Gee I wonder why women and girls are less inclined to use tools that were popularized via their ability to create fake nude photos of women and girls

Similarly bad news - in fields where we fund students with research money - that money comes mostly from federal funds, which OMB is illegally stopping the agencies from planning for or paying out.

What stands out to me is that we are seeing a growing push on this for PUBLIC libraries, but not too much collective energy for ACADEMIC libraries

eBook licenses for libraries are basically extorsion it is past time to fix that www.ala.org/news/2026/05...

I'm not anti-data. Graphs can of course be helpful. But if the data isn't showing what someone says they're experiencing, it can often mean the data you have is failing to capture that experience, not that the experience isn't real or representative of something.

oh wow it's that thing that was only happening in everybody's heads

📚

We just wrapped interviews for the University Librarian position here at Iowa State. I wanted to take a moment to recognize all the work that goes into these types of searches. There are layers of work that need to happen. Read more on my blog: libingthegoodlife.blogspot.com/2026/04/univ...

Air pollution in Iowa City correlates with The number of library technicians in Iowa (r=0.846)

The AASL statement in response to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals vacating the lower court’s injunctions of portions of Senate File 496, an Iowa law that requires library workers to remove books from the state’s public-school libraries. www.ala.org/news/2026/05...

Now planning to introduce my medical record to new doctors by yelling hwæt and launching into a description of all the beasts I have encountered and their mothers

All the people bemoaning the closure of a physical library space are no longer allowed to walk into a library and proclaim proudly "I haven't been in here for YEARS" unless you have already advocated to your Provost, Chancellor, and President - in writing - for library funding.

I have become an old man yelling at clouds and what I am yelling is frequently “INFRASTRUCTURE!!!”

Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes

Veronica this is no time to be hawking merch

I got to contemplate the complete destruction of my plan to get my life back on track because boomers and Gen X got salty about having to press 1 for English on phone menus and being asked to wear masks. It feels like shit and I feel like shit.

After a Wisconsin town did this, the mayor said: “The fact that they didn’t take the cameras down shows that we are the product. They were never really selling to us in the first place. They're selling to much bigger agencies the ability to spy on a ton of people.” (via boltsmag.org/verona-wisco...)

This is a crazy thing a lot of people fail to consider when it comes to public contracts and third-party surveillance vendors: 1. What happens if a company just refuses to take the cameras down? and 2. The city may lose access to the surveillance data, but does the company keep the cameras on?

Actual politically recognized tribes exist (in the US, Canada, throughout the global south, in Asia and Africa) so when you use the word "tribalism" as an insult the subtext is "such primitive behavior is beneath civilized white people such as ourselves" and it is very loud.

Enjoy your treasures. I am a bear.

A) Commission friend to draw Dr. Science's OC's with inside jokes and fetish jokes she refuses to do for free B) Y'all, I'm gonna be That Dog Mom. By which I mean, a weird middle-aged lady with several well-behaved dogs who have amazing wardrobes and get shuttled around like QEII's.

We shouldn't blame library managers for the collapse of academic libraries, no. That blame lies with the donor class that sets the agenda for higher ed these days. However, library managers who claim that layoffs and closures are "innovation" and "future-proofing" are lying in a deeply harmful way.

linktr.ee/Purrinink 🐈‍⬛🤍

Subskeeting MIT news but it could be any number of places. 📚

Me: People enjoy **caring about** fictional stories & characters. Not just consuming acceptable mid-ness. People enjoy caring about tv shows. Debating, arguing, Thinking, writing about them. Industry galaxy brains: I hear you saying you want an interchangeable array of ephemeral #content Me:

It’s always deeply disappointing when other librarians use AI generated images in presentations. Like wikimedia commons exists, come on

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A pound of ground beef is more than the federal minimum wage. Read that again.

Ahead of pride month, it's super cool how many straight people assume asexuals (or, people who lack interest in dating) are secretly gay, while many queer people assume asexuals are secretly straight.

I do not think it is possible to do this. The world today is so different from the one I grew up in. If you add cell phones into a story that doesn't have them, there are so many "why didn't they--" questions that arise.

I read the Chronicles of Narnia in the mid-1980s, and had no issues with understanding that the England mentioned there was set in a different time. As much as it pains me to say this, the time difference between books set in the 1980s and right now is the same as Narnia time:1980s.

...Where is that earring on MIffy attached? 'Cuz it ain't her ear!

The lamp-post at the entrance to Narnia has been updated to a motion-activated security light, and the wardrobe is now a walk-in closet.

Dear fellow white people, You can just say "fella". Or do the radio edit and pause for a beat. OR, pick a different song. It isn't that difficult.

The same people who are demanding the right to use AI for their publications saying they can't check citations that are in "other languages they don't read" is going to make me rip what's left of my hair out btw

I just wish some of y’all fought for libraries as much as you romanticize them.

Good titles: MFA called "Wall-Sized Fish"

the collective noun for homophones is a heard

Fuckit do I have to convert now

Personally, the closure of MIT’s Wunsch conservation lab hits hardest. It’s tragic to lose these highly-specialized skills in an established lab where experts have both stable employment and relationships with the collections/community. Conservation work *is* design and technology!

Morning take: this is actually a kind of cultural censorship www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/b...

This is living w/chronic illness in a nutshell. This inability to predict makes living a normal life so hard. It's difficult to commit to things when you're not sure you really can commit to any of it or when pushing through to meet that commitment could mean harming your capacity for weeks.

America's higher education system is proving so easy to dismantle in part because many of the people charged with leading it have done a terrible job for decades.

MIT closing three of its four libraries is shocking and appalling and underscores that the source of so much of the crisis in higher education comes not from attacks from the far right or the collapse of public trust, but rather from the university administrative class itself.

Future proofing? Hire librarians who can run their own systems, code their own ILSes, who have deep institutional knowledge of the collections across formats and repositories. Give them a good union. Pay them so well they want to stay.

Like, you only crank out shit this hideous if you think of kids as cash dispensers, not as living, thinking beings who's imaginations should be encouraged. You only generate this dreck if you have no respect for kids.

We should be clear that the MIT library closings were announced in December. A mournful faculty letter six months later does feel about right though. thetech.com/2025/12/04/m...