Part of teaching about queer zines and queer history is talking about the affair between Secret Heart Ken and Earring Magic Ken in the mid 1990s. This officially licensed post card was produced in 1994, just one year after Ken came out. Happy Pride, Y’all

At the eve of the summer solstice, I pick seven different flowers, in seven different fields, all in complete silence. I tie them into a bouquet and put it under my pillow. Doing so means that tonight, I will dream of my true love. I already live with her, but I like dreaming of her too.

Sure, the ladies in the Special Collections conservation lab take care of all sorts of neat old stuff, but I'm really here for their cats. 😸

I’m taking a break from my presentation because I have reached the point where I no longer know what my point is or why I am bothering to present at all.

I can’t work through my writer’s block for my presentation on object cataloging for rare book catalogers. I’ve never been this stuck on a presentation 😢

This notebook is going on my shelf of notebooks and journals that are too pretty and precious for me to write in.

Loving the materiality of this paper, used in a book from 1784. Due to shortage of white rags, the raw material for paper, this paper maker added straw and some blue rags. EHC A 29985, vol. 1: C.F. Flögel, Geschichte der komischen Litteratur. Legnica (Liegnitz), Siegert, 1784-1787 (4 v.)

Today was my last day with the library’s conservation lab staff. Instead of tearful goodbyes, we made books. I’m really pleased with mine. Mens et manus (mind and hand)

Scottish soccer fans in town for the World Cup made a side-trip to Fenway on Sunday and brought actual magic with them. It was such a delight and honor to get to accompany their singing.

Calling library and general GLAM data people 📜📚: If you were looking for training data related to historical city directories, where would you look? I'm considering fine-tuning a small GLAM model to parse 19th and early 20th century city directories, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel!

Last image from tonight (short film in the morning): this brother out here with his Singer sewing machine, gifting people a custom embroidery on their jerseys and hats with the name and the date, was more artistic than anything at Burning Man and ad gorgeous as a Caravaggio. Magic! Goodnight.

Here come the Haitians! Up Boylston, heading to the Common. #Boston

I wonder if this is the most popular livestream of scaffolding construction of all time

If I have Haitian and Scottish ancestry, should I feel torn over the upcoming World Cup match?

I would buy this textbook if it existed. It would give me motivation to relearn everything I’ve forgotten about Classical Chinese.

On my birthday last year, I spent over an hour with a single painting at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Seeing artwork in person and being in awe is something we all should experience.

"Metadata is not perfectly or consistently applied" should be a T-shirt

For both the London International School and the London Rare Books School we have hand-printed each individual name badge, using 3D-printed plates and our new 'Room 101 Press' - a merging of old and new technology beautifully displayed here by IES PhD student Miranda Rainbow!

In cataloging there should be a unit on acquiring, securing, and maintaining book carts. I just negotiated for a cart for a cataloging project and am putting ownership signs on it today.

ONE FROM THE VAULTS RETURNS! For a special Tenth Anniversary season! Ten brand new episodes of the original trans history podcast. In our first episode, we chart the life of tarot master, sci fi writer, and 70s trans activist Rachel Pollack! Please share! m.soundcloud.com/onefromtheva...

rainbows and the moon are incredible to see in person and the computer makes them look small, dim, insignificant. consider what other wonders the computer seeks to diminish, and what is prioritized in their place

The Fred Rogers Production has started uploading every episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood for free. www.youtube.com/@misterroger...

Query: TTRPG zine culture is vibrant, there’s a lot of riso-printed material, etc. Talk to me about letterpress TTRPG.

We need some advice. Specifically from a) Catholics who have made arrangements for a burial, b) Iowans who have wound up the affairs of an intestate person, and/or c) anyone who knew a certain person from the University of Iowa community who attended every public lecture but wasn't in a department.

I turned my interpretive-sign art into a sticker, for all of you out there who stop to read every historic marker and sign on trips…. littlebraincomics.etsy.com/listing/4516...

Went to make a cup of tea and found one of my colleagues had evidently enjoyed themselves at the kid's Lego session yesterday. Not sure we've got enough lego to make a full size one though...

To our dismay, the artist and author Marjane Satrapi has passed away. As she wrote, ordinary Americans and Iranians have more in common with each other than we do with either of our governments, which have far too much in common with each other. We honor her memory and oppose the war.

The local black cat rescue has a gray tuxedo cat that I am so tempted to adopt. I’m not set up physically or emotionally for a cat at this moment, but …

I am dreading my upcoming RBMS conference presentation. I wanted to have my slides done by this date, but I’m still struggling to come up with something to say.

If you missed my CALM Keynote, Slow Management in a Fast World, it's now available on YouTube fully captioned. youtu.be/frkgyhEERfs?...

also like, my measure of "wealth" now is how much of things going wrong you can bounce back from and maintain a basic standard of living. It is not about improving said standard of living. I want a house so I can't be priced out of my apartment. I want retirement money so I'm not homeless at 70.

When I visited Iceland, I stepped out of the airport into rain blowing sideways. Umbrellas won’t help with that.

Hello from the endangered modernist masterpiece that is Pride Cleaners Architect: Gerald Siegwart, 1959

you know social media isn't what it was a decade ago because back then The Masshole Meteor gimmick account would already have 30,000 followers

I thought a tree had been blown into the apartment building.

Bridges around The Mart are pretty cool too.

Being a lone rare book/special collections cataloger among archivists can be incredibly lonely sometimes.

Damn every one of us had our last brussels sprout sandwich without realizing it

Writing my presentation for an upcoming conference has been a struggle. I am realizing that I don’t have as much to say about my topic as I originally thought :(

Just one of the amazing things that conservators do: researching how people sealed letters before gummed envelopes. Letterlocking!! And where did this expertise come from? Jana Dambrogio. At MIT.

Love it. Love that the earring doesnt make sense cause its not attached to the ear even love it so here for vermeer nijntje

So, the rank-and-file staff of the MIT Libraries is pretty uniformly excellent - capable, interesting, kind - and should you perhaps find a résumé cross your desk from one, you should give it serious consideration. 📚

the patterns of Sultan Ahmed mosque 🌙

I’m not directly affected, but it has been a stressful time to be someone working with tangible materials.

I see that the source of much of my job stress over the past few months has entered the BlueSky discourse.

How many undergraduate library science degrees are there? People know you need a master’s degree to be a librarian, right?

#SundayReads: Tobiah Black on the history and afterlife of the Sanborn fire insurance maps: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/sanborn-fire-insurance-maps/

More people should study library and information science and there need to be many many many more jobs for people with, particularly, the perspective it enculturates.

“Many organizations struggle to hire trained librarians” aka “many organizations refuse to pay someone with an advanced degree something even remotely approaching a living wage.”

This happened to me this week at a routine cardiology appointment in which everything was fine with my health, except my weight. I knew it was going to happen, but I was still annoyed.