I miss when library books used to have little paper pockets inside with a list of all the people who borrowed it and when… I hate that this is now exclusive knowledge of librarians. I do care that a miss Mariana borrowed this book in 1985 and then Dario in 1997. They’re my brothers and sisters
but really, there’s a million reasons why it’s an issue for users and staff of the public library to have immediate access to a record of who has borrowed a specific item and when.
and that’s not even about keeping the information “privileged” to the library staff, these days they don’t even keep a digital record of an item’s history of borrowers; once you return a book, there isn’t a list of everyone thats ever taken that book out that your name gets added to (though they probably take a tally of how many times it is checked out for circulation statistics).
i think the card system is a remnant of a culture that could only exist in the world before the internet as it exists today, where this identifying kind of information wasn’t always readily at your fingertips, even for those at the “information professional” level.
don’t get me wrong here, i do understand the nostalgia factor to it as being part of a different time, but i think it’s always important to understand why this kind of system has its flaws and has been (at least in north america) taken out of practice
bear in mind that US public libraries spent most of the past twenty years fighting off lawsuits that they were prohibited from disclosing to the public because when 9/11 happened the federal government wanted a list of every person who read certain books and the librarians had a really bad feeling about where that kind of policy would end up going, for some reason.
not keeping the records in the first place is a way for the libraries to protect themselves when they stand up for your privacy.
Image description: An undecorated block of text in a serif font. The text reads:
“I did things in my 30s that were ignored by the world, that could have been quickly labeled a failure. Here’s a classic example; in 1974 I did a movie called Phantom of the Paradise. Phantom of the Paradise, which was a huge flop in this country. There were only two cities in the world where it had any real success: Winnipeg, in Canada, and Paris, France. So, okay, let’s write it off as a failure. Maybe you could do that. But all of the sudden, I’m in Mexico, and a 16-year-old boy comes up to me at a concert with an album - a Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack- and asks me to sign it. I sign it. Evidently I was nice to him and we had a nice little conversation. I don’t remember the moment, I remember signing the album (I don’t know if I think I remember or if I actually remember). But this little 14 or 16, whatever old this guy was … Well I know who the guy is now because I’m writing a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth; it’s Guillermo del Toro. The work that I’ve done with Daft Punk it’s totally re.lated to them seeing Phantom of the Paradise 20 times and deciding they’re going to reach out to this 70-year-old songwriter to get involved in an album called Random Access Memories. So, what is the lesson in that? The lesson for me is being very careful about what you label a failure in your life. Be careful about throwing something in the round file as garbage because you may find that it’s the headwaters of a relationship that you can’t even imagine it’s corning in your future.”
the thing about working as a housekeeper is that sometimes I will be called to clean a room that is in such a state that it gives me pause.
The thing about being a housekeeper at a Hospital is that it is not the things that would usually be concerning that leave me with questions.
Like if I go clean a room and it is just covered in blood, I’m not all “where did all this blood come from” that would be silly. It came from inside the patient and they were already in a hospital so they’re probably mostly fine hopefully.
In fact “Inside the patient” is where most of the potentially concerning stuff I have to deal with comes from. Vomit? That’s from inside the patient. Urine? Feces? Inside the patient baby. Needles full of unidentified drugs? That was supposed to go inside the patient but I guess they frogot.
But when I go to clean a hospital room and it is full of Sand… Did that come from inside the patient? I hope not. Why is there so much sand? Where did it come from? Was there some kind of terrible beach accident?
I have many questions and I’m scared of the answers.
All of these “describe the first memory you have of your mutuals” posts are very sweet and I would love to participate but I’ll be honest, I have a really shitty memory. It was just one day I didn’t know you, and the next we were besties, and life got better. That’s just how it works.
If there was a way to run SUPER MEGA AD BLOCKER on this website I fucking would
“Please oh please open up your computer to a porn virus! If you don’t you’re evil!”
Freeloader Comin’ through!
We didn’t start this war internet users have with ads - We might have moaned about banner ads, but it was only when they started making noises when we might be listening to music or a podcast or whatever, causing two sound sorces at once, that we started trying to block ads universally rather than just a specific type of ad (pop ups).
And since then ads have gotten worse - Actual malware rather than merely breaking one of the fundamental sins of web design - though shalt not autoplay anything with sound. And the more aggressive a website is with ‘please turn off adblock’ the less I trust it to bother to vet ads and advertisers to make sure they’re not installing malware.
Not to mention that the idea that avoiding ads is “freeloading” is hilariously backward. Advertisement is a transaction between the platform and the advertiser, the user has no obligation to provide the views/clicks the platform has promised. Using an adblocker isn’t freeloading in the same way that leaving the room to get a snack during a commercial break isn’t cheating the tv network.
Ok y’all, I work as a web developer and I’m here to tell you that you are 100% right and that it’s shit. SO I’m going to tell you how to get around websites that block you from using their website if you’re using an adblocker.
Every website uses a language called JavaScript; long story short it’s a website language that allows developers to do the crazy shit you see on websites. Now the easiest thing to do is to disable JavaScript to stop them from knowing you have an adblocker:
Oh no! I’m blocked from viewing the website. It would be a terrible shame if I were able to right click and select the “inspect” feature
Click the three dots in the top right and open the “Settings” Menu
And then scrolled down to “Debugger” and checked the “Disable Javascript Option”
Was walking through my mom’s house to borrow my dad’s drill when I saw my 11yo niece watching me with an odd expression.
“You wanna help me build the catio?”
Her eyes lit up, then she looked disappointed. “But I’m a girl…”
I rolled my eyes. “Do I look like I care?”
That must have been the right response because she jumped up and chattered excitedly as I showed her how to use a tape measure, a drill, etc. We spent all day building and she had a brilliant smile the whole time. After the tenth declaration of this being the best day in her life, I said,
“Gotta love that sweet sweet serotonin!”
She immediately started giggling, “What does that meeeeaan??”
Anyway, she had an amazing time building with me and acted like I had given her a solstice gift when I said she could paint it and that I’d take her to the hardware store to pick out hardware. She’s never been to a hardware store before and I love being the weird knowledgeable uncle who has weird pets always keeps fruit and pistachios in the house.
Update: While I was at the store I found a 53 piece around the house tool kit in bright purple, so of course I bought it for her. Her face when I gave it to her was priceless and she actually gasped. She’s going to “make all the stuff”
Are we going to talk about the “but I’m a girl.”? Where did she get that? Did someone teach her that? Who is it? I’m ready to kill for that cutie.
She learned it from her dead father
I’m just gonna assume you killed him for his blatant sexism
I was across state lines and in the presence of three witnesses at the time of his death. I have receipts timestamped. My alibi is solid.
I love how all these reblogs from ableds are like “boxes of paper are 20 pounds GOTCHA” as if every single person in a 60-person workplace needs to be able to lift a box of paper.
“What’s that, James? You tore your rotator cuff? Sorry, we have to let you go. What if the printer needed to be refilled and the other 200 people in this building were home sick? It just wouldn’t be fair.”
I deserve more intellectually challenging low-effort justifications for bigotry. Please try harder next time. 1/10.
hi! i’m a secretary with a lifelong congenital back issue that i had fixed via surgery.
the first thing i want to point out is that the box of paper that @bransrath posted is not the weight of the box. the 20 lb in that description is the paper weight, which is the amount of force a piece of paper can take before tearing. i know this because it’s described as copy paper, and copy paper is by default 20 lb weight. so posting that picture as a ‘gotcha’ in response to this post is ignorant at best and intentionally ableist at worst. in reality, that box probably weighs no more than 15 lbs.
secondly, i have never had to actually pick up one of these boxes ever. and i have to deal with them a lot, given that i’m a secretary who, prior to the pandemic, was printing off 1000+ pages of booklets per week. i’ve never had to pick these up because you can literally just open them, grab a ream of paper, and take it to the printer to load it in. there’s no fucking reason why you would need the whole box. most places, like my office, also store them on or near the ground because they’re heavy, so what i do is a just drag the boxes to their designated corner until they need to be used.
so “must be able to lift 20 lbs” is a tactic of discrimination, and there’s no excuse for it in office jobs like mine. i can’t actually lift more than 15 lbs and chances are, i’ll never be able to lift more than 20 lbs. i can still do all the duties of my secretary job, though, and it’s really easy to find work arounds for things like heavy boxes of paper. even i can, and my office literally employs 3 people including me. a weight limit is not a reason to deny someone a job.
*checks how much that is in metric*
MOTHERFUCKER I WORK IN A FACTORY AND WE’RE EXPLICITLY TOLD AS A PART OF ORIENTATION AND WORK SAFETY TRAINING THAT “hey man if you ever need to lift something heavier than 10kg (about 22 pounds), you should get someone to help you“
Chiming in with HI I Work In Printing - I DID regularly lift and carry those boxes. As a flex, to show off (I look deceptively weak). Even we had a hand truck we were encouraged to use for carrying them at any length of time. My coworker only lifted the boxes enough to get them on the cart. There’s also5000 sheets of paper in there. If you work at a front office, you are not going through 5000 sheets of printing on that little printer you got on your desk at any speed you can’t grab a ream or two at a time.
i’m not against vaping, but man, vaping two inches from my face on the subway is a ridiculous asshole kind of move. this dude was billowing like he was auditioning for the role of haunted house fog machine. the humidity in the whole car changed, he was ruining haircuts. just jump starting the water cycle. condensation was dripping down my glasses. people were slipping off poles, it was chaos. it was like watching one man try to terraform the moon. a planet with one dense, root beer scented atmosphere blocking out the sun and choking all life.
I sat with a crying second grader today. (The age range is outside my wheelhouse but I was the most convenient adult.) He was crying, the other adults said, because his brother took a phone he was playing on. “Phone addicted,” everybody said. “If he would get up and play games with the other kids he wouldn’t be crying.”
He told me everyone lets his brother take things from him because his brother is younger, and doesn’t know better. He told me he doesn’t want to play because he’s tired, he has too many extracurriculars this summer and can’t get good sleep because “everyone in my camper is so loud when I’m trying to sleep.” He’s exhausted and only eight. His mom’s an acquaintance and told me she and the kid’s father are going through a separation — mom and four kids left the house to stay in a camper.
But people will seriously not listen to kids crying over seemingly minor things because on the surface it looks like a tantrum. If kids are given the space to articulate themselves they often will.
I’ve found that if a child is capable of having a conversation (that is, old enough to speak and express themselves, not injured or upset so badly that they literally cannot stop crying, and not behaving violently), then 90% of the time their reason for being upset is legitimate, or at least understandable.
Please remember that this also applies to teenagers and preteens, they might be acting like a knowitall who doesn’t give a shit, or a first class jerk, but chances are fair they feel like shit for one reason or another and adults just chalk it up to teenage angst instead
Graffiti left on the tomb of Ramses V in Egypt by ancient greek tourists (when the tomb was only a few hundred years old). “I visited and did not like anything but the sarcophagus” and “I cannot read the hieroglyphs.”
i am! obsessed! with this book from the late ming dynasty about scams to watch out for (esp. if you are a traveling merchant). this guy is like, there ARE immortals who can survive without food but you WILL NOT encounter them because they live alone in the mountains and don’t talk to anyone. if a monk comes to your house and claims to not need to eat, it’s probably because he’s secretly eating human fetuses, or something. eunuchs are invariably corrupt and the court system is useless. however, do NOT try to bribe anyone for a better SAT result for your idiot failson; this never works. nuns WILL try to seduce your wife into cheating on you. if your idiot failson does really badly on the SAT, make sure to have his father’s remains buried somewhere with A+ fengshui; this is Guaranteed to work (unless your wife is cheating on you).
oh yeah and ofc there’s the classic pretending-a-cow-is-the-reincarnation-of-your-deceased-mother scam. watch out for that one
answers to frequently asked questions:
the book is “The Book of Swindles” (i’m reading the columbia university press abridged edition)
its actually not the SAT its the civil service exams but like. same difference
yes it IS unhinged and you SHOULD read it
I need to know. What is the reincarnated cow mom scam?
found the english translation in a search.
buddhist monk encounters a friendly cow that likes to lick people when they are sweaty (salt)
monk drenches self in brine
monk goes to cow’s owner, claims the cow is the reincarnation of his deceased mother who was insufficiently devout, proves it by the cow having ‘affection’ for him like that between a mother and a son (licking his face profusely)
monk asks to buy the cow at half price but has no money (due to being monk), owner is so moved that he gives the monk the cow
monk now has a free cow (this is where I thought it would end) - fattens it up and has it slaughtered, sells half the meat and turns the other half to jerky, which he keeps hidden in his robes.
monk encounters a wealthy man and visits him at his house.
monk claims to be the spiritual brother of the wealthy man in a past life and that the wealthy man has been reincarnated as a human because he was too attached to the mortal world. monk claims that he has knowledge of past lives through being extremely devout and that he has been fasting for three years, consuming only hot water or clear tea. 'proves’ this by fasting for another month at the wealthy man’s house (by secretly eating the jerky).
Convinces the wealthy man that to show devotion he should give away a large sum of money for the monk to deliver to a holy man building a hermitage. Monk absconds with half the money.
The Kiss of Life - A utility worker giving mouth-to-mouth to co-worker after he contacted a low voltage wire, 1967
Taken in 1967 by Rocco Morabito, this photo called “The Kiss of Life” shows a utility worker named J.D. Thompson giving mouth-to-mouth to co-worker Randall G. Champion after he went unconscious following contact with a low voltage line. Thompson over 400 feet away recognized the critical situation and ran to the pole and scaled it to reach Champion. Realizing champion wasn’t breathing he delivered CPR and chest compression while supporting his friend; super impressive /difficult given the angle (if you get it wrong air goes into the stomach and inflates that instead).
This all happened oddly in Champions work anniversary. And weirder Rocco Morabito, a newspaper photographer who had been covering a strike down the road with eastern freight (this happened in Florida btw) happened to be nearby with his camera in a time that no one carried cameras daily. This photo won him the Pulitzer Prize for journalism photography.
Babe are you okay? I saw you reblogged The Kiss of Life, 1967 again.
Champion lived and he and Thompson stayed friends for the rest of their lives.
Image description: An undecorated block of text in a serif font. The text reads:
“I did things in my 30s that were ignored by the world, that could have been quickly labeled a failure. Here’s a classic example; in 1974 I did a movie called Phantom of the Paradise. Phantom of the Paradise, which was a huge flop in this country. There were only two cities in the world where it had any real success: Winnipeg, in Canada, and Paris, France. So, okay, let’s write it off as a failure. Maybe you could do that. But all of the sudden, I’m in Mexico, and a 16-year-old boy comes up to me at a concert with an album - a Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack- and asks me to sign it. I sign it. Evidently I was nice to him and we had a nice little conversation. I don’t remember the moment, I remember signing the album (I don’t know if I think I remember or if I actually remember). But this little 14 or 16, whatever old this guy was … Well I know who the guy is now because I’m writing a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth; it’s Guillermo del Toro. The work that I’ve done with Daft Punk it’s totally re.lated to them seeing Phantom of the Paradise 20 times and deciding they’re going to reach out to this 70-year-old songwriter to get involved in an album called Random Access Memories. So, what is the lesson in that? The lesson for me is being very careful about what you label a failure in your life. Be careful about throwing something in the round file as garbage because you may find that it’s the headwaters of a relationship that you can’t even imagine it’s corning in your future.”
