Notes
📚 There are still spots available for online attendance at Public Librarianship in Contentious Times, a conference hosted by the University of Michigan School of Information and the Michigan Library Association. School librarians should find this relevant to their work as well and are welcome.
Pro tip: too tired/anxious to introduce yourself at a social event? Wear a bookish shirt and wait for people to come ask you about what you’re reading.
🔖🖖🏻 Happy Star Trek Day! I just read Teaching in Trek: A Look at the Education System of the Future by @joepraska@universeodon.com.
I love thinking, reading, & writing about this stuff. This is great timing as I watch Keiko O’Brien start the school on DS9. Thanks for writing this, Joe!
Finally watched the Amsterdam episode of Ted Lasso and just really missed Amsterdam the whole time. It was a really cool place to be and I’m sorry that between the weather and transit strikes we didn’t get into the city more. Also, gezellig is kind of like Dutch hygge.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my first writing craft book. In case you didn’t believe that I was excited, I recently found my journal from 7th grade and in it I write about that very book.
📺🖖🏻 Finished my rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation today. It felt much less intense watching “All Good Things…” now than when it originally aired, probably because I can visit my Enterprise-D friends whenever I want.
🔖 💻 Read Now is the time for grimoires: It isn’t data that will unlock AI, it is human expertise by Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing).
This is the most helpful take on generative AI that I’ve seen: create a prompt that is basically a computer program written in prose instead of code.
Fan Studies Network North America is October 11 -15 and open for registration! I’ll be facilitating a conversation among FanLIS scholars about fan tagging practices and ways libraries can use their collections to engage fans.
📚🍳 Started reading the introduction to Jules Sherred’s Crip Up the Kitchen: Tools, Tips and Recipes for the Disabled Cook and I might cry.
“The kitchen is the worst room in the house if you are disabled. I’m about to change that and make life easier for everyone.”
🔖📚 Read Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo: ‘People sneer at the things women and girls love’ by Sian Cain (The Guardian).
She really is my hero.
🔖📚 Read Falling in Love With the Avengers, America’s Most Toxic Work Force by Leigh Bardugo (New York Times, gift link)
I love Leigh Bardugo so much.
💬📚 “I hunker down with books when I need time to process what’s happening in my own life.
Books give me the space to breathe.”
- Kelly J. Baker, Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness
Currently reading: Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness by Kelly Baker 📚
Austin Kleon says to climb your creative family tree. Kelly is like an intellectual big sister, so I’m starting with her. (Katie Rose Guest Pryal is another.) 📝
Finished reading: From Bad to Cursed by Lana Harper 📚
Loved it even more than Payback’s A Witch. Full review coming later this week.
📚💬 “Disaster and hero, monster and martyr, beauty and beast . . . Choose your own dichotomy. Because it doesn’t matter. We were always built to be both.” Lana Harper, For Better or Cursed
W: I just don’t have a framework for doing this kind of writing…
Me: You need to read a lot of it and then just start writing.
W: holds up invisible mirror
If generative AI traffic is declining, does that mean AI can just become another tool we use and we can talk about it normally without talking about it exclusively?
Everybody else: You seen Barbieheimer yet?
Me: Nah, I’m going to the theater to see Terminator & Robocop. (Time travel is rad. So are retro cinema experiences.)
The belief at the beginning of a writing project that we don’t know how to write it comes for all of us who write, no matter how many writing projects we’ve finished or awards we’ve won, and IT HAS COME FOR ME RIGHT NOW.
I just donated to and joined Students Protecting Education, a national organization that a group of high schoolers started in response to book banning in their community. It’s awesome that young people want to step up to save the world. It’s critical that we don’t expect them to do it alone.
I love that they were able to let Worf’s skin be the same color as Michael Dorn’s.
Welcome to the analog part of qualitative data analysis. Whenever I get to the coding-the-codes stage, I need to channel Austin Kleon and use my hands. I sometimes handwrite the codes on index cards, but this time I printed them up and am cutting them into strips.
In the US? You might think the Kids Online Safety Act is good but before you decide, please read this piece at Ars Technica, this piece from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this week’s newsletter from Charlie Jane Anders. Then if you think it’s bad, contact your congresspeople.