*yawns*

[sofiaviolet]

Recently

I've been following the latest LJwtf and going to work, pretty much. Managed to wear a skirt today, and I think every single person I work with complimented it.

Follow Friday

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die". Just introduce us to some new things to read.

• handsfree

  This community is for people who use computers (and other, usually manual tools) partially or entirely hands-free. It's not a community for developers of speech recognition tools; those communities already exist. It's where people with limited or no hand mobility can talk about our issues.

• white_collar, notable mainly for a weekly newsletter of White Collar fanworks.


• piledhigheranddeeper is a community for grad students.


• oursin, who I kind of want to be when I grow up, has lots of very thinky posts, especially about sex, gender, history, and/or archives.


• dingsi makes thinky posts mainly about trans issues and other gender stuff.


• pinesandmaples posts a really wide variety of things.


• rooibos just started grad school.


• If you'd like to meet even more people, check out zarhooie's Friending Frenzy.

Latest Things | followfriday

Links

• oursin: Musing on personal, private, secret - not synonyms. With additional thoughts on 'public space'

  Oft, my dearios, have I complained (yo, they b hearin the whinge from the Moon) of that journalistic habit of saying 'secret' for things that are, in fact, merely private or little-known (little known at least to them, hem-hem). I.e. the general public do not have access (unless, say, the building is opened once a year or whatever). And why should they, they don't have access to my front room, either, and the existence of my front room is not a secret.

• niqaeli: time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future...

  I am totally okay with people squeeing over how Dreamwidth is awesome, but I'm less thrilled at Dreamwidth being marketed as LJ-only-better (and yes, I'll cop that to an extent I too have been guilty of this) because the thing is, it's NOT. Dreamwidth is, in fact, its own damn creature, and is evolving its own own damn site culture and yes, there are a lot of people who fled LiveJournal to find refuge here and yes, there's a lot of what-could-have been speculation to be had given the people who founded Dreamwidth. But even with that: Dreamwidth is not what-LJ-could-have-been. Dreamwidth is what currently is with the amazing people we have and it is amazing and I am an evangelist for a reason.

• via cofax7: Beta request; more on LJ

  I’ve been thinking about the LJ comments-to-Facebook changes. Code structures what we think we can do; it influences what we think we should do as well, which is why Facebook makes it so very easy to post to Facebook from various sites (not just LJ). I find the concept of affordances useful in discussing this (you can download Larry Lessig’s whole book, Code, which also explores the concept). It has always been possible to repost content seen in a locked post. But suggesting that one can do so by checking a box normalizes it: makes it easy to imagine, which may also (not necessarily, and not for everyone, but even a shift of the average matters) make it easier to approve. And that’s putting aside the accessibility/accidental posting issues, which are significant. We should generally structure our institutions to support behavior we like and discourage behavior we don’t. With respect to comments, I think LJ is not following that rule, at least as many of us have understood commenting.

• Spoiler Alert!, in which Eddie Argos of Art Brut writes songs about comics


• Future Feminist Activist-Librarian: librarianship =/= dick-waving contest

  As a fellow librarian, may I suggest it would be a professional move to spend less time worrying that observers won’t be able to tell you apart from the paraprofessionals and "someone with a GED" (damn those lowly plebes and their ability to work with books!). To insist on the distinction, particularly in such dismissive terms, is insulting to your staff. Staff who presumably, though lacking credentials, are working in a library for a reason (and it's probably not because it pays incredibly well). It is also insulting to your patrons: is assisting them -- even if it's simply to point them toward the bathroom or unjamb the photocopier -- somehow beneath your dignity? Those "observers" whom you imagine are so obsessed with your credentials are probably, in the end, much more interested in whether their information needs are met promptly, knowledgeably and courteously than they are in whether the person meeting those needs has taken a class in Information Organization. As a commenter on the LISNews site suggested rather pointedly, "Staff who aren't willing to chip in to do ALL the things to make the library a success aren't professionals - they are just getting a paycheck." To seek professional respect by denegrating the work of non- and paraprofessionals whose service unarguably enables a library to function is (to put it bluntly) the behavior of an asshole.

• rydra_wong: Follow Friday Part I: the information pack

  Handy links for new arrivals, since I gather we've got several thousand around *g* -- please feel free to circulate these to anyone who might need them:

• dira: I have been mentally reasoning this out since, seriously, my sophomore year of undergrad.

  Since then, I have thought a lot about the injustice of his position, and I have come to what is probably an obvious conclusion: there are a lot of sentences that appear to end in prepositions but really they don't. They end in words that look like prepositions that are really part of a verb or some other compound phrase.

Plans

Get rained on and blown about. Hope the power stays on long enough to to chat with C. for a good long while. Drive up to NH with Ellie and shadesong for the art retreat, and catch the bus back. Drag Ellie to see Scott Pilgrim, get groceries, and pick up the hair stuff I forgot last week. Make attempt number 4 at purple hair: bleach a thick streak and purple it, then update the rest to black.