February 2012
5 posts
this one's for the vacant: it makes me want to... →
oldtobegin:
what, i’m supposed to go through the process of paying my dues all over again at 28 because some dude who thinks he isn’t pompous won’t read anything written by anybody who isn’t internet famous? no. it’s become increasingly apparent to me that the large majority of cultural commentators have zero interest in learning from other people (there are notable exceptions)
THIS. And...
Epic and Trenchant LIS Student Rant on Mefi →
We need to do something which I’ll admit is ill defined and perhaps impossible: we need to become the center of civic engagement in our communities. We’re one of the few places left in our society where a great cross-section of people regularly interact, and also one of the few places that is free and non-commercial. Even museums, to bow and scrape to the master of Austerity, have...
January 2012
4 posts
“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill...”
– (The Telegraph |Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society)
Ghod, what absolute piffle. He starts out heading in a fruitful direction when he talks about the economics of ebooks. They’re definitely a threat to the commons and especially to libraries, because they’re a...
Code Year Fail
Code Year, do your example problems really need to be about writing code to enforce gender binaries? I know it makes for an easy way to model conditional statements, but please think before you do this shit. This whole thing is supposed to be about lowering the barriers to entry, and here you are putting up new ones and perpetuating the stereotype of geek/tech spaces as being unwelcoming...
Soccer, Neoliberalism, and Gentrification →
This fascinating examination of Neoliberalism through the lens of the sanitization of European soccer supporter culture stirred up a lot of conflicts with me.
The piece is really long, and you should read it if you have any interest in European soccer or the cultural and economic state of things in France, but I’ll sum it up for you for our purposes here. Basically, the deal here is that...
“…because blogs are provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal,...”
– http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/the-digital-humanities-and-the-transcending-of-mortality/
Stanley Fish, that is a shitty, small, narcissistic project, and insofar as it accurately describes the larger academic project over the past couple of decades, it explains why I’ve never...
November 2011
10 posts
McDonaldland
citationneeded:
Additional family were revealed in a McDonaldland VHS tape “The Legend of Grimace Island”: Grimace has an unnamed mom, an unnamed dad, a grandma named “Winky”, a great, great grandma named Jenny Grimace, and might have a brother named “King Gonga,” who is the king of all Grimaces.
Link
KING OF ALL GRIMACES!
“I have come to appreciate more and more that technology itself is one way to...”
– My favorite prof. here won an ALA teaching award. Man, it’s great when people who actually deserve it get recognition. Here he pretty much encapsulates why I’m doing what I’m doing, and how I want to do it.
1 tag
Bloomberg = Monty Burns
…
They sing without juicers. They sing without blenders. They sing without flunjers, capdabblers and smendlers!
4 tags
The First Amendment (unabridged)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Just reminding Mayor Pennybags that the First Amendment has multiple clauses and all.
A Library Just Got Trashed by a City Government....
The ALA and our profession in general have been giving the Occupy Library folks great press and encouragement so far. However, talk was cheap until now. Now that the chips are really on the table, how will they respond? I’ve grown more and more discouraged with the white-upper-middle-class, conflict-averse, duck-and-cover mentality of this profession the more I’ve learned about it....
3 tags
#OWS is dead. Long live #OWS
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/... →
lastyearsfad:
I got into another argument about CS programs and women today - I think a relatively unexplored aspect of getting women into STEM majors/careers is the intensity of the programs at colleges.
I find it absolutely fucking stupid that I refused to study CS in college - I feel like I am a giant neon sign advertising how badly broken the system is, if I am so successful at work and...
“[…] I’ve grown up through both geek and jock culture and they’re both the same....”
–
Geek Feminism, “On Not Being OK” (via violettabellocchio)
On top of what is listed above, I get the strong feeling that a lot of nerdy/geeky types are incapable of accepting the fact that they might be utterly wrong when they make judgments about other people/say stupid shit and that they simply...
October 2011
6 posts
“And recognizing that our male dominated culture is fucked up doesn’t make you a...”
– David Combs (http://www.punknews.org/article/42845)
+1
2 tags
“Darwin’s fundamental insight as a biologist was that, among members of a...”
– What Comes Naturally : The New Yorker
Louis Menand is a badass. One of the few working public intellectuals who is both an original and erudite thinker and has a constitutional aversion to bullshit. Here he destroys Steven Pinker and stacks of EvPsych nonsense while barely breaking a sweat.
“People are informed today. People are online. People in Kansas do yoga, you...”
– — Brendan Burke, “a tall, tattooed truck driver with a degree from NYU and The New School” (Esquire) (via soupsoup)
THIS.
September 2011
1 post
1 tag
August 2011
1 post
It takes a lot of balls to execute an innocent... →
Perry has flaws, huge flaws. Not the least of which is that he presided over the execution of one of his constituents, Cameron Todd Willingham, who was probably innocent. But I’m not sure that’s a liability in today’s Tea Party–obsessed GOP. There’s a legend in Lone Star politics that one of Perry’s Republican rivals in Texas tested the Willingham issue in a focus group. One...
July 2011
3 posts
Are Encores Necessary? →
jaimeleigh:
maura:
three of the four Big Shows i’ve been to in the past few weeks have skipped encores. are they becoming passé?
Encores intrigue me! Like, we all know it is going to happen? So it is this really contrived thing, always. Band plays “last” song. Band didn’t play a) biggest hit, or b) biggest true fan hit. Band walks off. Everybody knows they are coming back! WE ALL KNOW...
“But then there’s also a lot of books that I’ve read about the American social...”
– Michael Schur walks us through Parks And Recreation’s third season (Part 1 of 4) | TV | Interview | The A.V. Club
Holy fuck, Michael Schur cites Bowling Alone (and also Rushmore, and also Thomas Frank!) as an inspiration for Parks and Recreation?! It’s like this show was invented just for me.
June 2011
3 posts
“Kelly Fallis, CEO of the web-based design firm Remote Stylist, says she’s had...”
–
There’s something about the hungriness of it all.
Quite.
Interesting to see the management class give the game away more and more blatantly as they grow increasingly secure in their victory over labor. You used to have to rely on Thomas Frank et al to dig this kind of stuff out of trade...
3 tags
May 2011
1 post
“A court reporter takes down testimony. A judge grants or denies objections from...”
– This one is for all the people in my program who are just here to get a credential and “don’t want to get political.” We spent a good chunk of our Libraries, Information, & Society class this semester trying to convince this faction that we’re preparing to go out into a...
April 2011
3 posts
“The Michigan Education Association has been quietly holding votes on a...”
– From MI Gearing Up to Fire All Teachers on Modern School. Between this and news that the Emergency Finanical Manager has fired the entire government of Benton Harbor, MI, things look dire for Michigan. The Emergency Financial Manager has even gone so far as to recommend that the Benton Harbor...
mattie: Too long for Twitter. →
mattie:
wockerjabby:
I don’t know who those people are, but a large number of my almost-adult students don’t know how to attach documents to email, use the basic tools of a word processing program, or insert an image into a document. it’s because, while they grew up with smart phones (and they all have twitter), they DIDN’T grow up with computers and most of them still never use a computer...
March 2011
4 posts
double nickels on the dime
oldtobegin:
is the punk rock primer for modern civics and philosophy.
read up.
To this day, probably way too much of my worldview comes from the Minutemen and Bad Religion. As someone with intellectual pretensions, that’s a little embarrassing, but when you cut down to the bone morally and ethically, they’ve steered me true. You can definitely do a lot worse than asking What Would...
February 2011
2 posts
On What the Super Bowl Has Become
I’m a fairly big sports fan who remains one despite having a lot of trouble with many of the more reactionary, patriarchal, jingoistic, and hypercapitalist aspects of sports culture. Ultimately the appeal of the good things outweighs the bad for me most of the time, which is why I keep coming back. However, anymore the Super Bowl (and the presentation and socio-politico-cultural orientation...
Wikipedia's Missing Women →
The whole thing is fucked up and sad in general, but this bit in particular leaped out at me.
“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.”
Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he...
January 2011
2 posts
December 2010
1 post
"02 - Where you'd like to be in 10 years."
jackflaps:
I’m just not in the room where they do that. So in ten years, I’d like to be in the room where they do that. Ideally I could make that happen without having to get a Ph.D. in information science or a master’s in urban planning, because those things are expensive and I’m already $25,000 in the red from Carleton, but I think if it was brutally necessary I’d find a way to deal with that....
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
2 posts
WSJ - Free Checking in Danger
Yet over the past few months, the middle class has seen a beneficial feature of modern banking—free checking—begin to vanish due to these “reforms” and the substantial loss of bank revenues that they’ve caused.
There are two main culprits in free checking’s demise: the Federal Reserve’s new rules, in effect since July, that restrict banks from charging...
Kate Harding | On Good Kids and Total Fucking...
twoseconds:
apatosaurus:
Kate Harding has some choice words about bullying in general and the Tyler Clementi case in particular. Her words are so choice that the language in the title of her post is saltier than I use on this blog. Her piece is awesome and worth the read.
Seriously, half the problem here is the astonishing number of adults willing to come to the defense of the kids who...
September 2010
2 posts
