“Use your gifts and your talents to greatest possible effect while you can. Spread joy wherever possible. Laugh at jokes. Tell jokes. Make puns and bugger the embuggerances. Read books. Read my books. You might like them. You might find something else you like even more than them. Look for these things in life.

Question authority. Champion good causes. Speak out against injustice. Do not tolerate bullies or bigots or racists or anti-intellectuals or the narrow-minded. Use your education to challenge them. Broaden their perspectives. Make the world you interface with a happier place.

These are your choices. Choices you have been fortunate to have been given, so don’t waste them while you have them. Don’t look back in years to come and wish you had grasped a fleeting opportunity. Grasp it now with both hands, Live. Strive. Love.”

from A Little Advice for Life taken from ‘Terry Pratchett: from birth to death, a writer.’

—Sir Terry Pratchett; April 28, 1948 – March 12, 2015

One of the greatest compliments I've ever received is that I resemble Sam Vimes.

Mind how you go.

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

bonus it ALSO fills that dopamine hit of in-person shopping. “oh I didn’t go in looking for this but hmm, I’m tempted… I can’t resist… oh ho ho I have made some irresponsible decisions at the library today [carrying my stack of ten random books]” and then it doesn’t even matter if you don’t like them because a) free b) you’re gonna give them back anyway

Librarian here! Please please please please PLEASE do this! We don’t have any way to know if you read them, and we don’t care! We’re happy to see those books go out because that helps our stats. And that affects how much money we can get.

So grab that silly paperback romance, and maybe this new YA fantasy, oh and check for the new movies too! And don’t forget to check Libby and hoopla for music and ebooks and e-audio.

#i love that on the check out reciepts for my library it also says how much the books would have cost to buy#because there are days where ive checked out so much it would have been $100-$200#so i really get that big purchase feeling and didnt spend anything via @mossiestpiglet

Yes!!! And you can ask the librarians to look up how much you've saved since signing up! Since I moved to Florida in 2016, I've saved something like $1300 by using our library system for books and dvds!

@baytal.fann

"Did you know that the art of stained glass originated in the Muslim world?

In the eighth century, skilled glassmakers in Egypt made a groundbreaking discovery—the technique of painting glass with metallic stain. This innovation led to the creation of transparent stains, colored with copper (producing red or brown) and silver (resulting in yellow), which became distinctive features of early Islamic glassware in Egypt and the Near East.

Fast forward to the 13th century, when decorators in the Syrian region achieved a significant milestone by applying enamels on glass on a large scale. Over the following two centuries, Syrian and Egyptian craftsmen crafted a diverse array of glass objects in various shapes and sizes, adorned with brilliant polychrome ornamentation. These items served practical purposes such as hanging lamps for illuminating mosque interiors, as well as functional vessels and other useful items, along with awe-inspiring display pieces.

In the later Middle Ages, European admiration for Islamic luxury glasses soared due to their exotic aesthetics and advanced technical craftsmanship. Some even believed these objects to be relics from the Holy Land. Fragments of Islamic glass, often adorned with gilding and enameling, have been discovered in archaeological excavations across Europe, while intact pieces grace cathedral treasuries. Notably, excavations have unveiled evidence of the exportation of Islamic glass vessels to China, highlighting the widespread influence and global trade connections of this innovative art form."

occasional posts from users

reblog if you make occasional posts

Sometimes I still hear my voice

Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.

official library post

i have some questions yet i find myself too afraid to seek answers

dear god not the tumbleweeds

completely justified response if you haven't encountered tumbleweeds firsthand (because most of us are only familiar with the loony tunes version) but in reality....

so the thing about tumbleweeds is they are in fact incredibly invasive. they cause millions of dollars of damage every year, and create serious traffic accidents and agricultural disruption. (they're also highly flammable, because of course they are.) the town in question was piled so deep, residents had to call 911 after being trapped in their homes. bulldozers and emergency workers had to be brought. it was wild.

tumbleweeds are also heavier than they look--they're made of wood after all. and they're big (most varieties top out at 4 feet, but there are larger ones that can reach up to 6 feet across. you know how the Emu War sounds absurd and fictional until you realize emus are 6 solid feet of clawed, beaked, avian dinosauric FUCK YOU? yeah, this is like that

in summary, tumbleweeds are thorny, pollen-filled, fire-spreading assholes (and they can spread radiation from old nuclear sites), which means we are dealing roaming packs of stabby, poisonous, radioactive fireballs of death that can appear out of nowhere coming at you top speed down the middle of the highway!

the more you know :D

in conclusion, please have this photo of the only tumbleweed i have any fucking fondness for (the South African Brunsvigia bosmaniae), solely due to the fact it's fucking PINK

is it as evil as all its cousins? probably! do i care? that just makes it sexier! and the bulbs contain hallucinogenic properties, which makes perfect sense from a single glance:

oh GOOD tags: #we have tumbleweeds here where i live#and one of them politely used the crosswalk to cross the street the other day

(For balance one has to assume the protesters are not ones you would feel inclined to join in with)

corvid ass website

I know I’ve said this before but vampires

therefore I am in dire need of a heist film where a group of vampires band together to steal back their old stuff from museums

Oceans 1100 AD

Very interested in the hardest part of this beign the vampires trying to trick someone into granting them permission to enter the premises earlier in the day

I feel like this has several simple solutions!

(all ideas shared on this blog are public domain, feel free to go nuts. you can find more story ideas like this on my ko-fi)

STRETCHING SIAMESE CAT 

by Lee Sangsoo

The creator of these images is Matt Bernstein, one of my favorite educators online -- he makes incredibly clear, forceful collections of information like this one. He's queer, has fantastic nails, and has done a lot of education recently from his perspective as a Jewish person on why supporting Palestine is so important. Here's a link to this post, which he created for World AIDS Day on 12/1/23.

Fantasy stories should have more "what do you mean you don't do X" things in compare and contrast of cultures. Like the differences between peoples aren't the stuff they show off as "These Are Our Culture :)" things, fucking everyone has food and music and folk tales, but the things they've always assumed that everyone has, and are baffled to discover that they don't.

The people who are always barefoot are baffled that humans don't have a wash basin at their front door where people can wash their feet before stepping inside?? Do they just walk in with their dirty feet? The fuck do you mean you take your shoes off?

Humans don't have small baby-sized spellbooks for toddlers who just learned to read, so they can safely learn to practice tiny cute and harmless, age-appropriate magic spells before progressing to more mature and demanding spells? What, do they just throw teenagers completely unprepared into the arcane - hold the fuck up, is that why human sorceror mortality is so fucking high?

Dwarves who have always wondered why the entrance to human residences is so fucking big, why do you need to take up such a large area for a door that's just there to lead downstairs to the underground halls? Are the timber walls really as thick as a human is tall? What for? And once one of them gets invited to a human house to stay and rest, nobody ever fucking believes her: That's not the entrance, that's the whole fucking house. 100% of the human house is aboveground, there is no tunnel to the underground levels. They might have a single storage room down there, but the aboveground section is so fucking big because that's the whole house.

This post was brought to you by: People who butter their bread and who had no idea that there are people who put mayonnaise on their bread, and people who put mayo on their bread and had no idea about people who put butter on their bread discovering that the other kind of people exist.

“Doors!”

“Beg pardon?”  I had half expected Elunis to react to Port Johar with politely concealed disgust.  It was, after all, a human city.  And Elunis was a Silver Elf—they didn’t live in tree cities like most elves, but in palatial crystal cities that few ever see.

Elunis kept surprising me.  “Doors!” she said excitedly.  “I never knew so much could be done with doors!”

I looked around.  We were in Temple Square.  Granted, the temple’s doors were bronze, decorated with a relief of the gods doing various godly things (with “godly” definitely not meaning good, wise, or chaste) and the bank’s doors were high and forbidding, but still—”What do you mean?”

Elunis blinked at me with enormous gold-tinted eyes.  Her skin was the color of old bronze and her clothes were green silk and her eyes were that completely unhuman color, and sooner or later someone was going to dip into her pockets just out of curiosity, because she stood out.  A lot.  “Well.  Um.  In Tir Celes the builders try to conceal the doors.  They’re considered, I don’t know, gauche.  A flaw in the clean line of the structure.  But here, the doors are decorative, they’re an integral part of the design, they’re—”  She twirled.  “They’re beautiful!  I have to tell the people back home all about doors.”

I looked at her.  “Wait . . . is that why you keep finding secret doors and passages, when we get into a dungeon?  Because your culture just bloody hides them all?”i

Elunis blinked again.  “Those were supposed to be secret?”

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

Vienna Teng wrote this song in response to witnessing that weekend. It's one of my favorites.

The Bird Place That Was is redeeming itself a bit more today.

It's. HAPPENING.

(July 2nd 2024)

#I can't wait! #Tamora Pierce