MARC in a Cold Climate
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marccold.bsky.social
MARC in a Cold Climate
@marccold.bsky.social
1.2K followers 410 following 2.7K posts
Librarian, of sorts. I will always fight and I will never give up.
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marccold.bsky.social
Dewey makes strange bedfellows
An aisle in my local public library. 005 Computer Programming and 284 Protestant Denominations are opposite each other.
November 6, 2025 at 9:47 PM
marccold.bsky.social
oof www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/p...
A few hours later, he was walking into the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago for a “Great Gatsby”-themed Halloween party, where dancers in beaded fringe performed atop oversized champagne coupes. If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s disillusioned narrative of Jazz Age hedonism struck any of the guests as odd on the day food stamps were set to expire, they didn’t show it. “A little party never killed nobody” was the theme, apparently devised without reaching the end of the novel.
November 5, 2025 at 12:45 PM
marccold.bsky.social
Reading the Halloween Ellery Queen story "The Adventure of the Dead Cat." Here is Ellery being weirdly bitchy about a woman who invited him to a Halloween party. I have no idea what the egg thing means.
Nasty description of a female character. Contains, among other criticisms, the statement that "[she is the] kind of female who would be baffled by an egg."
November 1, 2025 at 2:00 AM
marccold.bsky.social
a very frightened little turtle knocked on my door and immediately panicked and rushed away without taking any candy. I said "come! come take some candy out of my kitty basket! I have so much candy!" before realizing that I sounded like the crooning witch in a fairy tale and stopping.
Image of the basket I use when handing out Halloween candy (photo taken earlier at work). It is a felt bucket designed to look like a black cat.
October 31, 2025 at 11:13 PM
marccold.bsky.social
Get with the times, Squaredle
The word game Squaredle, claiming that RANTY is not a word.
October 31, 2025 at 4:11 PM
marccold.bsky.social
More depressing stuff from the article.
"A real man provides discipline, and any talking back or acting out is asking for punishment." A quote from one of her dates. On their first date. "If [women who die in childbirth] picked up a Bible, God would show mercy." Another quote from another one of her dates.
October 30, 2025 at 6:03 PM
marccold.bsky.social
I think the saddest part of this is how women are so rigidly socialized to give men the benefit of every possible doubt while giving themselves no grace at all. ONE OF THESE MEN HAD THREATENED TO KILL HER.
Paragraph from the article by the female journalist who went on a conservative dating site to see what makes alt-right men tick. Highlighted sentence: "I wondered whether it was me who had been excluding them."
October 30, 2025 at 5:59 PM
marccold.bsky.social
My personal favorite for obvious double entendre reasons
AI YouTube comment summary (on a white noise video of a desk fan): "People love sleeping with fans."
October 28, 2025 at 6:49 PM
marccold.bsky.social
actual ad I just got served on the NPR website
Advertisement for a book called How to Know a Person by David Brooks (!). Tagline is "a practical guide to connecting in a disconnected world."
October 26, 2025 at 7:13 PM
marccold.bsky.social
if I've never heard about them why should I worry about the threats they face
CNN article with the headline "The threat to cruise ships you've never heard about."
October 24, 2025 at 4:23 PM
marccold.bsky.social
As an example, here is our archives mascot, Rich (short for Richardson Hall Biology and Biochemistry Wing Dedication Shovel).
Rich the shovel, looking dashing. He has no bad side.
October 21, 2025 at 3:59 PM
marccold.bsky.social
finally a factual headline
Headline from The Guardian: JD Vance brushes off racist texts by adults in Republican group chat as 'what kids do.'
October 16, 2025 at 2:14 PM
marccold.bsky.social
the Drake meme but it's these two photos of Hilary Jenkinson
Hilary Jenkinson looking annoyed. Hilary Jenkinson looking slightly less annoyed than he did previously.
October 7, 2025 at 1:26 AM
marccold.bsky.social
in retrospect I should have suspected something was wrong when my date abandoned me in the forest and I survived thanks to that mysterious gingerbread house
Teaser for a Washington Post article titled "Breadcrumbing and Three Other Dating Red Flags You Should Watch Out For."
October 6, 2025 at 1:21 AM
marccold.bsky.social
I clicked through and Gowdy was being active
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October 4, 2025 at 7:59 PM
marccold.bsky.social
to be fair I also would keep that a secret
Teaser for New York Times article. Thumbnail photo of a woman looking grave. Text of headline reads: "She Loved Eric Adams. She Kept It a Secret. Now She's Talking."
October 2, 2025 at 3:56 PM
marccold.bsky.social
It was comfort food day at the faculty dining room
Brisket, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and macaroni and cheese on a plate.
October 1, 2025 at 4:40 PM
marccold.bsky.social
not seasonally appropriate, but still my favorite picture of my sister's cat Perdita
Black and white cat sitting under Christmas tree with multicolored lights. In front of her are Christmas gifts wrapped in dinosaur paper.
September 23, 2025 at 7:43 PM
marccold.bsky.social
do the fancy hotels buy him the slippers and then monogram them for him or do they monogram slippers he already owns and has brought with him
From a review of Dan Brown's new novel in The Guardian: He's back, baby! Dan Brown's first novel in nearly a decade reunites readers with the world’s only professor of symbology, Robert Langdon – a man whose most distinctive quality of character is teaming a loafer-and-turtleneck combo with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. Do we learn more about Langdon? Not much. He is still so world-renowned that, as doesn’t happen for most academics, fancy hotels monogram his slippers for him.
September 11, 2025 at 12:33 AM
marccold.bsky.social
of course, nothing will ever match the full-bodied shudder I gave reading this
Screenshot of an "Ask a Manager" post from February 26, 2018: "my coworker with imposter syndrome actually does suck at her job."
September 9, 2025 at 5:53 PM
marccold.bsky.social
@askamanager.org reading me for filth, again
Screenshot of an "Ask a Manager" post from September 9, 2025: "my new team thinks they're incredibly overworked, but they actually do nothing."
September 9, 2025 at 5:50 PM
marccold.bsky.social
if you're reading a New Yorker article via our journal database and there is a cartoon on the last page, the OCR will pick up the text of the cartoon caption and incorporate it into the article as the final line, with interesting results
She is, she writes, always walking on the precipice. It's the language of recovery, an approach of total humility, the recognition of a fundamental fallibility which does allow so many people to finally, actually live. Oh, God... Here he comes... HOT-TAKE CHARLIE!
September 9, 2025 at 2:01 PM
marccold.bsky.social
stop talking about your feelings

PUT ON LIPSTICK AND SNARL INSTEAD
Screenshot of a CNBC article titled "Stop Talking About Your Feelings, Says Psychologist—What Emotionally Intelligent People Say to Understand People Better." Accompanying stock photo of a woman wearing a lot of makeup and looking very upset.
September 9, 2025 at 1:02 AM
marccold.bsky.social
I've obsessively read everything I can find about this book and I still don't understand what it means to be addicted to love
As in "Eat, Pray, Love," the narrative bends toward redemption. Reeling from grief, Gilbert confronted her own sex and love addiction, and discovered that most of her problems stemmed from being “a crazy, needy, clingy, desperate, out-of-control, love-starved maniac.” Working within a 12-step program, she eventually regained spiritual equilibrium and peace.
September 5, 2025 at 7:29 PM
marccold.bsky.social
absolutely the fuck not. no.

(to Gilbert's point, not to the reviewer, if it needs be said. the review itself is great.)
Gilbert's prose in "All the Way to the River" is often strangely flat and clipped. She has given two TED talks on creativity, which together have been viewed more than twenty-four million times; in 2015, she wrote "Big Magic," a best-selling book on the subject, which is full of spirited and generous advice for artists. The new book reads, at times, like the transcript of a TED talk—in one chapter, Gilbert introduces the metaphor of "Earth school," in which we might envision our planet as "the toughest and most elite accredited academy for spiritual ascension in the entire universe," and suggests that instead of asking "Why me?" we should ask "How might this terrible situation be perfectly designed to help me to evolve?"
August 27, 2025 at 4:07 PM