Ah, a nice leisurely afternoon. Time to log on to tumblr and look at my completely-manageable activity page, which has surely not changed much in the 12 hours since I last saw it

um

what

Anyway I guess this seems as good a time as any to introduce myself to the new folks.

I'm Kayt, an academic library worker, night lurker, and person who was unironically described by a fellow librarian as a vampire. I blog about libraries and communication and adhd and whatever leisure I'm enjoying and also really basic job/resume tips because I hire college students and see some really interesting choices sometimes.

I have a rabbit named Momiji Hasenpfeffer and a garden full of garlic (and a guide somewhere in my blog about how you can also have a garden full of garlic) and a browser full of tabs that I am absolutely going to finish reading one day.

So glad to finally see some momentum building to push back against ebook pricing models for libraries. I wish it didn't take huge libraries throwing around "we have millions of dollars" to give us any hope of change, but such is life.

I was in charge of ebook and e-audio purchasing for a small library several years ago, and can remember when they started phasing out their "one copy/one user" perpetual licensing model for popular titles. It seems the leasing model has only gotten more predatory since I left that role. Back in my day we could choose to pay a little less (but still a lot, maybe $30) for the metered access licenses, and the OC-OU licenses were the really extortionate ones but hey, as long as they continue to host that title on their platform your patrons can access it.

i need “Happier than a necromancer in a natural history museum” to become a known phrase immediately

@the-tao-of-fandom: #sir if you touch the fossils exhibit i will personally kill you

“most exhibits at natural history museums are casts or reproductions to prevent damage from people touching them” factoid actualy statistical error. average damage single person touching genuine articles does is negligible. Necromancies Georg,

me trying to convince myself that the whole spectrum of human emotions is a good and necessary thing to feel even if its not comfortable while im actively experiencing emotions that make me feel like my bones are being dissolved in acid

Yet another selection of some of the better names I've come across in Regency era newspapers recently.

The most "bitch you live like this?" moment is when I go to someone else's house and all their knives are dull

He's just sitting there... ✨menacingly✨

Please enjoy meeting our resident Slowly Melting Wax Nixon Head, he lives in the California History Room and he does not have eyes.

I think I am "shadowbanned." How do I check to see if this is the case?

Got a repliy from @okayto letting me know that there was a message in my askbox, but when I go there, it's invisible, so that's not working either.

Then let's try a reblog! (Link on my own blog too)

I can see your posts on my dash, but nothing from you ever shows up on my activity page anymore (it used to, a couple years ago). And when you reblog and add comments or tags, those don't show up in the post notes at all, either. So something is definitely catching you in a filter (wrongly).

Golden Key tiny book charm, Feb 2024.

All my other tiny book charms except my first one were intended as gifts, and I decided it was about time to make one with words for myself. It includes some of my favorite odds and ends, including some poems, short stories, excerpts from novels. I nicknamed the project The Golden Key after the first story I picked, a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm collection.

One of the librarians has been sneakily removing books from the snowman to make it slowly melt over the last couple months, and he’s finally gone. I only got a couple pictures of the process, but the later stages are hilarious

I am SICK and TIRED of seeing so much hate towards Al! Al hasn't done ANYTHING to hurt ANYONE! Al is harmless!

But I can already hear the Al haters out there!

"Al isn't original!" No shit, Sherlock! That's what we love the most about Al.

"People aren't supposed to look like that!" That sounds like a problem between you and God, and frankly, plenty of people like the way Al looks.

"Al is just too WEIRD!" Have you ever thought that you might be to NORMAL to actually appreciate Al?

I think you all need to apologize to Al right now!

APOLOGIZE TO HIM

APOLOGIZE TO WEIRD AL RIGHT NOW!

This post is dangerous on the site notorious for having zero reading comprehension

Inspired by a Misktanoic University Library post except they left out one crucial group

I'm kind of at a point where the "queer spaces" i feel safest in are the ones that have a pet cishet dude or two hanging around

When a space cares a lot about making sure its members are queer enough to participate, you get a space that aggressively polices the queerness of its members. There's no way around that, it's pretty much tautologically true. Only by paradoxically not actually caring if you're queer or not can a group really accept the full range of what queerness can look like.

Also, a space that has room for a cis straight guy who means well and wants the best for his friends has two crucial things going for it.

1) it has space for people who are learning and might fuck up a bit while they figure things out, and that learning process is probably not so godawful and unpleasant that a guy with other prospects would have to be a fool not to go find some nicer friends. This is nice because it is very difficult to personally embody the entire alphabet at once, and learning how to be good allies to one another is a crucial part of queer solidarity. It's nice for that process not to be painful.

2) it has space for people who aren't yet willing to or comfortable with presenting an externally queer label to continue to exist and soak up the queer vibes and information, which means it's welcoming to actual questioning people rather than the theory of questioning people. Probably it therefore has more interest in actually doing things rather than hierarchy politics.

3) it's probably not a radfem tar pit interested in weaponising you against people they've decided to hate in a social smear war that benefits nobody and nothing but their need for a power trip

Oh it’s even more than that! The cis straight guy is very often a ride home, dad or husband. Or a Bob which I will explain in this essay is a signifier of a healthy ecosystem, like frogs are.

This is a 3 am take so consider this a blanket apology and a readmore but if you hate this post you were warned.

I think the thing that makes me saddest about this is that... filler / quiet / character / bottle episodes that have nothing to do with plot used to be considered crucial structure in storytelling, particularly in a lot of drama storytelling.

It's been really lost with the rise of grimdark as a genre, and also with the way television has changed over the years. But 'the rise and the fall' or the 'inhale and exhale' within a genre (i.e. between intense and light moments, or emotional and silly moments) was actually fundamental in particular to television storytelling structure, and certainly in a lot of books too. You only need to look at Lord of the Rings to see that even J.R.R. Tolkien understood this inherently. It's good storytelling to know that in most stories, in most genres, even horror and thriller, it's good - powerful actually - to let your characters breathe and have a moment.

Anyway, ThatKodo is 100% on it, it's just that plot driven stories used to have so so so much more of this. Characterisation IS plot and it DRIVES plot. I am a 'character over plot' writer so I want to eat all of ThatKodo's words, I fully agree with them. It's just that for the most part the current divide between plot and character is one we didn't used to have in most genres to the severe degree we do now.

In 1944 a kitten named George (short for General Electric) was saved from drowning by a U.S. Navy crew member. George was then photographed and given a liberty card and detailed health record. Source.

Nationality: pussy