@jessamyn@glammr.us
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

jessamyn

@jessamyn@glammr.us

Rural tech geek. Researcher. Librarian resistance. Moss collector. Postcard enjoyer. I own MetaFilter. ✉️ box 345 05060 ✉️ (she/her)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

evan, (edited ) to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

You get in an argument on a social platform and the other person blocks you. What do you do?

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

@penryu @evan Yeah my first rule of engagement is "don't argue" unless I think a person is making a good faith effort to achieve some genuine understanding. And even then my other rule of thumb is "two replies and out" so I guess that is like moving on.

jessamyn, to random
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

One of the things I have been happiest to do as ALA's Vermont Chapter Councilor is to vote to give Dolly Parton an honorary lifetime membership.

We voted on this in January. For some ALA reason the press release came out Thursday. Please enjoy this READ poster with national treasure, Dolly Parton.

https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/04/dolly-parton-awarded-honorary-membership-american-library-association

kellan, to random
@kellan@fiasco.social avatar

I want a conversational interface to organizing and classifying spending and budget information.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

@fraying @kellan Seriously. Some people very much like this sort of work. 👋 (am not an accountant tho)

jessamyn, to random
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

2023 thread on Wikipedia work. I started out uploading a bunch of pictures to Wikimedia Commons that I'd gotten from newly-public domain books 🎉 Seven new or improved images. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListFiles/Jessamyn&ilshowall=1

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

If I read an article about a deceased person on Wikipedia and it doesn't have a pic, I try to track down a photo of them, shrink it down to low resolution, and add it to their article with a fair use justification.

Latest is this nice pic of Andrew Foster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Foster_(educator)

I wrote a little "how to" about how to do this in 2021. https://www.librarian.net/stax/5200/how-to-adding-fair-use-images-to-peoples-wikipedia-pages/

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Helped @zinelib and @kwooten write an article about media activist, baker and all around terrific person Jen Angel, may her memory be a blessing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jen_Angel

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

I very rarely write Wikipedia articles about white men but today I made an exception. Alexander Cann was a mess of a man but he did parachute into the New Guinea jungle with a film camera and document the rescue of some WWII soldiers who had crashed there. NB the usual "white gaze" problems with the film, but also a weird interesting story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Cann

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Rainy weekend day, good for writing. I checked the "articles that need writing" list, LGBTQ section, and found Beth Montague-Hellen who won (with Alex Bond) the Royal Society's Athena Prize for her work with LGBTQ+ STEM. He had an article, she didn't. Resolved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_Montague-Hellen

jessamyn, to random
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Moving my annual "what I've read" lists over here to Mastodon. Last year's list is here

https://twitter.com/jessamyn/status/1478058276734615553

This will be a 2023 thread.

First up: Gender Queer. I was the first person to check this out of my library somehow. I'd only seen the "racy" parts when reading internet stories by haters. This book is, OF COURSE, much more complex and thoughtful and it's a great look at what it means to be questioning gender and sexuality even when growing up in a totally supportive household.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 19: Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. If you've ever had "burn it all to the ground" feelings and you'd like a book that also shared your deep hatred for empire and colonialism, but you also like novels, pick this up. A singular book. Long and deep.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 20: Cold Water. I liked but did not love this book with a few interwoven story lines about a Europe falling apart and the people trying to get things done, track down the missing guy, and keep their heads above water. Three female leads who felt somewhat interchangeable. Good plot, lightweight characters.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 21: The Sex Lives of Cannibals. This is a book about a young man and his girlfriend who go to live in Kiribati when she gets a job as a foreign aid worker. I picked it up because my former landlady used to live there and I was curious. Other than the title (racist, misleading and intended to be titillating?) this book had some interesting anecdotes but was ultimately, also racist. The author later "somehow" got a job at the World Bank and if you know that, you know a lot about this book.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 22: Growing Up Weightless. Ford is a legend in scifi circles but this book about a teenager growing up on the moon dreaming of the stars was just confusing to me.The characters were strong and the lunar descriptions excellent but the plot not only (mostly) went nowhere, there were a few long divergences into virtual D&D-type gaming that seemed pointless. I read most of the book thinking "Am I missing something?"

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 23: The Dispatcher. Scalzi is also a legend but one of the things I like about him is that his books are predictably up my street and enjoyable. This was a book with a simple premise that murdered people (unlike people who die in other ways) somehow disappear and wake up alive and naked in their beds. This creates a job for murderers in situations where someone might die in another way. Some neat wrinkles. Short and more fun than a book about murder should be.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 24: Critical Mass. This was a sequel to a book I liked decently but this one had a lot less charm and a lot more "This is how NFTs and blockchain are going to save civilization as we know it" (I paraphrase) type of discourse. There was also a lot of that specific "These people are tightly disciplined, there can be no mistakes!" rhetoric coupled with a hothead character who is ungovernable. Well written but rambley and ultimately not for me.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 25: Antimatter Blues. Sequels to great scifi books can often be terrible. This one was not, it was really good. We see our "expendable" character from the last novel actually getting to sort some things out while no longer (or is he?) being expendable. Quick paced and just a little funny, I enjoyed this.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 26: Lost in Shangri-La. An interesting story of a plane crash in New Guinea, the interactions between the crashees and the indigenous people, and their eventual rescue. While the author tries to mitigate some of the historical documents' racist and sexist language, there's only so much he can do. A few characters who are well-documented historically get more attention than the Filipino doctors who did some serious hard work. Enjoyable but also flawed.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 27: The Twyford Code. A fun take on the "total amateur finds hidden code and spends a lot of time tracking down clues while other people think they may be losing it" genre that I enjoy. This one features a librarian character and keeps you guessing right up until the very last pages.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 28: A First Time for Everything. This book, which takes place in 1989, had a QR code in the front so I could listen to a soundtrack that would accompany it and it was just the greatest thing. An autobiographical story of a nerdy awkward kid who learns some things about himself and others during a month in Europe before high school.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 29: The God of Endings. Not my usual read, a vampire-adjacent tale of the undead and what it's like to be a quasi-vampire with a conscience and a love for art. Beautifully written and evocative. Not too scary but with a lot of moody ambience.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 30: Papergirls. I have a weird complaint about this book and that is that it was too heavy so it was hard to read in bed. I otherwise adored this compilation of the Papergirl stories which involve a lot of complex time travel, meeting some of your future selves, and navigating friendships and relationships.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 31: On Whitcomb Hill. This was a gift from a writer friend about the 1840s farmhouse he purchased with his wife and thoughts about fixing it up, and the rural landscape, the people who had built the house and farmed the land. A lot going on it it and it's hard for me to say what I night have thought about it if I didn't know the writer but since I DID know the writer, I enjoyed getting to go along with him on this journey.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 32: How to Keep House While Drowning. A friend suggested this since I've had a tough year or so. It's a pretty short and supportive self-help style book that has good strategies for just what it says on the cover. How to take care of yourself without shaming yourself that maybe you're not taking care of your house the way you'd like to. I found it useful.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 33: Fractured Infinity. The queer multiverse love story you've been waiting for. Maybe. This is a great debut novel that goes in some interesting places with multiverse ideas while not getting bogged down in the hard science aspects of it. At times funny and poignant, but not too terribly confusing (sometimes a problem with multiverse books) I enjoyed being along for this ride.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 34: World Running Down. A neat combination of a desert salvager dystopian novel and a trans queer romance. Valentine's been saving money for his transition by doing a series of somewhat sketchy salvage jobs with his only-sort-of-supportive work partner but then he meets Osric (an AI which usually lives in the network, ported somehow into a human body) who gives him the option of doing one big job and maybe getting everything he wants.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 35: Sensory Life on the Spectrum. This is a collection of comics about being autistic. Like any collection, it's a bit uneven--segments range from advice for allistic folks, to journeys of self-discovery, to metaphors about the autistic experience--but also engaging and informative. This book was originally published out of a Kickstarter campaign and then found a major publisher. I learned stuff from reading it and you probably will too.

jessamyn,
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

Book 36: Almost American Girl. This is a tough memoir about a young woman with a very difficult mom who gets uprooted (told she's going on vacation and then just... doesn't get to go home?) from her life in Korea to live in Alabama with her mom's new husband who she's never met. Her mom has her reasons, but there's still a lot of sobbing and misery and while it's well done and eventually works out okay, it wasn't a story I needed to read.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • anitta
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • love
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • mdbf
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ngwrru68w68
  • megavids
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • provamag3
  • tester
  • Leos
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •