Merrie Haskell

quality reblogs at a fraction of the price ||| writer, library manager, passionate moss photographer ||| merriehaskell.com ||| flickr.com/photos/merriehaskell/tags/moss

[weirdfact]

When sofas (or sophas as it was sometimes spelled) were first introduced to Europe from Turkey, they were considered rather risque! Up until that time, you couldn’t share a comfortable chair with anyone: multi-person seating was limited to benches. As a result, French novelist Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon wrote a rather naughty book in 1742 called  Le Sopha, conte moral or The Sofa: A Moral Tale. The satirical tale concerns a young courtier, Amanzéï, whose soul in a previous life was condemned by Brahma to inhabit a series of sofas, and not to be reincarnated in a human body until two virgin lovers had consummated their passion upon him.

[stultiloquentia]

[stultiloquentia]

Stylistic innovation in Persuasion

I’ve been geeking out about this in various places, and promised a couple people I’d collate.

I love Persuasion, but mostly because I find it fascinating in terms of craft. It gets billed as Austen’s most romantic (and Romantic) love story, and boy does it have its moments, but I feel like it’s less a novel written to entertain and delight, and more of a giant stylistic experiment that doesn’t quite succeed, but tells you a ton about Austen’s ambitions for, and innovations in, her genre.

Form follows content.

Keep reading

[teaandspite]

My Library Collections Professor Has Made A Terrible Mistake

She doesn’t know it yet, but she will soon. You see, the midterm paper on calls for students to write a collection evaluation for a library of our choosing. Now, I know that when she said that library does not need to be real, she meant that we didn’t need to pick a specific one. But what I heard was… 

[camwyn]

Speaking as someone who got so pissed at her early master’s degree instructors that she wrote her entire capstone project on business process reorganization at Virtucon, thus owing her master’s degree to Doctor Evil, I applaud.

[digitaldiscipline]

[luulapants]

Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.

[nestofstraightlines]

There’s a phrase that really stuck in my head around this. It was from one of the British divers who enacted the Thai caving rescue, though I couldn’t tell you which one or which interview.

As he described to the interviewer a moment of panic and how he he overcame, the interviewer said, in one of those, summarise-last-answer-given-with-appropriate-levels-of-respect-in-order-to-proceed-to-next-question phrasing’s, “Wow, so you rose to the occasion -“

And the diver said, “No, actually people always get that exactly wrong. In an unexpected and urgent situation you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training.”

[throckmortons-thrussy]

[catchymemes]

[therobotmonster]

When life gives you bears… trick them into doing market research?

[loki-zen]

@mercuryjellyfish

[discoursedrome]

What I really like about this is that the containers all have prominent labels with a camera pointing directly at them, but it’s still called a double-blind trial because the researcher isn’t present and the bear can’t read

[catchymemes]

[kittymaverick]

Can someone please tell me this was a pair that was trying to do the death spiral that mating birds of prey do, and somehow in the process they ended up stuck on a road sign. Because if it is, this is definitely one of the funniest “Okay, maybe we WERE a little bit over our head when we started this…” moments.

[ordinaryredtail]

I doubt it. One of these birds is a juvenile (the top) while the other is an adult (bottom). The juvenile would have no interest in mating.

Honestly when I see hawks doing stupid stuff 9/10 times its a harris hawk—this seriously just looks like one of those stupid hawks time. They are one of the only social raptors, so this leads to some funny things, like

Stacking

The harris hawk argument for stacking is “your back is less Pokey than a cactus so imma use it”

Not even falconers are safe…

They even hold hands

Please, what are you doing harris hawks, learn how to hawk

[peacocktalk]

Sometimes even raptors can be birbs.

[gif87a-com]

[orpheusmorpheous]

@samipapi

[2007miloventimiglia]

i dont understand why you tagged me but i’m not complaining

[qu-ucks-deactivated20180925]

@elodieunderglass

[elodieunderglass]

[In this video, the cameraperson navigates around an electrical substation, approaching a pillar. We see that there is a bird’s nest tucked into the steel iframe, full of baby birds. At the person’s approach, the baby birds leap up in unison and beg for food, opening their mouths wide, while the iconic song “Flash” (1980) by Queen plays, making it look like the birds are singing it.

The description does not help. it is essentially inexplicable but weirdly satisfying.)

[symphonicseauxl]

Masego - Veg Out (Violin Cover)

This is for a contest he's doing so I decided to participate 😁

IG: tyronewilkinsjr

Twitter: tyronewilkinsj

[huffpost]

[i-am-america-deactivated2016121]

*slow clap it the fuck out*  

[highkoos]

Mannnnnnnnnn........... no one has ever shot their shot like this before....

[whitepeopletwitter]

[shencomix]

[valtsv]

is there any sight in the world more healing than the that of a cat trotting daintily towards you

[shaelit]

depends. does it have anything in its mouth?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Mozilla updates its "Privacy Not Included" gift guide for 2019

As with last year, the Mozilla Foundation’s privacy researchers have produced a guide to electronic gifts called “Privacy Not Included,” which rates gadgets on a “creepiness” scale, with devices like the Sonos One SL dumb “smart speaker” (Sonos ripped out all the junk that isn’t about playing music) getting top marks, and Ring Security Cams, Nest Cams, Amazon Echos, and other cam/mic-equipped gadgets coming in as “Super Creepy!” (the exclamation point is part of the rating).

These rankings are purely about privacy, so there’s plenty of stuff that’s extremely proprietary and hooked into app stores and other ecosystems that allow the manufacturers to control how you use your property after you buy it, as well as giving them the ability to censor the kinds of information you can receive. Many of these devices contain copyright locks (DRM) and onerous terms of service that would make it a potential felony to have them independently repaired, too, so the manufacturer gets to decide what can and can’t be fixed, and unilaterally declare that it’s time for your device to become e-waste in some distant landfill (Apple is notorious for this, and they led the charge that killed 20 state-level Right to Repair bills last year, and CEO Tim Cook started 2019 with an investor call last January that warned investors that Apple was facing a crisis because people were not replacing their devices as often as they used to, opting instead to repair them).

And this kind of thing also matters for privacy! If not for the independent repair sector, we’d have never found out that Google had made a “smart speaker” with a secret, hidden microphone, so if you were relying on the manufacturer’s specifications to evaluate the privacy dimension of a product, you could land in trouble. Likewise DRM: because security researchers face felony prosecution and massive civil liability if they reveal information that weakens a DRM system, devices with DRM (to ensure that you only use approved apps, parts or consumables) are less likely to be independently audited, and when they are, there’s a greater likelihood that the researchers will delay or bury their assessments. That means that security defects in DRM-equipped devices (many of which get top marks on privacy) can fester for longer and do more damage before coming to light.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/27/creepiness-scale.html

[mindlevelzero-deactivated202208]

Nice, I didn’t know about this guide.

[afronerdism]

Last night on Oprah, Lupita said that even with all of the accolades she’s received about her looks, that she still feels unattractive sometimes because so many of her formative years were spent convinced she was ugly. She then went on to cry as she read a prayer she used to pray to be lighter which she put in her book Sulwe. It honestly breaks my heart. But I love how open and how raw she is about this.

I heard a darkskinned woman say that for her, this is so important because someone like Lupita crying about colorism gives dark skinned women and girls permission to feel, and permission to thrive while still working through colorism.

[rocktheholygrail]

When Ted Danson is literally his character irl

Bonus: