silveradept | A lack of tabs in my current space

Let us begin with the New York Times deigning to give column space to the plight of libraries and librarians expected to be a full-services social work team and location, but without any of the funding, expertise, training, or protection that is needed to accompany this unfunded, inexplicit, mandate. I'm unsurprised that Mychal Threets left the library profession, and I can almost guarantee that he not only had to deal with all of the social work requirements, and the precarities of getting funding and continuing the library's existence without organized harrassment campaigns or hostile boards/government officials, but also the casual racism on display against so many library workers of color and probably more than a few directed racisms at him.

Even in the somewhat calmer library I work at in the Dragon Conspiracy Territory still has its share of people having bad mental health days, people who don't believe that a black woman has any competence to help with anything, people who enjoy being rude to library staff and believe there are no staff, save maybe the seniormost manager, who can tell them what to do. I've had to have conversations with people who want to get rid of some of my books because they believed accurate depictions of people's lives were offensive to their god. And there are a fair number of people who want to complain that everything in their lives is worse than it was before and the machines are out to get them.

And yes, there's also the compassion fatigue, because there's not enough to go around to fix all the problems, and often times, the resources for the problems are concentrated in places where it will take a full day to get to those places, work through the applications, and then come back, and that assumes the bus runs near them and they can spare the money for fare and navigate the system themselves. And that either they can use a computer or there's someone there who can walk them through using a computer and an online form to put all of that data in. Most librarians would like to set down the burdens of being social workers and go back to the business of being people who recommend good materials, put on programming, help people discern bullshit from reality, and occasionally helping people with tricky research questions to find useful things. But that would require massive amounts of infusions into social programs, and also probably a program or two that not only helped people get devices, but trained them on their use and how to do important tasks with them. (And at least some amount of spotting spam, phishing, and bullshit, possibly in conjunction with a library.) We'd probably have to start by removing the class of person called "billionaire" from the world by confiscating their excess wealth for redistribution.

Women who know things are often cast as dangerous because of what they know, or what they seek to know, in horror and mystery films. Because that knowledge makes them act outside patriarchal norms (and often are able to see the patriarchy for what it is.) Men, of course, get the benefit of being actors in their own narratives, and heroic actors at that. Women do not.

asakiyume offers two excerpts from an introduction that talk about how oral traditions are more properly mnemonic traditions, and it is only a society that believes in the supremacy of writing that discounts the mnemonics and the need to listen with more than the ears. But I suspect it's different than the "whole-body listening" taught in schools that is more about suppressing the natural impulses of children than about listening in ways that will be understood and remembered.

Exhibitions at the National Archives Museum of the U.S. are under fire for alleged instructions to remove or change several figures of color from a proposed photo booth, to remove treaties made with Native nations, to avoid the photographs of Japanese concentration camps, and to replace things like patents for birth control with patents for bump stocks.

A very nice bright spot of news: The company that owns satirical news site The Onion is the winner of the bankruptcy auction for the assets of Alex Jones' company, Free Speech Productions, including the InfoWars name and assets, which will allow The Onion to remake the site into a parody of its previous self and ensure that mockery follows Alex Jones for the rest of his life. Also, the sale of the assets will be used to help pay the judgment against Jones for the defamation that he was found liable for regarding the Sandy Hook school shooting. More information from the CEO of Global Tetrahedron and why adding InfoWars to their portfolio is exactly what they want. (It's The Onion, doing their satire, but still, it's funny.)

Or, at least, that's what we were hoping for, but apparently the other bidder in the auction has objected to the win from the Onion, and now the question of who actually gets to bid and win will have to be fought out in the courts. Nuts.

A thing that may be helpful in evaluating your own situation, and possibly the situation of the people around you: the Advanced Bonewits' Cult Danger Evaluation Framework. Useful for evaluating the difference between an unusual entity and one that is dangerous. I suspect many of the people in the United States who didn't think they had to worry will start having those nervous laughs as they recognize what has happened to them. That said, there are a lot of the incoming administration's supporters who are quite content to either let him run over the institutions and the governent or who are encouraging him to do so, so it'll be a while before they come around to the realization that the leopard has always been eating their face. When representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked for why some people voted for her and for the Republican presidential candidate, the responses that came back indicated the success of messaging over facts. The messages that resonated appeared to be a persistent belief that the Republican could do well with the economy and that he was a necessary outsider. There was a substantive objection about the handling of Palestinians, but also a belief that the Republican was anti-war, while the Democrats were in favor of it, which is another triumph of messaging over facts.

Lisa Borders at McSweeneys has accurately captured the attitude of many people who voted for the Republican, but expect that vote not to cause any kind of actual rift or change in friendship status, because, well, not concerned about the leopards.

Author James Davis Nicoll makes some recommendations while talking about careers that may be suitable for after the end of the world.

The Archive Of Our Own is soliciting comments on proposed changes to the Terms of Service.

jesse_the_k offers commentary on AO3 choosing not to include new warnings in their latest Terms of Service revision.

beatrice_otter examines shortcomings of how AO3 is handling RPF, and specifically, RPF meant as part of harrassment campaigns.

If we want to talk about a consent model, puberty should be considered something that needs consent, so that someone doesn't have to get traumatized and violated and rendered vulnerable for further violation by going through a non-consensual puberty. Also wound into this is all the ways that cis people insisting they know what trans people want or how to care for trans people makes the trauma worse and provokes many of the terrible ways that people who are being un-personed try to live (or avoid trying to live) with it.

Alicce Wong on seeking pleasure of body, even in a body that is medicalized, is cyborg, is slowly losing the abilities and functions that it once had. And pleasure of mind, too, but in this particular thing, it's about pleasure of body and an explicit aggravation at the ways that society does not expect the disabled to be sexual, to be pleasure-seeking, to want to have good experiences like the able-bodied.

Rest is still an integral component to recovering from SARS-CoV-2, even though it is far easier for some people to take the necessary amounts of rest than others. And especially because it seems like you're still resting for far longer than you need to, but the rest up front can help keep away the chronic or long-haul problems down the road.

The state of Texas continues to kill women and children by preventing the women from being saved when the children will not longer be able to live. And the change in politics produces a rush of people trying to stockpile their birth control options and their hormone treatments, in advance of the possibility that Comstock Laws or other such restrictions will be put in place with the change in administration.

Racist text messages directing black students to report to the nearest plantation came out in force after the election, underscoring just how much the people who voted for white supremacy feel unafraid to express it, now that they believe the mechanisms of law and government will no longer bind them or punish them for doing so.

Now that Project 2025 is much more likely to be the playbook put to use, no matter how much the incoming administrator denies he knows anything about it, it's worth pointing out Project 2025 intends to make sure the state is funding private education for the rich and little to no education for the poors, to remove protections for vulnerable students and allow for greater latitude of censorship, and to dismantle what collective bargaining ability teachers have. And that's also with the threat that if a teacher or a librarian has any queer material in their collections, that teacher or librarian should be prosecuted for peddling porn to children and required to register as a sex offender.

The use of surveillance technology, matched with image recognition algorithms tuned to matching faces, allows police to identify protesters and other people they wish to harrass or detain more easily. And like so many other such intrusions, they are sold to a public as a good that will allow for the quicker identification of criminals or other people painted as threats.

The New York Times Guild had the tech workers on strike, and because they were asking us not to play the games at the Times or use the cooking sections during the strike, they've created strike-related alternatives for us instead. Fair contracts are a good reason to have a Wordle streak go up in smoke, but also, did you know that you can donload the entirety of the non-NYT Worlde as a single web page and then put it wherever you like? Including statistics-keeping, and importing and exporting your data from the standalone version, so that you can keep a streak going without crossing a picket line.

A message in a bottle in the wall of a lighthouse, recovered during an inspection that surfaced it.

The National Park Service Warns Us Not To Lick The Psychedelic Toad, a poem by Carla Sofia Ferreira in relation to the kinds of warnings that the US National Park Service often has to put out about how to interact with the wild.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources puts out a traditional "permission slip" for those who wish to skip out on work or school for the first day of hunting season.

The ways in which food has become a signal for fascists to virtue signal to each other, which is as much about how the food is prepared as it is the food itself. A lot of that signaling, as noted, is wrapped up in "I choose the more dangerous thing because it is a sign of my fitness as a human to consume the dangerous thing. Those of you who consume differently are weak (and unmanly, usually.)"

In technology, Spending a day with the people who make, place, stock, re-stock, and buy from automated vending machines.

A report detailing toolkits designed around infection of USB drives so that they could then be used to exfiltrate data stored on air-gapped (without external network connections) systems. The report suggests the team or teams involved in the creation of these tools are likely funded by state actors. What we take from it, among other things, is taht computers that are useful are computers that are hackable.

A plant that supplies nearly sixty percent of intravenous fluid manufacture in the United States has restarted its main production line, with temporary bridging used to remove stock in the factory and to make it possible for the lines to begin working again, assisted with state and federal resources.

Delta Airlines and Crowdstrike have decided to continue entangling themselves in legal battles, as Delta tries to blame Crowdstrike for their outages and Crowdstrike tries to prove that Delta screwed themselves.

A reminder to please use the scrollbar for its intended function, and to leave it both visible and manipulatable. The accessibility gains from having the visible scrollbar are more than whatever visual aesthetic penalty you feel you take by having them.

Last for tonight, Scholars finding their own community, their own community's struggles, and a possible promise of acceptance and authenticity in the story of Jacob receiving Isaac's blesssing, the promise that both the trans community and the disabled community will find places to be authentic and to participate fully in a society that doesn't accept cruel and unjust systems as simply the way the world works.

And the attendees of a cat convention in Seattle, Washington.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)