michael lascarides
@mlascarides.bsky.social
Art tinkerer, library dweller, immigrant. Thinking a lot about how to prove libraries are worth keeping around. Ōtepoti.
Reposted by michael lascarides
This is the first time in 24 years that
a scheduled passenger train has stopped at Invercargill Station. The station itself is in rough shape but nothing a bit of tender loving care can’t fix.
a scheduled passenger train has stopped at Invercargill Station. The station itself is in rough shape but nothing a bit of tender loving care can’t fix.
January 21, 2026 at 1:43 AM
This is the first time in 24 years that
a scheduled passenger train has stopped at Invercargill Station. The station itself is in rough shape but nothing a bit of tender loving care can’t fix.
a scheduled passenger train has stopped at Invercargill Station. The station itself is in rough shape but nothing a bit of tender loving care can’t fix.
Always surprising how far north most of Europe is. Would not have guessed we're Milan-adjacent!
You might not be too familiar with New Zealand. Maybe this overlay map will help you to make sense of the Kiwis. NZ cities replaced by global cities of the same latitude. Source: buff.ly/5qoXYT1
January 16, 2026 at 2:13 AM
Always surprising how far north most of Europe is. Would not have guessed we're Milan-adjacent!
Petition to officially rename the Unicode character from "sparkles" to "jabroni".
(cf. www.compart.com/en/unicode/U...)
(cf. www.compart.com/en/unicode/U...)
January 15, 2026 at 12:30 AM
Petition to officially rename the Unicode character from "sparkles" to "jabroni".
(cf. www.compart.com/en/unicode/U...)
(cf. www.compart.com/en/unicode/U...)
Reposted by michael lascarides
NZ national museum facing existential crisis
The national museum’s chief executive Courtney Johnston says the options were presented to provoke a wide-ranging discussion and demonstrate the significance of the financial challenge Te Papa faces.
Radical Te Papa cuts rejected as funding pressure mounts
New documents show the national museum’s leadership were presented with stark options to address a growing financial crisis, including abandoning physical visitors and closing its Wellington site.
www.thepost.co.nz
January 14, 2026 at 11:21 PM
NZ national museum facing existential crisis
GLAM sector folks: What are your favourite/least favourite examples of search & discovery interfaces federated over multiple systems and/or institutions? What makes them work well (or poorly)? Mainly looking for non-NZ examples, but will take local ones.
January 14, 2026 at 11:16 PM
GLAM sector folks: What are your favourite/least favourite examples of search & discovery interfaces federated over multiple systems and/or institutions? What makes them work well (or poorly)? Mainly looking for non-NZ examples, but will take local ones.
Reposted by michael lascarides
Pondering how AI is taking us back to mid-1990s “Dark Forest” Internet safety guidelines being correct:
- assume nobody is who they say they are
- don’t reveal anything about yourself
- everyone is out to get you until proven otherwise
- don’t believe anything you see online without verification
- assume nobody is who they say they are
- don’t reveal anything about yourself
- everyone is out to get you until proven otherwise
- don’t believe anything you see online without verification
January 14, 2026 at 6:52 PM
Pondering how AI is taking us back to mid-1990s “Dark Forest” Internet safety guidelines being correct:
- assume nobody is who they say they are
- don’t reveal anything about yourself
- everyone is out to get you until proven otherwise
- don’t believe anything you see online without verification
- assume nobody is who they say they are
- don’t reveal anything about yourself
- everyone is out to get you until proven otherwise
- don’t believe anything you see online without verification
Reposted by michael lascarides
This is going to grow much more when the new Kawerau to Cromwell trail opens. Also I’ve been to Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains. There was something like 600 tracks there used for biking. Biking in Ski areas is over taking skiing as business driver. We should learn from there too.
Bike rentals, workshops and shuttles are all humming as Queenstown’s trails draw families, Aussie downhill mountain-bikers and high-spending internationals.
Queenstown’s $280m bike boom fuels 1150 jobs
Bike rentals, workshops and shuttles are all humming as Queenstown’s trails draw families, Aussie downhill mountain-bikers and high-spending internationals.
dlvr.it
January 11, 2026 at 8:08 PM
This is going to grow much more when the new Kawerau to Cromwell trail opens. Also I’ve been to Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains. There was something like 600 tracks there used for biking. Biking in Ski areas is over taking skiing as business driver. We should learn from there too.
Reposted by michael lascarides
Seriously, this is what is needed. We do it now and maybe we stop this before even more people die and more countries are destabilised.
Sanction us. Bar entry with US passports. Upper middle class Americans are so used to being isolated from politics having any impact in their actual lives that canceling their European vacations en masse might actually stop this.
January 3, 2026 at 9:11 AM
Seriously, this is what is needed. We do it now and maybe we stop this before even more people die and more countries are destabilised.
Reposted by michael lascarides
The closest comparison for the Grok thing we can imagine right now is if cereal made a bunch of people ill and the news put a microphone in front of some cereal boxes at the grocery store and was like “well they didn’t admit guilt, not sure who else we can ask”
January 2, 2026 at 8:24 PM
The closest comparison for the Grok thing we can imagine right now is if cereal made a bunch of people ill and the news put a microphone in front of some cereal boxes at the grocery store and was like “well they didn’t admit guilt, not sure who else we can ask”
Reposted by michael lascarides
Wonderful. This is one of the best comics panels ever drawn. It - and the pages around it - rewired my brain and changed the way I talked about and understood art and storytelling. If there is any book I would recommend unreservedly to creative people, it’s Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
January 2, 2026 at 5:55 PM
Wonderful. This is one of the best comics panels ever drawn. It - and the pages around it - rewired my brain and changed the way I talked about and understood art and storytelling. If there is any book I would recommend unreservedly to creative people, it’s Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
Reposted by michael lascarides
Reposted by michael lascarides
Dishwashers are just objectively superior technology: convenient, efficient, unobtrusive. They’re a legitimate marvel of modernity.
People who want to get morally superior about how they hand-wash everything really gotta reckon with the fact that machine dish-washing uses considerably LESS water and emits considerably fewer greenhouse emissions than standard handwashing practices do.
(And you save a lot of time...)
(And you save a lot of time...)
December 27, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Dishwashers are just objectively superior technology: convenient, efficient, unobtrusive. They’re a legitimate marvel of modernity.
“The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes.” ―Neal Stephenson
What's an insult you'll never forget?
December 26, 2025 at 4:40 AM
“The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes.” ―Neal Stephenson
Reposted by michael lascarides
Salesman sample case for Christmas lights. 1960s. www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/...
December 23, 2025 at 8:54 AM
Salesman sample case for Christmas lights. 1960s. www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/...
Reposted by michael lascarides
Somewhere out there right now is a programmer vibe-coding an FDA-regulated medical device, and somewhere else is the unemployed person whose job was to inspect that code and hold it to standards and who was fired by a 19 year old.
December 23, 2025 at 8:45 AM
Somewhere out there right now is a programmer vibe-coding an FDA-regulated medical device, and somewhere else is the unemployed person whose job was to inspect that code and hold it to standards and who was fired by a 19 year old.
Reposted by michael lascarides
The majority of archival material out there has NOT been digitized.
So if you really want to figure something out, odds are that you have to go to an archive and dig.
Historians are trained to dig.
So if you really want to figure something out, odds are that you have to go to an archive and dig.
Historians are trained to dig.
Seems like it's worth posting this one again.
Why Do Historians Still Have To Go To Archives?
Why do historians go to archives? Hasn’t everything already been digitized?
contingentmagazine.org
December 22, 2025 at 1:49 AM
The majority of archival material out there has NOT been digitized.
So if you really want to figure something out, odds are that you have to go to an archive and dig.
Historians are trained to dig.
So if you really want to figure something out, odds are that you have to go to an archive and dig.
Historians are trained to dig.
Reposted by michael lascarides
I feel like there should be a personal version of the national emergency phone klaxon to remind me to put the bins out tomorrow night. If that recycling bin doesn't get emptied, I'm screwed.
December 21, 2025 at 9:07 PM
I feel like there should be a personal version of the national emergency phone klaxon to remind me to put the bins out tomorrow night. If that recycling bin doesn't get emptied, I'm screwed.
Reposted by michael lascarides
People are saying that this is a problem for all library catalogues but that's not true: this is a problem for, in this case, Ex Libris Primo and more generally for outsourced proprietary library catalogues that libraries don't control. The answer, as always, is to build and control our own tech.
When viewing the fake article in Google scholar on my university network, there is a link to access the article via my uni's library. That link sends me to a library page that makes fake article appear real... Turns out library page is made programmatically from info on Google scholar 🤦
December 21, 2025 at 4:59 PM
People are saying that this is a problem for all library catalogues but that's not true: this is a problem for, in this case, Ex Libris Primo and more generally for outsourced proprietary library catalogues that libraries don't control. The answer, as always, is to build and control our own tech.
Reposted by michael lascarides
So, today I'm wrapping up People Watching. Massive thanks to everyone who has supported it & all the cool people I've met and drawn. I wrote an article in the Sunday Magazine today talking about the lessons I've learned doing it - and there were so many.
www.thepost.co.nz/culture/3609...
www.thepost.co.nz/culture/3609...
December 20, 2025 at 7:17 PM
So, today I'm wrapping up People Watching. Massive thanks to everyone who has supported it & all the cool people I've met and drawn. I wrote an article in the Sunday Magazine today talking about the lessons I've learned doing it - and there were so many.
www.thepost.co.nz/culture/3609...
www.thepost.co.nz/culture/3609...
Reposted by michael lascarides
As told by the late dancer and choreographer Agnes DeMille.
December 20, 2025 at 2:10 AM
As told by the late dancer and choreographer Agnes DeMille.
Reposted by michael lascarides
"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."
- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.
Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!
- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.
Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!
December 19, 2025 at 12:24 PM
"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."
- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.
Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!
- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.
Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!
"AI citations often point to nothing. They’re citations to the idea of a citation. References to the concept of research. Footnotes in a dream." Excellent, useful article.
"How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian" HT @tjowens.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/cardcata...
How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian
The verification tricks that would make fact-checkers weep with joy.
open.substack.com
December 18, 2025 at 5:44 PM
"AI citations often point to nothing. They’re citations to the idea of a citation. References to the concept of research. Footnotes in a dream." Excellent, useful article.
Reposted by michael lascarides
the '76 KING KONG is a lot more fun if you tell yourself it's a prequel to THE BIG LEBOWSKI
December 18, 2025 at 3:22 AM
the '76 KING KONG is a lot more fun if you tell yourself it's a prequel to THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Reposted by michael lascarides
Some good news. Thank you Mayor-elect @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social for sticking to your campaign commitment.
We need NYC residents to pressure the City Council to deliver. Help by sending a letter to your CM: actionnetwork.org/letters/city...
We need NYC residents to pressure the City Council to deliver. Help by sending a letter to your CM: actionnetwork.org/letters/city...
December 17, 2025 at 10:24 PM
Some good news. Thank you Mayor-elect @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social for sticking to your campaign commitment.
We need NYC residents to pressure the City Council to deliver. Help by sending a letter to your CM: actionnetwork.org/letters/city...
We need NYC residents to pressure the City Council to deliver. Help by sending a letter to your CM: actionnetwork.org/letters/city...