Remember when Marie Kondo was telling us all to ask if things "spark joy"? And we all lost our damn minds folding our underwear into perfect rectangles and arguing over whether we were allowed to own more than 35 books? Good times. Anyway, I got a new one for you. I decided to tackle the basement Room Where Stuff...

"Garden" never means the same thing to any two people. I don't usually list "gardening" as one of my hobbies. I don't usually tell people "I'm a gardener." Because everyone has varying ideas of what that means, and because even other "gardeners" and I will have radically different notions of what "gardening"...

There's a scene in Angeline Boulley's novel Firekeeper's Daughter where the main character, an Ojibwe teenager, describes her coming-of-age "berry fast." She loves berries of all kinds, so she committed to not eating any for an entire year. She otherwise lived a normal life - going to events where berries were...

No, really. I'm sitting here reading about the Bath School disaster: Bath School disaster and I discover that the building was rigged with a bunch of dynamite and something called "pyrotol." I'd never heard of the latter, so I Wikipedia rabbit holed that too: Pyrotol Apparently, the US had so much of this stuff left...

At this time last year, I was scrambling so hard to get everything done that I straight up closed the library for the last week and a half of school. This year, I'm better at my job. Better enough that instead of closing the library, I'm mostly sitting here being bored in it. It is a library. It is hard to stay...

Since ChatGPT launched, I have had a hypothesis. Since it is a probability-calculating machine trained on the text contents of the Internet, it should return the "average result" for Web-content-based questions. For example, if I want the average of all blog posts on some common keyword, I should be able to get an...

I am not a historian. I'm sure this is all very simplistic and reductive. BUT I got spicy this morning and searched "why did the Roman Empire fall?" And this pop-history listicle seems to have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to teach us in the present moment: History dot com: 8 reasons why Rome fell I'm sure reviewing these is...

The following exchange popped up in the teacher group chat just now: First Year Teacher: I have several seniors absent. Do I mark them as present? I know today is Senior Skip Day. Principal: You mark them absent. Senior Skip Day is not on the calendar. An unexcused absence? That's it? I went through high school in...

For those of you in the United States, Canada, or the Bahamas, may I recommend: CoCoRaHS - the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network CoCoRaHS is, as the name implies, a community volunteer effort to measure rain, hail, and snow amounts across the member nations. It's also fun as hell. I LOVE WEATHER...

Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the fact that my titanium bones make me a human barometer who detects every change in said weather with screaming bone pain. Maybe it's the end of the school year. Maybe it's a lot of things. But: Today, I have a hefty case of "what is the use?" when it comes to our AI future. This...

One of the other librarians emailed this morning asking if the rest of us had gotten an email from an outfit called Librar Labs. We hadn't, but I looked them up. And yeah, this whole webpage can fuck off: Librar Labs How can it fuck off specifically? Let us count the ways: "Librar makes it easier to set up and...

Most of my friends pull out their phones even in the middle of the woods. I tend to roll my eyes and tolerate this. Merlin and PlantNet are certainly useful. But I grew up on field guides and conversations with more experienced naturalists. Instant AI-enabled possible-answers feel more like junk food info to me....