liprairian

[liprairian]

not being able to borrow an ebook because someone else has it on loan is stupid as hell. like babe this is Document. these are pixels.

[liprairian]

My roommate thought she hated cooking and then she moved in with me and started using knives that were actually sharp and realized cooking is fun. Sometimes I wonder how many other situations are like this. It's not you, or your skills. It's just the lack of correct tools. Everyone knows you need a knife in the kitchen but no one mentions a sharpening stone.

[liprairian]

There's nothing wrong with Hooters per se, but only a deeply sexually repressed society would be capable of producing Hooters. It's wild that it existed alongside Applebee's and Chilli's. Yeah man let's go to the psychosexual chicken wing place.

[liprairian]

i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.

“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside

“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)

we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don���t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.

we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.

two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺

got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks

expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv

was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this

tiny……….

[liprairian]

So, I see in the notes that this has been said, but cozy mysteries were the first genre to have the "cozy" appended, quite a long time before the "cozy fantasy" thing got big. That said, I hope you don't mind if I expand a bit on that - I'd never actually consciously reflected on this and it was a lot of fun!

The cozy murder mystery genre has a ton of parallels to the Regency romance genre. Others have said the cozy murder mystery genre has been around since Agatha Christie - I haven't independently corroborated this, but I'm going by it anyway. It's been around at least for the literal half of my life (I realized today) that I've been working in libraries, at any rate. The parallel author there would be Georgette Heyer, who invented the Regency romance as we know it.

Since their inventions, these genres have crystallized into extremely recognizable tropes and forms. The original authors were prolific enough that you could fairly easily identify formulas for their work, and those formulas are by and large respected as foundational to the genre. The titles and covers are distinctive but the same - candy colours and punny titles for cozy mysteries, rank-dropping and dubious period dress for Regency romances.

Cozy fantasy owes a lot to cozy mystery as a genre - cozy mystery established a lot of the elements that get touted as staples of cozy fantasy, like the warm cast of fun side characters and the relatively low stakes for the protagonist. (For the protagonist! Everyone else can go hang - but often in, say, crime mystery, the stakes are much higher for the protagonist as well). Legends and Lattes, in particular, feels like a specific callback to the cozy mystery genre, from its punny title to its ultra-specific setting (I can think of at least two long and popular series of cozy mysteries set in coffee/tea shops off the top of my head).

It's been really interesting seeing which aspects of this established genre get usurped into the "cozy" prefix - particularly the ones that are more marketing than literary, like the punny titles. Personally I view it a bit like, oh, cladistics in biology maybe, where the reasons something is considered a 'dinosaur' have more to do with specific characteristics they share with their ancestors than with any ideas the rest of us have when thinking about what a dinosaur is. I'm fascinated to see where things shake out long-term re: what bits a book needs to have to be considered "cozy".

Help why are we sincerely throwing “cozy” in front of everything? “Cozy murder mystery” okay what’s next cozy international heist? Cozy body horror? Cozy psychological thriller? “Haven’t you always wanted a Stephen King book where they drink tea and knit sweaters and grow parsnips?” Someone is dead Rebecca. “It’s about a young detective trying to solve the disappearance of his neighbor’s evicerator in the alps.” Fucking free me.

[liprairian]

Ah, the cargo cult method of software usage.

today was the day we finalized the migration of essential software at work from some old and busted shit that was ready to die at any time, to the new cloud version of the same software that we are no longer responsible for maintaining. which is good because no one was actually maintaining ours. it's just been slowly crufting into unusability for a decade. so anyway they set aside an hour for a teams meeting where they'd walk us through the different interface and how to go through normal processes.

"it's not that big a change," they said. "it's all the same stuff, it just looks a little different," they said.

they did not account for the fact that the primary user of this software is someone who doesn't actually know how it works or what it's doing. they learned how to do their job entirely through rote memorization. they know which buttons they are supposed to press in which order, and that is the full extent of what they know. they also did not account for the fact that this person's processes were learned thirdhand from other people who were not using this software normally to begin with.

it's like. imagine if someone had only ever used tumblr in the app. and you try to get them to use it in a desktop browser, but they cannot figure out how to post. and you go through explaining where the button is and how to format text and add tags, even though you could have sworn it was all the same in the app. but then they're like, "okay, but what's the phone number" and you're like "what" and they're like "the phone number to call to make a post?" and it turns out somehow they still had the ability to post by calling a phone number, and every time they posted on the app they called the post in first and then edited the audio post to transcribe it into text before screenshotting the text for a photo post. and nothing you can say to them will make them understand that none of that is necessary or correct. they shouldn't have even been able to do some of that. they can just type into the post box now, like a civilized person. "okay," they say, "but what is the phone number, though? because when i made my account my friend gave me this checklist and the first thing on it is to call the number."

so anyway we were on that teams call for almost three hours and they still don't have a handle on the new software

[liprairian]

Re: that last comment, I've known library workers to be mildly freaked out by that exact thing - it's been so long since books were commonly sold well-made that a book that opens flat seems like a suspicious anomaly.

publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur

[liprairian]

... Tumblr? Tumblr what is happening

@icryyoumercy you didn't tell me that y'all had a dog-napping!

I had to hear on the radio that a pair of dogs had been abducted from Zurich and taken all the way to Poland.

Gamut would like to volunteer for kidnapping! Zurich to Poland? Can you imagine the car ride all the way there - and then back again? This is the best news ever, she didn't know this was possible.

[liprairian]

Hi. Shrieking. Absolutely just whistling like an abandoned teakettle over here. This is truly what it's like. One time the school librarian dumped out all the protected-personal-info storage of the public librarian and just left it lying around for anyone to find because she was mad at her former friend on the library board.

Many such cases.

One of the underratedly funny aspects of my job is that when I say it's like a therapy session trying to get these untrained rural library managers to weed their collections, I quite legitimately mean it's a case of "what happened in your childhood to make you this way".

[liprairian]

A series of events:

1. Teens request new graphic novel at library

2. Library purchases said graphic novel

3. Library manager actually looks at graphic novel and discovers that it contains, quote, "pages and pages of pornography"

4. Library manager is shocked and uncomfortable and ensures that absolutely everyone she can possibly reach is warned about the Sneak Porno

5. In her defense, the cover looks like this:

6. In her not-defense, the publisher's blurb looks like this:

7. I have to sit there and give wide-eyed blinks while my coworker, a research academic party girl, fascinatedly Googles 'Omegaverse' and attempts to determine whether or not it's the same as furries.

[liprairian]

In honour of Bil, the cranky old Scotsman who, when I told him I wouldn't be visiting his town again for another year, ran home to get his copy to give me, along with a set of Celtic runestones he'd carved himself.

He may be gone now - one of the things he was cranky about was the fact that he thought his doctors were insulting his intelligence by not telling him he was dying - but he also struck me as one of those tough-as-nails unkillable types who managed to pickle themselves in the 70s with unrecorded combinations of novel substances. I wouldn't be shocked to see him there every year for the next 20. Either way, I'll carry on his tradition of making this book available by whatever means are at my disposal.

For no reason, here is Art Spiegelman's 1991 graphic novel Maus, for free on the Internet Archive.

[liprairian]

One of the underratedly funny aspects of my job is that when I say it's like a therapy session trying to get these untrained rural library managers to weed their collections, I quite legitimately mean it's a case of "what happened in your childhood to make you this way".

[liprairian]

People didn't respect Miss Level. They liked her, in an unthinking sort of way, and that was it. Mistress Weatherwax was right, and Tiffany wished she wasn't. 'Why did you and Miss Tick send me to her, then?' she said.

'Because she likes people,' said the witch, striding ahead. 'She cares about 'em. Even the stupid, mean dribbling ones, the mothers with the runny babies and no sense, the feckless and the silly and the fools who treat her like some kind of a servant. Now that's what I call magic seein' all that, dealin' with all that, and still goin' on. It's sittin' up all night with some poor old man who's leavin' the world, taking away such pain as you can, comfortin' their terror, seein' 'em safely on their way .. . and then cleanin' 'em up, layin' 'em out, making 'em neat for the funeral, and helpin' the weeping widow strip the bed and wash the sheets - which is, let me tell you, no errand for the faint-hearted - and stayin' up the next night to watch over the coffin before the funeral, and then going home and sitting down for five minutes before some shouting angry man comes bangin' on your door 'cos his wife's havin' difficulty givin' birth to their first child and the midwife's at her wits' end and then getting up and fetching your bag and going out again... We all do that, in our own way, and she does it better'n me, if I was to put my hand on my heart. That is the root and heart and soul and centre of witchcraft, that is. The soul and centre!'

A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett

[liprairian]

Yeah, it doesn't always have to be a book ban. If it really must be kept for some other reason - for medical woo, high demand is a big reason - we can always reclassify it to keep it out of the section where people look for actual medical information. DDC 001.9 is a fantastic place to put those kinds of things.

I was listening to a podcast discussing the question of what to do if a library book isn't just objectionable but has dangerously wrong information- in this case, advice to feed your infant raw milk- and they were conflicted about it because they didn't want to pile on the book bans. As someone who is not yet a librarian but has done a bunch of research on how libraries work, here's my advice if any of you have a similar situation:

Libraries get rid of books all the time- it's the only way they can find room for new books- and the first books to go are outdated legal and medical textbooks, where incorrect information could get a person killed or arrested. So if you find dangerously incorrect medical information in a book, please tell a librarian! You don't have to petition for a book ban, just politely bring it to the attention of the reference librarian! If they decide you're right, they'll remove it, and if not, they'll keep it. It doesn't make you a member of Moms for Liberty if you alert them to something they missed when weeding.

(Librarians who see this, feel free to add on if there's more to it!)

[liprairian]

This was interesting to me as a sample bias because it's almost too expansive to be seen - you will get more answers from people who live in densely populated (read: more transit-equipped) areas because... there are more people in them. There are tons of other factors at play, of course, but that one stuck out to me as a bit of a catch-22.

[liprairian]

I have a rant perpetually locked-and-loaded about how libraries have two distinct levels of services, and how people making funding decisions by definition only access one of those levels. The first level is the one in the original post, the books and the storytimes and the cool 3D printing initiatives - the nerd fantasy. And don't get me wrong, we do all that, and really well!

But the second level is the public computer and printers, the de facto daytime homeless shelter, the 211 centre for everyone who doesn't have a phone to call it. If you have a job where you're making funding decisions, by definition you get paid enough that you aren't using most or all of that second level, and most of the time when you walk into the library, you won't even register that it exists. That's how you get the fantasy of late library hours where everyone reads quietly, and that's why we tend to get so annoyed at the fantasy itself. For me, at least, it brings up the frustration of our 'appeal' factor needing to be entirely focused towards those first-level users in order to get funding for second-level services, and feeling like we need to sweep the second-level users under the rug to do it.

This is the DREAM.

[liprairian]

hi i just wanted to say that i, too, miss the chattier aspect of Old Tumblr. also that i really respect how nicholas sparks is your nemesis. both because i think more writers should have nemeses, and also because nicholas sparks is such a perfectly loathsome choice. A+

If I am known for nothing else on the internet, let me be known for my one-sided blood feud with Nicholas Sparks, curses be upon his name.