@libris46 on Tumblr

libris46 reblogged

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.

libris46 reblogged

justangrymacaroni

knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

justangrymacaroni

two things i’m noticing in the notes:

1. every artist/crafter/cook agreeing that influencers in their communities also pull shit like this

2. ppl shouting out their fav old lady tutorials and being like “i would die for u diane”

libris46 reblogged

the-busy-ghost

slushyseals

video credit: Rob Harcourt

Not only can you see the MOMENT this Weddell seal decided to prank the Crabeater seal, BUT HE LAUGHS AT HIM AFTER HE DOES IT! Ah Weddells <3

stultiloquentia

Turn sound on for asshole seal laughter.

airyairyaucontraire

remarkably strong sibling energy for animals of different species

libris46 reblogged

fandomshatewomen

lilithsaintcrow

“What this means is that the entire 2023 Hugo scandal is something completely different from what we've understood it as during the last month.”

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

The last month has been a busy one in Hugo and Worldcon fandom. After the shock of the much-belated 2023 nominating stats, and their revelat

wrongquestions.blogspot.com

neil-gaiman

Read the link.

razziecat

This just gets worse and worse.

getvalentined

Just to clarify what this is saying, this means that basically no Chinese folk were included in the Hugos at all. They struck expats and mixed folk on the English-language side because they could be "politically risky" to include, and then just threw out all the Chinese nominations entirely.

Worldcon was hosted in China, and no one with the slightest connection to their Chinese heritage, in their life or in their work, was considered worthy of a Hugo nomination.

I am incandescently angry.

libris46 reblogged

eighthdoctor

escuerzoresucitado

ceekari

unmute for

QUACKQUACKQUACKQUACK

libris46 reblogged

batshit-auspol

So Australia has a yearly tradition going back over 20 years, that every Australia Day we all gather round our screens to watch an ad for a certain product. It's so ingrained in our consciousness that the ads don't even really relate to what they're supposed to sell anymore, we all just know.

This year the ad broke containment, and non-Australians are having their brains melted by this bizarre tradition, so international followers, lets see if you can work out what this is trying to sell before the last few seconds.

libris46 reblogged

fandomshatewomen

pearwaldorf

oakttree-deactivated20221126 asked:

please tell me about dewey and his decimal system! why is it racist? (i know i could google this but if you have time i'd rather hear about it from someone i know, who's in the field)

pearwaldorf answered:

OK, so. First off, Melville Dewey was a sexist, racist, anti-semitic creeper. He was an advocate for women getting into libraries, and helped found one of the first library schools at Columbia. This was mostly because he felt women were suited for the “repetitive nature” of library work at the time. He also thought they were more easily controlled and “didn’t cause trouble”. So, ew.

It is not possible to represent the full spectrum of human knowledge, we know that now, but you can tell a lot about what people find important by what they choose to privilege within the types of classification schemes they create. For example, Ranganathan was remarkably abstract, using things like personality, matter, energy, space, and time as sorting facets for his Colon Classification schema.

The Dewey Decimal System (DDC) is much more concrete, but in ways that give short shrift to an awful lot of the world. Everything about the DDC is appallingly Anglocentric. If you take a look at the 200s, where religion is classified, you will note how many subclasses are devoted to Christianity. Every single other religion in the world gets relegated to the 290s. And language and linguistics! Everything non-Western gets relegated to the 490s. The 800s are devoted to literature. One guess what happens there.

Given that DDC is used mostly in public, school, and smaller libraries that don’t have enough books to warrant a classification system as complex as Library of Congress, one wonders what sorts of values are being imparted by the emphasis on Anglo/Eurocentric everything. Obviously these things can be overcome, and nobody would ever accuse the DDC of causing the devaluation of non-western ideas or thought, but it’s just one more subtle structural fuck you.

[eta 3/19/2015] Which is not to imply that LC doesn’t also have biases. Please see the middle of this talk by Chris Bourg, director of libraries at MIT, for examples. These are manifestations of biased systems in general, not just classification schemes. [/eta]

To be honest, it’s mostly institutional entrenchment that hasn’t lead to any sort of reform. (Insert rant on how you can put ten catalogers in a room and come out with twelve opinions.) Librarians are well aware of its flaws, but it would be a tremendous effort to overhaul the DDC. And asking people to implement those changes, in an age of declining appreciation for libraries and thus staffing levels, would probably not be the best use of those limited resources.

There are alternative classification schemes formed in opposition to DDC for various reasons, including the lack of inclusivity, the most notable being BISAC, which is based upon subject headings used by booksellers. The problem is these systems have not been evaluated particularly thoroughly, even by the institutions that use them. And they are not suitable at all for libraries with large collections (but most of those use LC, which is its own can of worms).

That was probably more than you wanted to know. :D

pearwaldorf

‘sup nerds? I dug this out of my archive because the American Library Association Council just voted to take Dewey’s name off of an award for creative leadership because he was a really terrible person. (A new name for the award is forthcoming.) So terrible, in fact, the SUNY Board of Regents wrote a letter in the New York Times condemning his exclusionary behavior and forced him to resign as state librarian.

This was in 1905. If a bunch of white guys from back then think you’re going too far, it’s pretty bad.

Anyways, this is a thing that’s long overdue and I applaud ALA for taking a small but symbolic step forward.

libris46 reblogged

camelot-arrhythmia

rafawriter

scontent.fsig3-1.fna.fbcdn.net

libris46 reblogged

eighthdoctor

libris46 reblogged

eighthdoctor

intactics

my favorite bit of "rich people are Like That" ephemera that I picked up from my Russian literature binge was from a noble character who was complaining about his serfs neglecting their duties, specifically the duty of staying up all night long slapping the pond water in order to prevent the frogs from croaking so that the nobleman could enjoy his sleep at his country estate with its adorable pond. whenever I hear wealthy people's complaints in this day and age the majority of it automatically filters to "the fucking serfs won't slap the pond anymore and it's honestly so destructive and cruel of them to deny me my beauty sleep like this" type statements

libris46 reblogged

dduane

“I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.” He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser. Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.) I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say. I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)”

— “As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?” (via meiringens)

libris46 reblogged

libris46 reblogged

I'm not a psychology researcher, but my guess would be that the nature of it being a time-limited puzzle game where you have to juggle multiple factors means that your short-term memory gets filled and the traumatic images are "dumped" in favor of remembering how many times to rotate the L piece. "As soon as possible" is probably because the sooner you do it, the less likely it is to become part of your long-term memory.

If that is true, then other time-limited activities where you have to remember and plan in a tight time frame may serve a similar purpose.

cryptic-ink

This can have an effect hours after the traumatic event happens too! All participants were treated within about 6 hours and played for a total of 20 minutes of Tetris (with at least one play time of 10 minutes straight).

Here are the links given in the screenshot:

Trauma, treatment and Tetris: video gaming increases hippocampal volume in male patients with combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder

Tetris has been proposed as a preventive intervention to reduce intrusive memories of a traumatic event. However, no neuroimaging study has

PubMed Central (PMC)

Tetris used to prevent post-traumatic stress symptoms — Department of Psychiatry

A single dose psychological intervention, which includes using the computer game Tetris, can prevent the unpleasant, intrusive memories that

psych.ox.ac.uk

Here is the paper that the second link uses as a source:

Preventing intrusive memories after trauma via a brief intervention involving Tetris computer game play in the emergency department: a proof

After psychological trauma, recurrent intrusive visual memories may be distressing and disruptive. Preventive interventions post trauma are

Nature

naamahdarling

I have no idea if any of this actually would work in a wider clinical setting but I have heard it said this ALSO works after being triggered, and is ALSO also great after trauma therapy, especially, apparently, EMDR, where you are asked to engage with the traumatic memories just enough to provoke discomfort as you are guided through some form of distracting stimulus, supposedly causing the memories to begin to be transferred to long term memory instead of held in the more immediate short term.

So yeah, this is a very interesting line of enquiry, and I am almost certain that any similar game would work just as well. They just settled on Tetris as the testing default because they had to have something, and Tetris is EXCELLENT at what it does.

libris46 reblogged

spybrarian

itskyalenotkyletoo

itskyalenotkyle

Lmaoo

quietstorm-thundathighs

It's disrespectful

smirnoffpasta

This is SPECTACULARLY done

quadradaz

I feel called out

teaboot

This man looks like a Carrivaggio depiction of a bacchinalian God and I must do art about him

libris46 reblogged

fandomshatewomen

deanoru

I’m so tired of every show that takes place in the past (wild west, medieval, pirates etc) ALWAYS having so much sexual violence towards women like writers can cry “oh it’s realism” all you want but it’s very transparent how realism only applies when you want to hurt women on screen. If we’re talking staying realistic, why doesn’t everyone have brown teeth? Or bad skin? Or dying of dysentery? Just admit y'all want an excuse to brutalize women on screen lol

squidsticks

This pisses me off so much. A lot of the time if you mention realism would also involve women having unshaved legs or pits, or bushy eyebrows, or syphilis, the answer is often “well that’s gross, no one wants to read about/see that” and like…. If you think that women being ugly is grotesque, but brutal depictions of rape aren’t, then I don’t really know what to say to you other than stay the fuck away from me.

libris46 reblogged

fandomshatewomen

deanoru

I’m so tired of every show that takes place in the past (wild west, medieval, pirates etc) ALWAYS having so much sexual violence towards women like writers can cry “oh it’s realism” all you want but it’s very transparent how realism only applies when you want to hurt women on screen. If we’re talking staying realistic, why doesn’t everyone have brown teeth? Or bad skin? Or dying of dysentery? Just admit y'all want an excuse to brutalize women on screen lol

squidsticks

This pisses me off so much. A lot of the time if you mention realism would also involve women having unshaved legs or pits, or bushy eyebrows, or syphilis, the answer is often “well that’s gross, no one wants to read about/see that” and like…. If you think that women being ugly is grotesque, but brutal depictions of rape aren’t, then I don’t really know what to say to you other than stay the fuck away from me.

libris46 reblogged

fandomshatewomen

deanoru

I’m so tired of every show that takes place in the past (wild west, medieval, pirates etc) ALWAYS having so much sexual violence towards women like writers can cry “oh it’s realism” all you want but it’s very transparent how realism only applies when you want to hurt women on screen. If we’re talking staying realistic, why doesn’t everyone have brown teeth? Or bad skin? Or dying of dysentery? Just admit y'all want an excuse to brutalize women on screen lol

squidsticks

This pisses me off so much. A lot of the time if you mention realism would also involve women having unshaved legs or pits, or bushy eyebrows, or syphilis, the answer is often “well that’s gross, no one wants to read about/see that” and like…. If you think that women being ugly is grotesque, but brutal depictions of rape aren’t, then I don’t really know what to say to you other than stay the fuck away from me.