Nathan F
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librarypoweruser.bsky.social
Nathan F
@librarypoweruser.bsky.social
57 followers 150 following 160 posts
Pro libraries, PIC abolition, and cats
Midwest, U.S.
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librarypoweruser.bsky.social
Keep hanging on
the brick red trimmed upper-floor windows of an apartment building in early morning are visible through a window screen upon which a honey bee has landed vertically
October 1, 2025 at 12:34 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
Feeling this after vacillating over whether to buy an electric scooter. My joints are sore peddling everywhere and I’m only a mile from work. A scooter would help but the fear of being hit is overpowering
tweet thread by Malcolm Harris (@bigmeaninternet) dated July 30, 2024 It's such a bummer that there's been all of this micro-mobility innovation and we can't take advantage of it because of fucking cars You ever seen a kid with a big wheel attachment for one of those electric hoverboards and nowhere to ride it? Tragic! Would it really be the end of the world to have a few streets on the typical city grid that were bus/bike/scooter/etc only?
July 27, 2025 at 9:21 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
I baked these while washing the dishes I dirtied making them 💅
golden frittatas on a plate
June 1, 2025 at 7:52 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
Edit: Seeing this for other sites (e.g. The Verge), seems to only affect hypertext links though. non-hypertext links open without the interstitial
Leaving Bluesky This link is taking you to the following website: https://www.theverge.com/news/602096/copyright-office-says-ai-prompting-doesnt-deserve-copyright-protection Visit Site Cancel
January 30, 2025 at 7:45 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
really hope this modal to... *open* a link from @kottke.org is a mistake
Leaving Bluesky This link is taking you to the following website: https://kottke.org/25/01/the-public-domain-image-archive Visit Site Cancel
January 30, 2025 at 7:32 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-a...
Aaron Swartz was threatened with decades in jail for accessing (not disseminating) information; Sam Altman, whose company has accessed—and openly monetized—orders of magnitude more information than Swartz, has polluted and then regurgitated that information to the public, and gathered endless cash reserves from investors with which to fend off lawsuits challenging its commercial ambitions.
January 19, 2025 at 5:49 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
I’m sure Pocket’s homepage of reading suggestions is some mix of manual curation and algorithmic recommendation, but it’s all trolling all the time
Pocket-Worthy Reads an article, headlined “A Neurosurgeon Shares His Effective Strategy for Overcoming Fears,” headed with a photo of an orange kitten (facial features marked by darker fur) peeking over the back of bright red furniture, its ears fanned low and flat, eyes bugged out—glaring toward, if off center, of the camera lens Pocket-Worthy Reads Article from The Atlantic headlined “How to Email” headed by a shot of comedian James Hamblin facing forward, in black collared outfit, looking into the screen of a laptop set in front of him, a focused look on his face Below another article, headlined “Instead of Pulling Out Your Phone, Let Your Mind Wander”
January 8, 2025 at 2:44 AM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
the fun police are approaching (the person being quoted, not apocalypticanow:), here's to outrunning them for a while longer
quote post by @apocalypticanow.bsky.social‬ If true, this story is going to be buried so fast quoting a post by ‪Shannon Watts‬ ‪@shannonrwatts.bsky.social‬: Based on his social media profile, the man who allegedly murdered the United Healthcare CEO is an Ivy leaguer and fan of Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel and other right-leaning personalties. He also attended a $40,000 per year prep school. Guessing he could afford insurance…
December 9, 2024 at 10:16 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
of tentative beauty, grievously snatched from us. I do not share photos of many places from Before. Life in Gaza has never been easy. Poverty, unemployment, and polluted water were just some of the tools of oppression designed to kill us slowly. Gaza has 8 official refugee camps and a population of approximately 2.1 million people, crammed in tight, uninhabitable spaces. Without contextualizing what they see Palestinians in Gaza share on social media, non-Gazans tend to get the wrong impression about life before the ongoing genocidal war. I urge you to bear this in mind – to stop for a moment and contextualize what you see shared online. Do not be quick to judge. If this is our way of coping with the
December 1, 2024 at 7:01 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
when I have the occasional rude or uncooperative patron interaction, as I did today, I recall this post: “bad customer service is actually a form of kindness” marginalutilityannex.wordpress.com/2016/01/
Taking this to the logical extreme, I claimed that bad customer service is actually a form of kindness: A clerk’s rudeness is really a gift that knocks you out of the complacent, compliant role of customer and thrusts you back into the more fundamental, sentient role of responding to what’s really around you; it disrupts the narcotic haze of a shopper lost in their private fantasies of acquisition and self-aggrandizement. It undermines the self-centeredness of consumerism; it affirms that, in contemporary capitalism, the customer is always wrong, always reifying the good things in life, always content to purchase rather than experience pleasure. The anger that many feel at bad customer service is a displaced anger; they are angry at themselves and how what they expect from life has been reduced to such squalid, petty demands as a smile on the face of the person who pours their coffee … When you are given the suck-up service with a smile, you are immediately made to feel like you belong, but you have to wonder what you belong to, and if that’s a club you really want to be in.
November 19, 2024 at 10:07 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
made black bean burgers
black bean patty with ketchup, mustard, on a sesame seed bun another view, the fixings, including relish, show up better
November 18, 2024 at 2:24 AM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
a couple pts I took from this: the farm workers & non-human animals being coworkers (obviously), who're all already compelled by industry to work closely in "hot, stifling" conditions during summer--making all sick/more prone to getting sick--before accounting for H5N1
fortune.com/well/2024/11...
The California Department of Public Health has already distributed PPE to dairy farms and their workers, as have some other states. But like other health agencies, it can’t force the workers to wear them. Anecdotally, that has been a problem across the country, as workers often shun the gear in hot, stifling conditions. In a separate report Thursday, dairy farm workers in Colorado confirmed that the hot, humid environments found in milking parlors can make wearing respirators and masks uncomfortable. Especially during summer months, that could lead to fewer protected workers. And even among those who wear masks, degradation of PPE is not uncommon when workers are in close proximity to contaminated milk or animal manure.
November 10, 2024 at 5:08 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
in the spirit of the seasons—spooky & election—I baked snake breadsticks lol! 🐍🥖

from this recipe / how-to www.dbrl.org/kids/snake-b...
four spiral breadstick snakes, some green, some brown, with black olives for eyes and carrots for forked tongues, atop a paper-lined baking sheet an up close shot of a couple of the breadstick snakes
November 3, 2024 at 11:14 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
Anne Trubek: “The writing is not gone, or lost, but it’s much harder to find, literally and metaphorically.”
notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/we-have-no...

(paywalled but there’s a free trial; found after reading Anne Trubek’s post on print on demand publishing which was illuminating)
I briefly toyed with pitching a longform piece on the rise and digital loss of Lingua Franca, a case study of the gutting of the humanities and nonacademic venues for writing about ideas over the past few decades, framed by the deterioration of the internet in this one, but then I tried to think about who I might pitch to, wandered in my mind through the now defunct digital outlets of the past that might have been interested, and then tossed this idea, like so much else of our past, aside. Maybe it’d be better as a book.
October 30, 2024 at 12:05 AM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
In Lebanon, Israel Is Forcibly Displacing Civilians. That's a War Crime. - Foreign Policy
archive.today/2024.10.12-2...
Instead, more localized responses have prevailed. Some 1,000 collective shelters have been set up over the last few weeks, with 80 percent already at capacity. Public schools across the country are shuttered, as nearly half of them have been transformed into shelters for approximately 200,000 people, alongside a number of private initiatives that are providing shelter and relief to thousands more. Many families are hosting dozens of extended relatives, and even total strangers, in cramped apartments. Overall, grassroots Lebanese responses to the war have been remarkable; it is a dark silver lining that Lebanon’s repeated crises and weak state have primed self-organized groups, municipalities, and advocacy organizations to quickly mobilize limited resources to support those in need.
October 13, 2024 at 12:16 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
"rotting in our beds" rotting...?

also why is every other link on Pocket's homepage some variation on this
Apple has an optional feature called Screen Distance in Settings → Screen Time that will warn you when your screen is too close to your face. Your heart Phones were built to be portable, but often they can keep us inert, glued to our chairs or rotting in our beds.
September 27, 2024 at 9:27 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
with a judge in Missouri blocking the abortion ballot amendment, revisiting this article by Melissa Gira Grant on this and similar ballot measures was clarifying to me
newrepublic.com/article/1799...
The problem with the “restore Roe!” rallying cry is that, as activists have succinctly put it, “Roe is the floor, not the ceiling.” Roe protected the right to abortion only up to the point of fetal viability. But this boundary is disputed: How viability is defined, how viability should be used to set limits on abortion, and whether it should be used at all, are all complicated questions medically, morally, and politically. But when it comes to the law, “viability” is too arbitrary a standard to set, some advocates argue, and one that excludes later abortions, which are already difficult to obtain. Now state ballot initiatives meant to “restore Roe” could be enshrining this viability standard in state constitutions.
September 9, 2024 at 12:58 AM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalklines / and snapping a photo.” !

and those final two lines 💀

Solmaz Sharif - “Dear Aleph,”
Dear Aleph, You’re correct. Every nation hates its children. This is a requirement of statehood. This and empathy. Empathy means laying yourself down in someone else’s chalklines and snapping a photo. A Chrysler with four bullet holes in the rear passenger door just drove by calmly, signaling before it turned. Oh, Mrs. Evans, you’re such a wonderful woman, said, supposedly, Ethel Rosenberg to the woman who walked her to the chair. It was empathy on Evans’s part. Love on Ethel’s. I am a wonderful woman more often than I care to admit. We are going to have our first woman president.
August 12, 2024 at 10:13 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
this awning, for how high it is, should be a third wider at least. sunlight’s shining over most of my body and into the glass doors
sun peeking through patchy clouds and around a very high, narrow metal awning
August 10, 2024 at 8:57 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
robhorning.substack.com/p/companions... “Companionship without companions” by @robhorning.bsky.social
Many anticipated AI applications seem predicated on the idea that our experience of the world should require less thought and have better interfaces, that we want to consume the shape and form of conversation, consume simulations of speaking and listening without having to risk direct engagement with other people.
August 4, 2024 at 4:27 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
gukira.wordpress.com/2024/07/23/i... “Interrupted lives are interrupting lives. Does that sound too pat?”
Business should not be interrupted. Life should go on. As scheduled. Yet, [highlighted] the protesters’ very simple claim is that no such thing as a scheduled life is possible under this government. Life is a series of interruptions and truncations and emergencies. Moving from one gig to the next. One “informal” job to the next. One “casual” job to the next. One loan to the next. One health emergency to the next. One violent encounter to the next. [end highlighting] After all, the state’s violence against the young and poor and vulnerable did not start with these protests. It is a feature of Kenyan life. Interrupted lives are interrupting lives. Does that sound too pat?
July 29, 2024 at 12:14 AM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
friend wrote this poem, a response to Gretchen Henderson’s Dear Body of Water project, drawn from a local nature area
www.dbrl.org/teens/dear-b...
WATERSHED [by Grae] how might I wear the river’s heart? and how many hearts swirl beneath its sheets heavy with iridescence? I draw each slipping tear each soothing wash upward near the dear parts of my shrewing self I wish I could shred but don’t. yes, or okay, or ♒ the water says. let your rash of emptiness rush raw into rest.
July 18, 2024 at 2:08 AM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
“Dancer” by idles has been stuck in my head for weeks (I suspect I heard it on Inhailer), but could not remember its name, thanks Inhailer #2024Indie500
“Dancer” by Idles playing on Inhailer radio
May 27, 2024 at 7:42 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
www.inhailer.com/indie5002024 👻
everyday is halloween by Ministry playing on Inhailer Radio
May 27, 2024 at 3:25 PM
librarypoweruser.bsky.social
inflatable tube men bend in the desert wind - movie still from Jordan Peele's Nope (2022)
May 17, 2024 at 10:53 PM