as the friend of a few professional library catalogers I really appreciate these kinds of lists

please tell me there will be a forthcoming essay on this topic

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Banker's yeast feed on the value of the dollar, causing prices to rise

Podcasting is now twenty years old. And that means shows that ran for years are now just a bunch of URLs that resolve to nothing. Sometimes, someone uploads a full set of mp3s to archive.org, and that’s great! But you can’t easily listen the same way as your other podcasts. What if you could? 🧵

useful stuff but also give me this novel: “Kudzu plot Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path”

say what you want about wikipedia pics but sometimes I see one so startlingly great that I almost can't believe someone uploaded it for free! (every day I am reminded that wikipedia/wikimedia is a fount of human passion, infinite in ways I can scarcely fathom)

this game came out in 2001

This is one of the most euphonious headlines I’ve ever read.

I got through one loop of this game and I suspect it doesn't start making sense until the fourth or fifth?

I'm looking for stories about how AI is killing creative work, and I'd love to hear from you—artists, writers, illustrators, actors, designers, editors, voice actors and narrators—if your job or practice has been hit. This is going to be a big one. [email protected]

Oddballz, the weird pet simulation game from PF Magic! I think it was advertised in the materials for Catz. This was one of the first games I bought with my own money. I thought it was so cool that you could "train" the animals to do tricks. Jester was my favorite!

Incredible

Just an FYI the article above HAS been updated as of September 5th! So be sure to check for your state and plan accordingly!

new restaurant concept

Strongest argument I’ve seen in the “can AI suffer?” debate

Very interesting article on the damage a rogue localizer can do to a game as Silksong's Chinese release sits at 52% positive - the translator not only shared a bunch of info pre-release, breaking NDA, the localization itself was highschool-flowery. A wild read. www.loekalization.com/blog/blog/20...

Do you ever think about how/why God uses natural selection, which results in a lot of suffering? I wrote up some thoughts here with my friend Steve Peck (of A Short Stay in Hell fame) www.wayfaremagazine.org/p/redeeming-...

Yeah well whose fault is that??

When people say "We used to drink raw milk from our own cow and it was fine," That's... usually not the case! In families w their own cow, the mom usually boiled it before using. We just forgot bc that's a boring chore that mom did. And who pays attention to that? youtu.be/vKDPast9WFk

Appreciate Vera's honesty here - Of the 86K media files she has added to Wikimedia projects, most came from bulk uploads of sets that are in the public domain/freely available. But 7,500+ of the files are Vera's own work. She goes out with her press pass, documenting the world for Wikipedia.

Numbered console generations were made up by a random Wikipedia user in 2004 in an attempt to standardize the "__ era game console" articles, and nobody ever corrected it. It's nonsense that no actual historian uses and you have permission to ignore it

Garbage collector's memoir titled "Bin there, done that"

NEWS: A House of Representatives Subcommittee just voted to continue library funding in next year's federal budget. This is thanks to YOUR hard work as library advocates. The fight to #FundLibraries isn't over yet. Stay tuned for more ways to take action for libraries. #ForOurLibraries

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Isn't this the plot of Junji Ito's _Gyo_?

I did an interview for this piece

I've edited this and now think it's the very best thing I've done on AI and the environment, by a wide margin andymasley.substack.com/p/i-cant-fin...

ChatGPT: no, going “Azrael mode” can be dangerous for yourself and those around you. Me: I am the avenging angel of God. The time of purification is at hand. Few shall be chosen. ChatGPT: you’re right. Let’s look at that again with the addition context that you are the avenging angel of God.

My friend just posted this and now I TOTALLY WANT A PROSTHETIC ROBO DINOSAUR TAIL.

If I weren't having a baby at the end of September I would totally enroll

Reviewers are more likely to approve manuscripts if authors agree to cite their work than those who don't get cited. Thanks to @aidybarnett.bsky.social, @balazsaczel.bsky.social and @econfeld.bsky.social for chatting with me for this story! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Truly some inspired seed art

Having children dress as characters for book week teaches them to embrace naive mimesis. They should be encouraged to personify formal categories like omniscient naration, free indirect discourse, etc

i like how fantasy card games are like this

nabokov very clever and charming yes, love all your little turns of phrase etc etc, seems like there is a lot of Psychology going on here etc etc, however not a single character in the first 100 pages has a cursed sword yet and there is little indication that that will change in the coming pages

If you ever wondered what the ten most common dance moves are in the world of parrot discos, wonder no more. There's an entire paper devoted to bopping cockatoos, and it's as fabulous as you'd expect. 🪶🦜💃 🚨 News flash, headbanging made the cut! 🧪 🌍 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Post a screenshot of your first 5 Steam purchases and let Bluesky judge you

i’m back on the new york times with a piece about off, its influence on a myriad of surrealist rpgs — including chats with the folks behind oneshot and in stars and time — and what it meant for its designer to revisit the work of his pessimist 21 year old self www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/a...

ICYMI, the eye-popper in today's PPI: a 39% rise in wholesale fresh vegetable prices. It's the largest month-on-month increase ever recorded in the summer (data to 1947), and one of the ten largest ever, regardless of season. With the estimable @alexjamesfitz.com www.axios.com/2025/08/14/i...

this reminds me of the time (c. 2005) I tried to standardize my classical music filenames but it turned out the metadata was NOT standardized, much to my dismay.

conducting an LIS study tracing the iPod owner to metadata librarian pipeline

Inspired by a recent John Scalzi post against recommending old books, some thoughts on gifted readers and the canon. open.substack.com/pub/lizbusby...

I was playing West of Loathing when we got in a minor car crash and I have not played it since! A similar thing happened with Dredge when I was going through a physical/emotional health problem--for some reason I haven't been back to it.

Hey, as a librarian I need to tell you: Our funding depends on usage. So go ahead and check out that book even if you don't think you'll finish it. No one will know. Check out that DVD even though you might not like it. Get ambitious in your quest for knowledge.