jumping-off point, from whence one can see a large amount of the reaction. To wit, students were asked to read from a list of fiction and leave constructive-criticism type comments on the fic. The authors of the fic were not informed of their inclusion, and the idea of leaving those types of criticisms apparently violated several large fandom norms about not leaving critical remarks unless solicited on a fic's comments. As one might guess, Wheaton's Law applies here, too.
And also it applies to lawyer behavior, but you at least can ask your counsel to not be such a dick.
The redesigned GED is experiencing an incredible decline in those taking and passing the test, which appears to be related to the move to an online-only test, the increased cost, and the college-preparatory nature of the test. Considering that the test is used as a substitute high school certificate for those that dropped out or entered the prison system before graduation, so that they can find employment, there's a lot of pushback against orienting the test toward those intending to go to college, and testing on skills that are not likely to be used for the kids off work being sought by those who want the GED. I suspect there's an underlying issue here about poverty, school quality, and things like the school-to-prison pipeline, where there really is no safety net underneath someone who, for whatever reason, doesn't complete enough schooling to get into "society". And in places where that help is most desperately needed, there isn't enough support to hire a library director at anything more than minimum wage.
The suggestion that the only things that need to be in your life are those things that give you joy - all others are to be shed, which very much insists, intentionally or no, on a very Spartan lifestyle, in terms of objects. The Toast understands this and takes it to the most logical of conclusions.
Writing things down can have practical and spiritual benefits, not just for memory aid, but also for working through things and keeping a record of what's happened and how it has been dealt with. There's a reason I'm impressed with people who give others access to their writing.
Coins thrown into the Thames River as wishes for love.
Technology opens with pre-installed adware on Lenovo computers that allows anyone to spoof a secure website without the computer raising a peep, because of the self-signed security certificate injecting itself and representing the website as secure, instead of using the actual security certificate. Once you have the password to the certificate, you can exploit that certificate to make any website appear genuine and secure.
Open Source software can be vulnerable to security issues as well, including on phones, where many of the keys for custom software are the test or debug keys that are well-known. Plus, if you want great software from other sources, you have to let all unknown sources install, potentially.
And then there's the fact that many of us are making decisions about the sharing and use of our data without full knowledge of how it will be used, since "free" things generally means giving up data in one form or another, which is then added to the storehouse of data associated with us.
Making better everything requires thinking about accessibility. For example, it's highly likely that people consuming visual data will have someone who cannot perceive the full range of colors. The fixes on that, once you're aware, are pretty easy. Even better, though, is include as many combinations of people using assistive technologies in your design and your test cases, baked right into their user stories along with the other things that need testing, so that it does being about "people with disabilities" and "normal people" and is instead just about "our users".
Library and librarian knowledge and information needs to find its way to the open Web, so that it can then be mashed up and remixed in ways that make new knowledge, including all of that useful Reader Advisory knowledge. Which means taking advantage of the cover provided by frameworks and policy statements to empower users to not only function within structures when needed, but to be able to question and dismantle those structures and their power bargains.
Also, teaching source evaluation to students by starting with the familiar and moving to the authoritative.
There are many, many ways of streaming movies and television that are free, if you're willing to sit ads, and some of those services offer subscriptions to get rid of the ads and add HD.
On the practicalities of integrating Wikipedia editing into one's academic coursework. On the same resource, advice on how to edit while female that amounts to basically, "Don't be female-coded, don't give out any information, and ignore the bullies as best you can". This is also offered as advice on how to close the gender gap on Wikipedia as well. Perhaps I am missing something, but if you want to be showing that you're closing the gender gap, then don't you need visible women who aren't being harassed, bullied, and run off the site? The advice is good for participating in an environment that's toxic, but that shouldn't really be good enough for anyone.
Starting a just space is more possible if you think to be inclusive and to give people appropriate outs at the beginning.
It's very tough to determine what it would cost to have every possible journal resource in any given library, because the quantity to buy and the cost of the buy are both unknown and somewhat unknowable.
Very old cheese.
The use of computer tomography on a statue of a meditating Buddha has revealed scrolls of writing placed where organs were removed during the mummification process that provided the base for the eventual statue.
Last for tonight, chocolates intended to represent the onomatopeia of texture, Warp Zone Prints, making geeky cookie cutters, a person who builds temples that are meant to be burned, a company that will make plush versions of pets, based on photographs, The use of mood lines in artwork, with movie posters and other examples of each line, and a person who wanted to build a community for living after the end times and found he wasn't suited for it.
And the best librarians in fiction, what life is like for security personnel at a public library, and the need to build software (and libraries and collections) that encourage wanderlust, sharing, documentation, and the building of a diverse community. And here's the links and supporting information for that talk.
Much consternation cometh from renewed interest in Fifty Shades and its grafting of BDSM elements into a romance tale, but take care not to police literature choices by women, while at it. A lot of criticisms do or wring their hands about people taking the fantasy seriously as How It's Done.
Finland will join the Century of the Fruitbat in 2017.
The Impossible Missions Force, the Massive Dynamic family, the hobbits of the Shire, the True Organization XIII, the town of Springfield, the Planet Express team, the models that he photographed, and all the other subjects, too, the United States Army, Bruno Mars, the recipients of his poetry and wisdom, whether in his most famous role or not, all those who replicate his benediction, whether famous or not, and in whatever medium suited them best, those who identified with any of his characters, but especially those who saw a representation of themselves in him (a representation he was fully aware of and consciously used for good), and, of course, the crew of the Federation Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701-A, salute and welcome Leonard Nimoy, actor and great example of a human being, to the end of his journey of life at 83 years of age.
Photographs of abandoned locations, capturing moments in time otherwise long gone.
if you want to make progress in mental health issues, work on building the capacity and availability for those with mental issues to get help, as it's not that people aren't trying to get it, but that it isn't there for them. The system is designed to be incredibly difficult to access by those that need it, and measures are routinely proposed and enacted that punish those with mental issues and make it harder for them to get effective help.
Watercolor and ink makes cats on canvas that are strikingly realistic.
it is significantly less likely that a marijuana user will reach a lethal dose of their drug, especially when compared to alcohol.
Another Bush wants to be President. Which would be okay, I suppose, but for hiring a guy who regularly made sexist and homophobic tweets as the chief technology officer (he resigned, after trying to delete the evidence), and publishing thousands of unredacted emails of correspondence with Floridians to promote an upcoming book on the subject of how awesome a governor he is and how he'd make a great President. The featured comment strain when I read that article was a dick insisting that since nothing Jeb Bush did was illegal, nobody should be worked up about having their personal data put out in the open, and they should have known what would happen when they wrote. Which was missing the point, as usual - privacy is not just the technological means of keeping data secret, but a set of social norms where people who may have data agree not to disclose that data where it would hurt someone. So Wheaton's Law applies here.
The death of an aid worker taken hostage by the terror group operating in Syria and Iraq renews the commitment to the destruction of that group from the White House, regardless of the cost needed to achieve that goal. To that end, the President has officially requested that the Congress give him authorization to use military force against said terror group.
Three Muslims, shot by their neighbor over what is officially a parking dispute, but what may turn out to be hate motivations, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The shooter owned a significant number of weapons and ammunition, which is not inherently wrong, but suggests a clue to the ideology of the shooter.
Alabama joins the Century of the Fruitbat...or would be, except the state's highest judge, Roy Moore, issued orders telling lower judges to ignore the federal court order. This is the same judge that refused to take down their Ten Commandments, was tossed out, and then re-elected to a higher court position.
The blizzard conditions are sufficiently tough in the Northeast United States that environmental waivers are being sought and granted to move excess snow into local bodies of water.
People have disabilities, regardless of what they use to accommodate them. So if they're not with their devices, it doesn't mean they're getting better. That said, it appears that we have too many people who think dead is preferable to disabled, and are willing to give parents a pass for killing their disabled children.
Am inquiry investigating whether NBC anchor Brian Williams exaggerated claims he has made about his time in Iraq and during national disasters had resulted in Mr. Williams removing himself temporarily from the job until the investigation is compete. Which is a sound thing to do - for an example of what not to do, we turn to fake news correspondent Bill O'Reilly, who uses exaggerations to try and leverage himself into positions of superiority and then levels attacks that encourage bad behavior against those that fact-check him. which only encourages other organizations to find more instances of his lies - regarding the witnessing of violence against nuns, or his lack of presence at the suicide of a person involved in the JFK assassination. And after the evidence he was hoping would exonerate him didn't, and the heat continued to build on his avoidance, well...nothing. No apology yet.
Author John Green went on an odyssey to try and discover whether a quote being used all over the place to promote a work of his actually was in his book. it wasn't, which meant plagiarism had unwittingly occurred, because everyone thought the quote was in the book. So there's an entire process there of finding the correct author and paying them for all the uses done so far. That the author needed an illegal version of his own work to digitally search it (as all legal copies contain DRM that prevents searching the text of the book) says a lot about the state of copyright and our ability to fact-check.
After several confirmed attacks, owl strike warning signs were installed in a park in Oregon. The signs were suggested by the Rachel Maddow Show as a way of warning potential joggers, and then taken up by the Parks and Recreation Department where the strikes are occurring.
Scandalized in many ways, including seeking to have emails stored on a government server deleted, Oregon governor John Kitzhaber is resigning his post.
The problem of an independent bookstore closing, supposedly brought about by minimum wage laws that made it unprofitable. These are competing issues - the bookstore is being eaten by conglomerates, yet the workers deserve a fair wage for their labor. The store eventually decided to pilot a patronage model, selling memberships to cover cost.
A Kickstarter project intended to provide stock images of people of color or outside the Hollywood standard of "attractive white people. Even if just used for book covers, I can see a lot more authors getting to see their vision, rather than having to avoid it.
Probability is a branch of maths that often makes very little sense compared to what should be right. For example the maths behind the Monty Hall Problem are so counterintuitive that Marilyn vos Savant received a deluge of "corrections" when she initially gave the correct answer. One could make a case that at least some of this was people wallowing in the idea of being able to take a prominent woman columnist down a peg, or being able to say that the really smart person was wrong, and that the fusion of the two (Marilyn vos Savant is undeniably a very intelligent woman) is what generated the large volume of patronizing corrections and comments. Were it to happen today, I would guess that Marilyn vos Savant and Anita Sarkeesian would be BFFs from shared experiences.
Columnist says "men do not have a uniform identity of masculinity anymore", says it's best to forge one's own path, in the context of talking about various forms of identity that are either popular now or are giving way to new fads of masculinity. The good part is that the column acknowledges the basic impossibility of many of those popular forms, much as has been foisted on women, and sees this confusion as a natural conclusion of feminism - the changing definition of what female roles are and the expansion of possible identities naturally changes what masculinity is as well, even if others believe such change must be stopped.
Exhortations for people to leave their comfort zones ignores the reality for most people that already includes sufficient fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Those who truly would need pushing outside their comfort are those with the means to make life more comfortable for many others. The rest of us are still waiting for the time where we can be authentically ourselves.
The hero's journey as an example of Tropes Are Not Good. Contrast with Afrofuturism as an example of Tropes Are Not Bad, and especially so here as The hegemony of white men in science fiction is being slowly knocked over in favor of increasing diversity of writers. Not necessarily at the biggest publishers yet, but it's getting easier to sidestep them anyway. And, as it turns out, due to a shared interest in imagining worlds that were better than the one lived in right now, science fiction and QUILTBAG activism were often able to work together, with the overt interest in science fiction providing the necessary cover.
"Human Resources" devalues humans and puts time-sucking processes that demand every worker justify their continued existence in charge of a company.
The United Kingdom's practical realities of taxation are much like the United States - disproportionate burden on the poorest, not being at full capacity, and the rich doing the most of the tax dodging.
Relentless enforced optimism is a sucker's bet, but there are more than a few powerful forces that want you to be unable to express anything but optimism.
The Regents in charge of UCLA are looking to get rid of a garden gifted to them under an agreement that the University would maintain the garden in perpetuity, citing cost of maintenance as too much. We note that going back on promises does not engender good will...or donations to those places that renege.
The city of Vanport, Oregon, from origins as a place to stash black people to its destruction from dike failure, to the march of gentrification proving to new more adept at displacing the poor and minorities than any redlining practice ever did.
In a world of more people competing for less resources, certain drugs are being used as cognitive enhancers, even if they don't really enhance cognition.
Columnist laments the death of traditional publishing when compared to serial publishing apps like Wattpad. We, over here, are whistling and pointing to all the literary magazines in existence, the crowdfunded projects like "Foo Destroys Bar" and the gentle reminder that parts of the literary canon such as Sherlock Holmes were published as serial instalments initially, only to be given a codex form later.
The A.V. club examines the usage, prevalence and wisdom of the "Will They, Won't They" trope, although they title it as being about the fan practice of (relation)shipping. Shippers are one influence on showrunners, who indulge or reject them at their peril.
Why aren't we taking children's books seriously as literature, asks columnist, not realizing that children's books are automatically considered lesser because children are considered lesser, excepting to parents (limited), teachers, librarians, and those with an interest in censoring literature. While authors of books for kids may go on for a long time afterward, their work is not going to be put up for prizes in literature because the prize definitions of literature and what makes an excellent children's book are often opposed.
Sometimes a prolonged silence between books is good, often times not, columnist writes, then wonders where all the women comeback authors are, speculating perhaps lowered ambitions or a decreased tolerance for a return after bad behavior. More likely is the same phenomenon that affects women who would otherwise climb the corporate ladder - being forced to choose between career and family, being seen first as a dabbler and then a fad, but never seriously, and the general discounting of women writing outside genres considered to be "appropriate" for them.
Unsurprisingly, more than a few men choose to use dating sites as their preferred platform to insist that there are no women suitable for them. They're right, but not for the reasons those men think.
Try spending a year reading authors that are not white, straight, cis men. This is not a thing about staying in comfort zones. Reading good fiction by people who aren't like you is going to push you well outside any comfort zone, but it will also mean you get exposed to really good fiction outside your normal orbits. It might also be a good exercise to go back and read reviews of the books after you're fine reading them - there are a lot of implicit biases toward white and Western culture, which makes books with diverse casts and settings to have to work harder to satisfy those reviewers. Your public library should be able to help you with this pursuit - if their collection and recommendation staff aren't able to fill your requests, that represents a potential bias on their part as well, in the selection and retention process. Not that it's easy to select well - competing interests, ideas, and budgets make selection difficult for the now, much less for the long term, in deciding what should stay and what should go in any library collection.
An attempt at encouraging analysis and discussion of fanfiction started as a student-run class at Berkeley... well, backfired spectacularly. Link is to a good jumping-off point, from whence one can see a large amount of the reaction. To wit, students were asked to read from a list of fiction and leave constructive-criticism type comments on the fic. The authors of the fic were not informed of their inclusion, and the idea of leaving those types of criticisms apparently violated several large fandom norms about not leaving critical remarks unless solicited on a fic's comments. As one might guess, Wheaton's Law applies here, too.
And also it applies to lawyer behavior, but you at least can ask your counsel to not be such a dick.
The redesigned GED is experiencing an incredible decline in those taking and passing the test, which appears to be related to the move to an online-only test, the increased cost, and the college-preparatory nature of the test. Considering that the test is used as a substitute high school certificate for those that dropped out or entered the prison system before graduation, so that they can find employment, there's a lot of pushback against orienting the test toward those intending to go to college, and testing on skills that are not likely to be used for the kids off work being sought by those who want the GED. I suspect there's an underlying issue here about poverty, school quality, and things like the school-to-prison pipeline, where there really is no safety net underneath someone who, for whatever reason, doesn't complete enough schooling to get into "society". And in places where that help is most desperately needed, there isn't enough support to hire a library director at anything more than minimum wage.
The suggestion that the only things that need to be in your life are those things that give you joy - all others are to be shed, which very much insists, intentionally or no, on a very Spartan lifestyle, in terms of objects. The Toast understands this and takes it to the most logical of conclusions.
Writing things down can have practical and spiritual benefits, not just for memory aid, but also for working through things and keeping a record of what's happened and how it has been dealt with. There's a reason I'm impressed with people who give others access to their writing.
Coins thrown into the Thames River as wishes for love.
Technology opens with pre-installed adware on Lenovo computers that allows anyone to spoof a secure website without the computer raising a peep, because of the self-signed security certificate injecting itself and representing the website as secure, instead of using the actual security certificate. Once you have the password to the certificate, you can exploit that certificate to make any website appear genuine and secure.
Open Source software can be vulnerable to security issues as well, including on phones, where many of the keys for custom software are the test or debug keys that are well-known. Plus, if you want great software from other sources, you have to let all unknown sources install, potentially.
And then there's the fact that many of us are making decisions about the sharing and use of our data without full knowledge of how it will be used, since "free" things generally means giving up data in one form or another, which is then added to the storehouse of data associated with us.
Making better everything requires thinking about accessibility. For example, it's highly likely that people consuming visual data will have someone who cannot perceive the full range of colors. The fixes on that, once you're aware, are pretty easy. Even better, though, is include as many combinations of people using assistive technologies in your design and your test cases, baked right into their user stories along with the other things that need testing, so that it does being about "people with disabilities" and "normal people" and is instead just about "our users".
Library and librarian knowledge and information needs to find its way to the open Web, so that it can then be mashed up and remixed in ways that make new knowledge, including all of that useful Reader Advisory knowledge. Which means taking advantage of the cover provided by frameworks and policy statements to empower users to not only function within structures when needed, but to be able to question and dismantle those structures and their power bargains.
Also, teaching source evaluation to students by starting with the familiar and moving to the authoritative.
There are many, many ways of streaming movies and television that are free, if you're willing to sit ads, and some of those services offer subscriptions to get rid of the ads and add HD.
On the practicalities of integrating Wikipedia editing into one's academic coursework. On the same resource, advice on how to edit while female that amounts to basically, "Don't be female-coded, don't give out any information, and ignore the bullies as best you can". This is also offered as advice on how to close the gender gap on Wikipedia as well. Perhaps I am missing something, but if you want to be showing that you're closing the gender gap, then don't you need visible women who aren't being harassed, bullied, and run off the site? The advice is good for participating in an environment that's toxic, but that shouldn't really be good enough for anyone.
Starting a just space is more possible if you think to be inclusive and to give people appropriate outs at the beginning.
It's very tough to determine what it would cost to have every possible journal resource in any given library, because the quantity to buy and the cost of the buy are both unknown and somewhat unknowable.
Very old cheese.
The use of computer tomography on a statue of a meditating Buddha has revealed scrolls of writing placed where organs were removed during the mummification process that provided the base for the eventual statue.
Last for tonight, chocolates intended to represent the onomatopeia of texture, Warp Zone Prints, making geeky cookie cutters, a person who builds temples that are meant to be burned, a company that will make plush versions of pets, based on photographs, The use of mood lines in artwork, with movie posters and other examples of each line, and a person who wanted to build a community for living after the end times and found he wasn't suited for it.
And the best librarians in fiction, what life is like for security personnel at a public library, and the need to build software (and libraries and collections) that encourage wanderlust, sharing, documentation, and the building of a diverse community. And here's the links and supporting information for that talk.
