This was probably meant to be a late-night post: I spent eight months working on a stunt blog about a $200 sandwich. Or, no, I did an end-of-year post about my mental health and the federal funding crisis. I'm not sure which. Maybe you can figure it out. www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/epi...

please excuse the yelling, but REDPOLL!!! #birds

So, librarians, do you have a contingency plan for when these goons enter your facility? You might not be able to block access to a public building, but how are you alerting your patrons? Do you have a plan to get them out safely? Because you should.

I moved off Canvas this fall, and have set up spring using Box folders with some refinements from my students: organizing everything in weekly folders, & adding a shared calendar they can subscribe to in order to give them the deadline alerts they miss from Canvas.

Semiotic paradox alert!

Where are my #CrabTime & #Crustmas fans at - look at this little guy 😂 Land #Crab Effigy Vessel Colima culture, E. Mexico, Proto-Classical, 100 BCE - 250 CE Redware ceramic w/ brick red slip, black oxides H17 x W18 x D20.5 cm www.giquelloetassocies.fr/en/lot/10121... #MesoAmericanArt #IndigenousArt

My favorite fun thing to read on here this year - thoughtful, insightful, entertaining. Recommend.

My favorite thing I did on Bluesky has to be THE LORD OF THE RINGS threads. THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING:

This thread makes me sad, not because the people in it made bad choices, but because the goal of the college class should be the learning in community along the way, not the result, not content acquisition. And professors can do things to encourage or discourage that.

Ask your friendly academic librarian about all the times we tried to tell you that what we do is important and you should fund it. You get the services you pay for, friends.

Me too!!! If my trans kid moved to a country with less oppressive laws then my disabled kid and disabled wife couldn’t follow. There’s no real answer … other than to fight here and try to win.

Like, yeah. You should read what you wanna read! Reading is a pleasure! But one of the pleasures of reading is that it makes our inner worlds bigger. Challenges us to think about things we haven’t thought about. Expands our horizons, as the phrase goes

"Q: Does the @librarycongress.bsky.social replacement of MEXICO, GULF OF and DENALI, Mount (ALASKA) as subject terms following a Trumpian decree represent a case of abrogation of professional judgment and autonomy?" preview of Sandy Berman's auto-interview coming soon to my website 📚 #sandynistas

THAT MEME IS A PROBLEM A book is not a container. A book is a temporal discipline. It does things an LLM cannot do: • It forces linear attention • It preserves authorial intention without adaptive drift • It resists interruption • It embeds thought in duration • It creates irreversible commitment

Library people fight the misconception that we ever *read books* at work (we don’t, because we are overwhelmed by other responsibilities). But I think we should, actually, be given time to read on the clock. I’d be a much better librarian with, say, 3 hrs of book reading time built into my week.

The shorteste daye The longest nighte Welcome, sun Welcome, lighte

Friends at Primo/Alma institutions, get the bat signal out for your systems people.

College is not vocational school. Being college-educated should mean more than "trained to do a job." There is joy in living a full intellectual life. If you don't want that, vocational programs are available for a fraction of the cost

Interesting to read a bit of commentary, from a perspective outside of academia but local to the area impacted.

1/ At bargaining yesterday, @propublica.org management said that they should have 100% discretion to replace workers with AI and would not commit to labeling future AI-generated content.

One of the few things I sometimes think about changing careers for is something public health / social services related for older adults. What happens to them in this country is enraging.

So... after a certain age we just let people die?

this is a DERANGED system

This isn't hyperbole. In 2023, I watched Cigna revoke approval for my friend Carole's life-saving lung transplant *minutes* before surgery was set to begin—a decision that very nearly killed her. Public outrage in response to a viral post about her situation is the only reason she's alive today.

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

I know how to drive the horse and buggy!

Training the robots to replace you is not a job whatsoever. Running security or admin at a data centre is not a long-term job with prospects or meaning. Our educational institutions need to stop advocating for the technology that is being used to outsource thought itself. #spéirghorm #ireland

FYI - I need to find a good sci-fi/ fantasy tech dystopia novel for the 10-11 year age range in the next 36 hours or so. Please share. thank you!

We’ve posted an update on Fobazi here: gofund.me/e475efa5c

It /is/ a problem that the right has articulated a reactionary vision for the humanities and the left has pushed ROI analysis to boost tech and marketing degrees.

my favorite thing about the benoit blanc movies is that they aren't really about benoit blanc. he is not grappling with demons from his past. we are not getting flashbacks to the husband whose murder he never solved. he just shows up and does his job like mary poppins for homicides

i had to explain that ponies are just stubby horses, which come in all ages, while baby horses are actually foals, which look like two pairs of stilts wearing a hat. the tiny horse people became involved at one point.

I am convinced this phrenological, (racist, ageist, ableist) belief is why linkedin et al demand face photos. Also why I refuse to have my face on the internet. No thank you.

There were protests in cities all along the Coast Saturday, resisting federal efforts to site an ICE detention center on the Oregon Coast. Members of SRI showed up to show solidarity with coastal Indivisibles. #ICEOut #Resist #ResistFascism #OregonCoast #IceHasNoBusinessonTheOregonCoast

One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.

One of the ways you can see this is driven by an industry looking for some way to make itself profitable? No one has shown any concern that students demonstrate basic competency with computers before enrolling (or graduating)—and, many do lack that.

I hate a lot of stuff, but most of all I hate how hard we fail the kids.

I saw Wake Up Dead Man in an actual theater and liked it a lot! I’ve become a such a hater, with a rising dread that nearly all fiction is fundamentally conservative in outlook. This is the first new thing I've seen in a long time that hasn’t felt illiterate and reactionary, that imagines better.

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

The Black-billed Nightingale-Thrush is a common high-elevation bird in Costa Rica. They're very friendly and they have a beautiful, magical thrush call. They might not be as colorful as some other species, but I just love them. At Paraiso Quetzal Lodge #CostaRica #birds #nature

I mean, in what sense will you be able to say the college “survived”?

For a while, they said if you needed tech help, ask a 10yo. But current 10-20yos didn't have to explore and click around and futz with things to get them to work, so if it's not immediately obvious, they can't do it. Basically if you're 30-50 you're just doing tech support for everyone forever.

What better bird for #SmallBirdsBigPersonality and #BirdoftheDay than the intimidating Bushtit? #birds

Which lines of poetry live rent-free in your head?

Genuine question, because I STILL cannot find this out: what happens to your overdrive data that is accessible to the patrons themselves?

I did not use canvas in any of my classes this semester. I set up a google drive (yes, I know, imperfect but I did it in ~1 week) for each class with subfolders for various materials and assignments. Things went well with only a bit more checking in *until* the end of the semester crunch. A thread 🧵

It only took four of us making a two-minute public comment about the library at the city council meeting for the councilors to restore the funding the mayor’s office had cut.