Spoiled brat @sexception-al - Tumblr Blog

Posts

sapphos-right-hand-gal

these paintings feel VERY lesbian to me💅

momentary-ecstasy

I procrastinate so much now that if I ever become a vampire I will literally put things off for centuries.

ughmerlin

everyone in Camelot being in love with Gwen

bonus:

whitepeopletwitter

catherine-the-great-tv

Anna Karenina & Alexei Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Vronsky story (tv mini-series, Russia, 2017)

swimthroughthefires

#men undressing women: [drakeNO.jpg]#men assisting in dressing women: [drakeYES.jpg]#he’s really concentrating in getting those laces sitting right#what a good boy#anna karenina: vronsky’s story#gif harrietvane

drownedinlight

On of the things that I learned in high school, which was just one of those facts that was just kind of like, “Yeah?” but is also one of those facts that you rarely see represented, that it does sort of startle into this idea of “wait, is that right.” Men absolutely helped their wives and lovers dress, especially in times when dress had become complicated enough that women could not get dressed alone (ties and buttons that had to fasten in the back for one reason or another, for example). If a woman didn’t have a servant to help her dress, and most women did not, it was the job of her husband once she was married.

blood-head

This leads to the interesting trope of a husband discovering his wife’s lover’s handiwork, for example in this 1840 illustration from Paris le Soir. The caption reads: “That’s funny! This morning I made a knot in this lace, and tonight there’s a bow!“

okayto

This is why classes need library instruction

Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!

Me: Okay, what’s the subject?

Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.

Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?

Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!

Me:

okayto

I’m still mad about this because it happens frequently. Students at all levels of education need library and research instruction–they should get it before graduating high school, they should be getting it in several different classes in college, and there should be something in grad school–seriously, there are people in my master’s program who don’t know anything besides Google.

And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?

Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:

First, zoom out. Start broad. Pick a few phrases or keywords, like “tech companies” and “culture.” See what comes up.

Actually, back up. First, does your library’s website search include articles, or do you have to go into a database? My library’s website searches some of our 200+ databases, but not all. And you’ll need to find (in advance search or adjustable limiters that pop up after your initial search) how to limit your search to scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles.

What other keywords are related or relevant? For the search above, you could use a combination of “silicon valley,” “company/ies” or “organization/s,” “sharing,” “collaborative,” “workplace culture,” “social culture,” “organizational culture,” and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.

Did you find something that looks promising? Great! What kind of subjects/keywords are attached (usually to the abstract, sometimes in the description section of the online listing)? Those can give you more ideas of what to search. Does it cite any articles? Look at those! Some databases (ilu ProQuest) will also show you a selection of related/similar articles.

If you’re researching a very specific topic, you may not find any/many articles specifically about your subject. You may, for example, have to make do with some articles about west-coast tech companies’ work cultures, and different articles about creating sharing/collaborative environments.

That said, this student did the right thing: they tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

beradan

They tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

tikkunolamorgtfo

I get goddamn professors pulling this shit, there is not one single level in the academy where research literacy isn’t lacking.

plaidadder

Also: Everyone has forgotten how to browse the stacks. As in, find a book that’s relevant, go to the stacks, then look at what’s near it on the shelf. You will find stuff that way that would never turn up on a search. It really works and can be a useful supplement to electronic research even though it involves your corporeal form and books made out of paper.

scary-murphy

my law school requires a legal research class. you take it as a 1L, and it’s mandatory. you are signed up for it automatically along with all your other 1L courses. it’s a wise thing to do, because you’re fucked as a lawyer if you don’t know to find, you know, the law.

christina-articulates

I have a library and information science degree, which I often refer to as a degree in google, and I’m only being a little facetious with that. I often impress people with my ability to find things online, but it’s only because I’ve taken so many classes in research methods that I know how to phrase a search well. It’s so important, not just in school!

thebraveandthebroiled

Goddammit there is so much information and so many way to access it that it burns my biscuits when we don’t give students the tools they need to succeed at this. Hell yeah all y’all above!

And here’s what I’ve got to add:

Ask a Librarian

Seriously guys librarians are here to help. We would love to help you find the right resource for your particular informational need and we’ve been trained to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Nowadays you don’t even have to go to the library in person as many libraries offer online chat services as well as the option to contact via email. Further, and I think very importantly we are dedicated to our patrons rights to privacy. To quote the American Library Association the “rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”

Search the Stacks

This is one of my favorite ways to immerse myself in an area of study. While a good subject or keyword search will lead you to some good results sometimes is just as fruitful to go the library and plunk yourself down in section and browse all the books in a topic area. Libraries will label the (book)stacks based on whichever classification system they use and you can use the links below to figure out which area of the stacks you’ll want to look through.

Dewey: used in public libraries

LOC /Library of Congress: classification system used in university libraries

http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit03/libraries03_04.phtml

Online Books

Some websites like gutenberg project are dedicated to making public domain books accessible to the public. Using the search term public domain books is a good way to go about looking for more sources of them. Open sourced is another good term to use when trying to find freely accessible books online and that’s not just limited to fiction books but textbooks are also offered by various sites.

Project Gutenberg is an online archive of tens of thousands of books that have enter the public domain that can be freely accessed.

Openstax is one website that provides access to Higher Ed and AP open sourced textbooks.

Libguides and Pathfinders

As stated above librarians are in the business of connecting people to resources. If we can’t do so in person then we also do so by creating guides that can be found and used when we aren’t around. These guides are filled with search terms, books, articles, reviews, lists, links, and anything else we think would be helpful for patrons trying to explore a particular topic area.

Pathfinder is a particular term used for these guides. Libguides is a particular platform which to host these guides. Using either word at the end of your search terms online will bring up guides that have been created in that particular subject area. Or you can explore libguides directly with your search terms to find what guides librarians across the country have created.

Note: Using pathfinder in your search terms may pull up resources about Paizo Publishing’s same titled tabletop RPG series and while dragons are cool you can modify your search to library pathfinder to exclude these resources.

Other than using a search engine or libguides directly I find a great many pathfinders on university library sites. Usually what I do is find a university’s library webpage, find their pathfinder/research guides/guides section, and then browse through their lists of guides. These are generally organized by field of study so just pick the one you are interested in and look through the resources they have listed.

Some of the resources will be accessible for anyone while some might be locked for students of the particular university. If the article, book, or resource is locked by a school portal you can either search for it online outside of the university portal or you can go to your own university/public library to see if they have access to the resource there. Even if they don’t have it currently in their collection libraries are often connected with other branches and may be able to request an interlibrary loan of what you need.

Online Reference Resources

Sometimes the problem isn’t finding information but finding good information. Below are two sites that I use regularly to help me with this issue when searching online for resources.

The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association gives a list of the best free reference sites on the internet

The Ipl2 is a good authoritative source to find general information on a variety of topics. Even though the website is no longer updating there are still a plethora of subject guides that can be explored.

Open Sourced Journals and Articles

Just as there are open sourced books and textbooks so too are there open sourced journals and articles available. Again you can add the term open sourced when searching for these resources.

DOAJ is the Directory of Open Access Journals and you can search through here to find both articles and journals freely available to access.

Journal Article Tips

Finally whenever I’m searching through journal articles there are a few things I always like to keep in mind.

Build context. Once you find an article that is relevant to your search you can do this by exploring the citations. Both those that the article you are using references in its bibliography and those that reference the article itself.

Every database is going to do this differently but generally with a few clicks you can find out who has cited an article that you have read. If nothing else try popping the title of your article into google scholar and you’ll see a blue ‘Cited by’ below the description. Also in some cases you can click on the author directly in a database to see what else they have written in the subject. Totally ask your librarian for help navigating the particular database you are using again they will be stoked to do so.

Building this context of literature by finding and reading these extra articles is important to building a critical understanding of your topic and will allow you to build the best possible defense of your arguments. This will also allow you to see if the article you’ve initially selected is in itself a viable position or if it is an outlier of its field.

If you can try and find reviews of literature articles and special issue/special topic editions of journals. These are your best friends in the resource world as these types of articles and journals compile a great deal of information on particular topic in a tiny space. They are immensely helpful in building context in an area of thought and useful to finding out what to read further to be informed in an area of study. Add those words to your search terms to see if you can get some useful resources.

mandalorianreynolds

Goddamn…

We should be taught this in MIDDLE SCHOOL.

This is a more important skill than being able to WRITE COHERENTLY.

This is not just a writing or academic skill, this is a CITIZENSHIP SKILL.

kamikaze-kumquat

Did…did they take this out of school? When I was in middle school we were taken By Class to the school library and the librarian gave a lecture on how to us the library and it’s resources. Of course, at the time all they had was the card catalogue, but we were taught how to read the cards. We were taught the dewey decimal system and how to search the stacks. Then the teacher gave us an assignment that made us go to the public library and use the knowledge we were given. I don’t remember if I was taught to look through journals then or if that came later, but I eventually learned it. Either way, I was taught that way back in the 80s…

WHEN THE EVER LIVING FUCK DID THEY STOP TEACHING THAT IN SCHOOLS? IT’S A GODSDAMN NECESSITY IN THIS AGE OF INFORMATION. INFORMATION IS FUCKING USELESS IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIND IT!

Gods…we are failing kids so fucking hard in this fucking country…

emi--rose

I was lucky enough to have great library education in elementary/middle school, university, and medical school, and it has made me LOVE my librarian friends so so so much <3

ruffboi-mags

I didn’t learn how to do this shit until I taught myself as an adult.

Some people are lucky enough to learn it, but most people aren’t.

everythingfox

“Fun fact about Carter: he watches cookies bake in the oven from start to finish.“

(Source)

anduinsholydick

#WeAreAllCarter

angel-reyes

#CALL HIM OUT

fuckyeahwomenfilmdirectors

Never Goin’ Back dir. Augustine Frizzell (2018)

pillowprincesslexa

ALYCIA dhksjdksjjd

sawasawako-archived

fattypanc4kes

brains say, "I know a spot" and take you to a traumatic memory from 2011

chewbacca

DAKOTA JOHNSON IN THE ELLEN DEGENERES SHOW (2003– )

plaidadder

Would you like to know how it feels to vote for a protest candidate in a very close Presidential race? I can tell you.

It doesn’t feel all that good even while you’re doing it. Then, after the Republicans’ idiot child king gets into office, it feels even worse.

I voted Green in the 2000 presidential election, for many of the same reasons that I see a lot of Bernie supporters talking about now. And for my sins, I actually have a record of my thinking at the time, because I have been old on the internet for a long time now. Here is a chunk of something I wrote explaining my decision to vote for Ralph Nader in 2000:

“Especially now that almost nobody is voting these days, the defection of a particular block of voters, even if it’s small, is of serious concern to either party. That’s why you see George jr. out there whoring himself for the Christian right, just like his father before him. But Gore doesn’t whore for the liberal left, because he doesn’t have to. He knows that as long as he doesn’t actually start talking about criminalizing abortion and rounding gay people up in cattle cars, we’ll stick with him just out of fear. Which means we’ve already lost any power we had. We can’t influence the Democratic party’s agenda; we can’t impact Gore’s platform; we can’t put any kind of pressure on him. All we can do is concede, concede, concede. Telling ourselves while we do it that it’s all right, it could be worse.“

Ah, the pugnacious pungency of my younger days, how I miss it. Anyway, rereading that has reminded me of how BAD it feels to be in the position of having to choose between two candidates who don’t seem willing to fight for anything you believe in. And I actually do not disagree, generally speaking, with Young Plaidder’s assessment of the evils of the two-party system. So, you know, it curbs my desire to yell at the Bernie Sanders supporters who are still not willing to vote for Clinton. They’re already in pain, it’s neither helpful nor strategic to make them feel worse.

Here are some things I know now that I was wrong about then:

1) I SEVERELY underestimated the amount of damage that an unqualified and incompetent President of the United States can cause. SEVERELY.

I have seen a number of comments from the Bernie or Bust perspective suggesting that if Trump got elected, he’s so uninterested in the whole business of government that he might not actually bother implementing what passes for his platform. Friends, you may be right or you may be wrong. But I’ll tell you what: the eight disastrous years of George W. Bush’s presidency, during which I am 100% convinced Dick Cheney made most of the major decisions, are all you need to teach you that incompetence at the top can be just as destructive and dangerous as malice. It’s very, very unhealthy for any organization when the person who has all the executive power is someone who either can’t or won’t use it effectively. It leads to factionalism, infighting, and corruption, because his subordinates know they can get up to whatever shit they want and nobody will bother stopping them. If you want to imagine a Trump presidency, try imagining a Trump cabinet. He doesn’t even know enough Republican politicians to fill it with. It’ll either be cronies from his ‘business’ dealings or names that Mike Pence fed to him figuring he won’t know any better. Who wants to see what a gang of evangelicals and profiteers get to do to this country while the boss is out golfing? I don’t need to. I’ve seen it already. It’s hideous. We’re still trying to recover from it. I mean this is the reason that New Orleans was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Katrina…and nothing was done about it. Because Bush put in some chum of his as the head of FEMA who could not have found his ass with both hands and a flashlight if you gave him a week to do it. And that is why there were corpses floating in the streets of New Orleans days after the hurricane was over. Incompetence kills. It doesn’t have to be evil. You’d be amazed how much damage stupid and untrained can do.

2) I didn’t expect that we would experience a massive terrorist attack on US soil during the next 4 years.

That was not an unreasonable assumption to make in 2000. It’s a completely unreasonable assumption to make in 2016. I think it’s also pretty clear which candidate would, given the opportunity to wreak VENGEANCE! that such attacks always provide, do the most damage with it. The entire twenty-first century, nearly, testifies to how catastrophic it is when the person in charge of responding to a terrorist attack on American soil is an idiot who has no understanding of dipolmacy or foreign policy and no way of making decisions apart from listening to his own ID.

3) I didn’t appreciate the importance of the one issue Gore would actually have made some significant movement on: climate change.

I honestly still think Gore only did all the other crap he did–like, say, choosing Lieberman as VP–because he wanted to have a chance to GET to the Oval Office and do something about climate change. He grasped the importance of it long before most other American politicians wanted to talk about it. I really wish he’d been in the Oval Office in 2000 to get the ball rolling. I really, really, really wish that.

Here’s the good news from that paragraph: the Bernie Sanders campaign has already changed some of the things I was complaining about in 2000. The platform has moved left. The agenda has changed. There is pressure on the Clinton campaign, to which they have responded. In other words, just by running the primary campaign, Sanders has already achieved a lot of what I was mistakenly hoping my protest vote in 2000 was going to achieve.

Bernie Sanders’s speech last night was basically a bunch of variations on that theme: that the Sanders campaign itself has already had a greater impact than a protest vote (or protest abstention) would have, because it has changed the party. Has it changed Hillary Clinton? Who knows. But if the past 8 years have taught us much, it’s that in terms of shit you can get done, Congress matters just as much as the presidency if not more. Get enough left-thinking Democrats into Congress, and they can lead even if Hillary Clinton won’t.

So anyway. I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. Because I don’t want to have to say that I did not do everything I could to prevent George W. Bush from becoming the SECOND WORST ever President of the United States.

plaidadder

Thought it would be interesting to look back at this post from 2016. It is definitely depressing.

phoenixwrites

I’m officially linking this post to anymore inane reblogs and asks.

swan2swan

There was a moment very early on in this post where I realized 2016 hadn’t happened yet and it was, because I can find no more apt descriptor, bone-chilling.

ampervadasz

bunjywunjy

self-critical-automaton

in ‘the creation of adam’, Man lies back indolently, reaching out idly in response to the forwards-thrusting touch of divinity, well within reach but lacking the drive to take it, representing the naive state of original mankind, unburdened by consciousness or desire.

In this fascinating modern take, however, the artist instead shows Man as a driving force, frantically throwing aside all barriers and restrictions in pursuit of his goal: a goal which remains impossible to reach. Fast food, representing compromise for survival in the face of an uncaring and overstressing world, hangs awkwardly in the center of an uncrossable abyss. Note the use of highly-rendered tensed musculature to imply physical effort, emphasized by the contrast with loose, hanging fabric, and also the lack of effort on the part of the employee: She is trying, and were she reach out just a little further, then through their collaboration would Man attain his goal. But, the strictures of her position allow only a certain amount of human generosity and kindness. The structures we build as humanity prevent us from doing all that we can to help one another, and this remains true even when presented with a fellow human willing risk death, to survive.