It's a Krill Eye

i'm jay and i'm hanging out online

[feluka]

youre never alone. bacteria

[quayrund]

Eric Ravilious

[acheronist]

sorry it really is so fucked up that one of the best preserved artifacts from the cannibalism expedition is a preserved slab of corn beef from the botulism lead poison canned food. i cant believe we have that

[acheronist]

like i love this thing so much. its so viscerally appalling in every single way. franklin expedition mystery meat i'm your biggest fan

[karvina]

variations on "feel old yet" meme:

lying (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 36 years ago

lying (undershooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 7 years ago

lying by a ridiculous amount (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 900 years ago

lying by a ridiculous amount (undershooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 15 minutes ago

real date of event no one reading was alive for: feel old yet? the great san francisco earthquake happened 118 years ago

real date of event no one reading was alive for or cares about: feel old yet? prince frederick henry died 395 years ago

event no one reading was alive for and also lying: feel old yet? the great san francisco earthquake happened 4 years ago

event that did not happen: feel old yet? brian mulroney was assassinated 48 years ago

event that did not happen and even if it did this would be a lie: feel old yet? brian mulroney was assassinated 197 years ago

real date of event on a cosmological scale: feel old yet? the sun was formed 4,600,000,000 years ago

lying on a cosmological scale (undershooting): feel old yet? the sun was formed 12 years ago

lying on a cosmological scale (overshooting): feel old yet? the first episode of spongebob aired 12,000,000,000 years ago

real date of a personal anecdote that only you know or card about: feel old yet? i made a really good stir fry 5 years ago

reversal: feel young yet? frozen 3 is coming out in 3 years

reversal on a cosmological scale: feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 8,000,000,000 years

reversal (lying about event): feel young yet? the first episode of spongebob will air in 3 years

reversal (lying about time, overshooting): feel young yet? frozen 3 is coming out in 8,000,000,000 years

reversal (lying about time, undershooting): feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 3 years

reversal (lying about time, really undershooting): feel young yet? the sun will collapse in 12 minutes

real date of a recurring event that wasn't very long ago: feel old yet? halloween was 13 days ago

lying about recurring event: feel old yet? halloween was 10,000 years ago

reversal of recurring event: feel young yet? thursday is tomorrow

reversal of personal anecdote: feel young yet? my laundry is done in 52 minutes

real(?) date of a nonspecific event: feel old yet? something happened 2 years ago

lying about the reader (undershooting): feel old yet? you were born 5 years ago

lying about the reader (overshooting): feel old yet? you were born 650 years ago

making a reasonable guess about the reader: feel old yet? you were born 22 years ago

technically telling the truth about the reader: feel old yet? you were born between 0 and 120 years ago

threatening the reader: feel young yet? you will die in 7 days

non sequitur: feel old yet? half of all chameleon species on earth live in madagascar

non sequitur (lying): feel old yet? chameleons are immune to fire

lying on several levels: feel old yet? chameleons were invented 36 years ago

self-reference: feel old yet? i started writing this post 40 minutes ago

giving up: feel old yyet?th e emmenkr,tn dbw a 8 gn m hk\

i can't finish the joke someone else come up with a punchline: feel old yet?

declarative statement: you feel old.

subversive declarative statement: time isn't even real.

reference another meme: feel old yet? yeah. this is the beach that makes you old.

reference another meme specifically about injecting non sequiturs into long posts: feel old yet? the glue that lets you walk up and down anything was invented 36 years ago

[critter-creature-or-beast]

The third one looks cool

[adamshallperish]

can i say something

[onceiwashere]

Satire requires being funny and good lest it be unfunny and bad

[grox]

I wanna look at him forever

[birchworm]

Select works of Gérard Trignac, a French artist known for grand and fantastic architectural landscapes.

[sapropel]

Stop pussy footing around it. Are you coming to my Chinese giant salamander's bar mitzvah or not

[carriesthewind]

Is it ok to take notes in the margins of library books?

No, because it's rude to other readers.

No, because it can damage the book.

No, because it's never ok to take notes in the margins of books.

Yes, because I need to take notes understand what I'm reading.

Yes, because it enhances the experience for other readers.

Yes, because if it bothers other readers, they should just buy their own copy.

No (some other reason - please put tags)

Yes (some other reason - please put in tags)

Voting ended onMay 8, 2023

I have very strong opinions on this subject, and I'm curious how others feel.

[lollybliz]

Hi, public librarian (lower case l, no degree) here, please don't.

We're already, in general, severely underfunded. Shocker, the capitalist hellscape we're stuck isn't great about allocating county budget to such a socialist outlet.

When you write in the margins, that's considered damage, and we just do not have the funding to replace every book we have to weed for damage.

Use sticky notes. Please. Write your margin notes on sticky notes in the book. You can even keep your place that way. But please please please don't write in the books, don't crack the spines, and don't dog ear them. That's just going to force us to weed them, and we can't always replace them.

[elfgrove]

#we flip through every book that comes in the drop off to see if the pages are loose torn damaged or written on #and we're supposed to set aside all of those for checking by collections #to see if its severe enough to warrant weeding #and frankly as the budget gets tighter i know im not the only one turning a blind eye to some damage #because i know we wouldnt be able to replace it anyway #better to let it slide til it gets worse #but its a serious problem

[knottahooker]

Hi, capital L Librarian here, if you think your notes enhance other readers' experience of the book 1) you're wrong and 2) no one's going to get to read them anyway because you damaged the book and we had to throw it away.

Good job breaking it, hero.

[somesortofitalianroast]

Also capital L Librarian here: do not write in the books. do not highlight the books. do not cross out the swear words. do not mark in the book! If you do, we remove the book. It's been damaged. And damaged books are removed from our collection, usually to the trash can. And replacing books with intentional damage eats into our already tight budgets!

[ancientphantom]

I see some people in the notes complaining that the problem is Evil Librarian Weeding, so let me give you some extra context, as another capital-L librarian:

Yes, we get rid of books that have been extensively written in. (Most of us will try to rescue them with ink and whiteout and glue and desperation, but that only works with small amounts of writing, like when a kid puts their name in the front cover because they haven't yet learned they shouldn't with books they don't own.) There are a lot of good reasons for this and absolutely none of them are "being snobby" or "purist":

A) Book annotation can be misleading. Okay, sure, you're hopefully making good annotations, but can you be sure? Even more important, if YOU can annotate the book, so can everyone else. Librarians don't have the time to not only flip through every book with writing but also read every annotation to prevent people from putting blatantly incorrect information in there. Some people are conspiracy theorists; some people are bad actors; and some people mean well but are legitimately just wrong. We have to get rid of the book because we can't guarantee it's quality is what it says on the back anymore, either in content or physical form.

2) Book annotation can be abusive. Please imagine that in addition to you making your happy thoughtful annotations in your book, the Worst Person You've Ever Heard Of is also doing that. Imagine what the inside of, say, a book about the Holocaust would look like if people like this were allowed to write in it and we kept putting it back out there. Can you imagine what books about trans people would look like? Books about disabled justice? We also don't have time to read every annotation to make sure it isn't vile, and that means we have to get rid of books with writing in them to make sure we don't accidentally expose our patrons to hate speech at their public library. It's one thing to read about the horrors of the Holocaust, and another entirely to see pro-Nazi annotations from random people in your community.

3) Book annotations are visibly rejected by most patrons. Yeah, I know someone out there is going to respond with "excuse you I only annotate in full medieval illumination, my copy of The Devil Wears Prada looks like the Book of Kells," but no one does that and, surprisingly, it doesn't matter. Nothing makes a patron decide NOT to take a book like flipping through it and seeing handwriting; i have put things back at the checkout finish line for this frequently. Lots of patrons instantly just turn it in to us and tell us it's damaged, because most of the time they also do not have time to read a bunch of unasked-for annotations to see if they'll enhance or detract from their reading experience. Many get mad, because they're used to picking up pristine book copies for sale and get actively angry we have grottier books people have been writing in. And even if they aren't opposed to the idea, it still turns a lot of readers off simple because its messy looking. Writing in the margins creates visual clutter. You may LIKE visual clutter, which is great, but most people trying to read the newest Steel or learn about the Civil War before their test next week probably do not. More often than not, the attempt to engage with another reader via marginalia actually drives drives away, and they never read it.

4) Book annotation does damage the book. It's the nature of books to be a mostly temporary medium; paper degrades or gets eaten by bugs, glue dries and rots, bindings break, etc, and any foreign element you add hastens that. Ink on pages makes them more fragile, which makes them tear earlier and more often; graphite from pencils gets ground into the paper permanently and starts blotting out the while page after a while; dog ears simply fall off. An annotated book doesn't live as long as an unannotated one, and since we have negative money to be buying new books when we don't have to, we try very hard to protect them. (Note this doesn't matter for your home collection; your books will probably live about the same amount of time unless they're being handled 50 times a day like ours.)

If it helps, you can think of it like a comment section. If anyone can say anything, you need mods to be on constant duty reading every line of text, which translates into zillions of worker hours no one has even if our (usually government or nonprofit so not rolling in the dollars) funding wanted to pay for it. And since we don't have that and will never have it, and these are physical objects so that process can't be automated, we have to do the responsible thing as a profession: disallow comments entirely.

Ironically, most libraries actively seek patron comments in the form of reviews and recommendations to others, which we often post online or on bulletin boards. We love it when readers tell each other their thoughts and encourage each other to read. But the inside of a book no one will ever see unless they already wanted to read it anyway is not the place for that.

(For what it's worth, I love the idea of shared marginalia, of thoughts added to thoughts by people connected to one another. I do them in my own books. But that's the sort of thing you should do with your OWN books, whether you leave them in a public place for a stranger or loan them to your friends or whatever. Library books are a public resource and they have to be accessible to everyone, and marking them up actively prevents them from being used that way.)

[shelbybunny]

db cooper got isekai’d by the plane and hes in the elf world now with all the money and parachutes he stole

[restingbitchfaceceo]

rb to protect prev from burnout

[femmedesyeuxnoirs]

[antoine-roquentin]

Profits and politics pushed small pickups off the road. Let’s bring them back.

Incredible headline from Dion Lefler of the Wichita Eagle, but also, he’s right:

Traffic deaths of pedestrians are up by 70% in the last 10 years and pickup trucks are largely to blame, according to a story from The Hill that we ran this week. The number of walkers killed by “light utility trucks” rose from 732 in 2010 to 1,773 in 2021. The reasons are obvious. Pickup trucks have long since ceased to be the single-bench-seat, utilitarian work vehicles of my youth, and morphed into monsters. It used to be rare to see a large four-door pickup. Now, it’s practically impossible to buy anything else. To make them look brawnier, manufacturers raised suspensions and put huge grilles on the front. The hoods are so hard to see over that one congressman has proposed requiring new trucks to have forward-facing cameras and sensors to reduce “frontover” accidents, which is running over people or things you can’t see through the windshield. There’s a better way: smaller trucks.

They exist. We just can’t buy them. Many’s the time I’ve turned on the nightly news and seen Taliban or ISIS militants tooling around in mini-trucks, mostly Toyotas, with machine guns bolted to the bed “Rat Patrol” style. Every time I see that, I say to myself (or anyone unlucky enough to be in earshot) “There, that’s the truck I want” — minus the machine gun, which I’d only need if I were driving Kris Kobach in a parade. But we can’t get those trucks here because of two reasons: profits and politics. Profits, because car manufacturers make way more per unit selling jumbo trucks. And politics because of an antiquated trade policy levying a 25% tariff on imported light trucks, in retaliation for a European tariff on U.S. chicken. Mini-trucks — mostly Toyotas, but also Ford Couriers and Chevy Luvs — were once ubiquitous on the streets and freeways of southern California, where I lived from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.

The first vehicle my wife and I ever bought together was a 1989 Chevy S-10 pickup, and we’d probably still have it if we hadn’t been blessed with twins and needed space for two car seats. It was a simple, nimble, reliable and comfortable two-person truck. From the time we got it, my wife used it regularly to bring home furniture to replace the mismatched mishmash I had brought into our marriage. I once transported enough salvaged solid oak hardwood flooring to redo our entire kitchen. The S-10’s curb weight was 2,700 pounds. It wasn’t the smallest truck on the road then, but today it would look like a mackerel swimming with a pod of killer whales. The Ford F-150, America’s most popular automobile according to Car and Driver, weighs in between 4,000 and 5,700 pounds, depending on options. The real heavyweights are 8,000 pounds and up. Their high-rise suspensions and oversize tires could get you through the Baja 500, but are way more than overkill for the annual trip to Lowe’s to buy mulch. According to an Axios study, shopping and errands are the No. 1 use of pickups, with 87% of owners reporting they do that frequently. Second was pleasure driving, 70%, and third, commuting, 42%. Only 28% said they frequently use their trucks for personal hauling, and towing was a piddling 7%. That same study showed that in 1985, mini-trucks were slightly more than a quarter of all pickups sold. By 2010, that had dropped to zero, and full-size trucks had over 90% of the market. That’s tapered off slightly with mid-size trucks picking up more market share, but the smallest pickup you can buy today, the Ford Maverick, is still a needlessly beefy 3,500 pounds — 800 more than my trusty S-10.

So if you want to try to make a dent in traffic fatalities, gasoline usage and global warming, call or write your congressperson and ask them to repeal the Chicken Tax. That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. U.S. trade negotiators made a deal in 2011 to allow Korean light-truck imports by 2021, but President Donald Trump, a big fan of trade wars, pushed that back to 2041. Ditching the Chicken Tax might break the big-truck stranglehold on the market. If smaller import trucks sell, as I suspect they would, our domestic manufacturers might be led to retool and compete. And then, when it comes to buying a pickup truck, we might once again be as free as the Taliban.

[cheddar-baby]

In this big world is there a place for someone as little as me?

[romangf]