I’d like to point out one way to support the need to mark up books while reading is to give away weeded books (such as 9 out of 10 of the year old James Patterson's) to the people in question. My mom’s picked up many interesting books at library weeding sales (including a reusable grocery bag’s worth for $10). I would happily let people with the print disability you describe have first dibs to the books in question. I’m sure many other’s would as well.
They won’t be able to read best seller’s immediately but sometimes life’s like that. I’m dyslexic and my ability to read-read instead of listen-read is EXTREMELY limited.
I recently read most of “Make, Sew, Mend” by Bernadette Banner and it took me three months.
I need someone to read comic books to me.
I’ve thrifted many books I’ve already read and have the audio book as well in order to annotate them. And so far I just... haven’t.
I bought a set of children’s poetry books two years ago now and haven’t read a single one cover to cover.
There are many niche book’s I’d like to read but won’t get the chance.
So... when I say, “sometimes life’s like that”, my life is like that. My needs are not greater than someone else’s needs. Neither is my right to books.
One of the reasons that I personally think the answer, "because it's not yours" is not a good enough reason on its own to the question of "why is it bad to mark up library books," is because of the first "yes" answer I suggested in the poll. There are some people who are not effectively able to read books unless they can mark them - underline, circle, star, take notes, etc. This is probably an extremely small percentage of people, but I know for a fact that they do exist. And the suggestions of taking notes on post-its or a separate piece of paper won't work for them, because they will need to mark up the book in order to effectively parse it.
Now, I still don't think it is ok for individuals in that situation to take notes in a library book. Those markings still damage the book, and they will interfere with other people's ability to read to book. As far as I'm concerned, that is a case of competing accessible needs where unfortunately the result is that some people just aren't able to access a certain resource in a way that they need to.
But I do think it's important to recognize that such a competing need exists, and that certain people will be prevented from fully accessing a community resource because they can't mark up library books. And if you stop the analysis with, "because it's not yours," you can't account for those people and their experience and needs.
@prokopetz
made me think of you
I love it soooo much!!!!
SOB LOOK AT 'EM!
I am so so happy you like it! I hope these lil owlbear butts (or as my spouse calls them- "Hoot-Hoot Patoots") support your wrist wonderfully!
Heeyyyyy!
I use that when flame working glass
(while going through some casual photos:)
How You Pull Ivy Off The Wall
(I was outside in front of the house one morning, trying to pull this effing tenacious crap off, and breaking my nails... and then I thought: "Why am I doing this? I'm a nurse. We have a tool for this kind of bullshit.")
...And lo and behold, we do. :)
ETA per @maybeasunflower's questions:
(a) What makes the gynecological clamps better? They were sort of spoon-shaped at the ends, with little grabby teeth on the insides of the "spoons". You could grab much more of an ivy stem with them. My regrets that I can't summon up their proper name from the depths of time. ...Must make a run up to the surgical supply place in Dublin and see if they've got any.
(b) Which rotation in your nurse training gave you the skills to remove ivy with Foley clamps? Med-surg. Debridement: i.e. debriding someone who's fallen off a motorcycle at speed onto gravel while not wearing leathers or other protective garments. Getting the deeply-embedded gravel out of the damaged tissue requires a very similar skillset. Fortunately, when working with ivy one needs to have far less concern about handling the process in such a way as to cause minimum pain to the substrate you're removing it from. The wall doesn't care. :)
I went to University in the middle of a large city. There were was a lot of tension between the residents who lived right next to the campus and the students as well as the school as a whole.
Landlords were buying up peoples homes and converting them into apartments to rent out to the student population, displacing families and rapidly changing the make up of the area.
Students called the residents ‘the locals’, or, when they were complaining about how, ‘they just didn’t get college culture’, ‘the natives’. Yikes. Add on the residents were majority black and the students were majority white and it’s a Big Ol’ Fucking Yikes.
Moved to the suburbs and my dad was encouraging me to talk to the people I saw while walking the block and to in general ‘go native’. Oh boy that took me aback.
But even outside of the racial and economic tensions in an area, each neighborhood has it’s own little culture.
If you want to know anything about the area you go to my next door neighbor. He’s lived here 52 year and can tell you how long ago a project in your house was completed and if he thinks the people who did it would have done a good job.
If you lost your dog there’s a woman on our block who is always willing to help you out.
We have a block wide yard sale every other year.
Hey I'm sort of curious. I haven't read the book, but I'm a fan of the show and was genuinely disappointed that the phrase "going Native" had an exclusively negative connotation when I watched. Idk if this occurred to you or not, but that's pretty blatant racism. It's especially tone deaf considering this is a show about angels and demons - which have been a tool to commit genocide against us for upwards of 500 years.
Why not just use "human"? It's accurate and doesn't frame an entire demographic as inherently bad or undesireable.
Not trying to garner any ill will, it just rlly bummed me out bc I'm Native and it's an identity I wear with great pride bc ppl have tried countless times to rip it away from me. To see it treated with such disdain was very hurtful.
I understand your concerns, and do not wish to minimise them, or your hurt. Obviously the phrase has colonial roots. However, it's a lower case N, and isn't intended to talk about Native Americans. When the angels talk about Aziraphale "going native", this is the meaning they are using. It may be negative for the grumpy angels, but it's positive for humanity and for Aziraphale and Crowley.
From Mirriam Webster online:
: to start to behave or live like the local people
After a few weeks, she was comfortable enough to go native and wear shorts to work.
Recent Examples:
But dogs that go native make bad guards, hunting companions, and friends.—David Grimm, Science | AAAS, 29 Oct. 2020
Let your yard go native: The Cuyahoga Soil & Water Conservation District is offering seven native plant kits for sale that are adapted to the local climate and do not require excess watering or fertilizer once they are established.—Joan Rusek, cleveland, 6 July 2020
I just typed out "uwu" but then realized it wasn't helpful. It sounds soft and sweet, like the noise a small child would make when wanting to be picked up and held.
the prospect of how the text to audio converter the blind person is probably using to answer your post is gonna convert your keysmash is incredibly funny to me
Fuck, you’re right.
Robot voice: “Glumshoe reblogged your post and said: Gee Kay Ess Aich Eff Kay Ess Jay Ess Jay Ess…”
I’m so sorry, but at the same time, I think that’s how keysmashes should be experienced by everyone.
do you ever read a ‘callout post’ where the summary on top is like ‘they EAT BABIES and RUN A COFFEE SHOP FOR MURDERERS and they HATE GAY PEOPLE’ and then you scroll down and actually read the post and it’s like, they posted about lamb chops once, they work at starbucks and one time someone who killed someone had a coffee at that starbucks, and they made a ‘fruit (derogatory)’ joke once
Also the original tweet never specifies straight or cisgender women. So. You know.
glad this guy is getting absolutely owned in the replies of this sexist and completely ahistorical tweet
Hook it before putting it on.
I recently realized that my ideal gender presentation, which thanks to FINALLY going on T I will eventually achieve, is what transphobes think transwomen look like.
I will likely be indistinguishable from a non-passing transwoman. I will be asked why I don’t shave if I want to be seen as a woman. Womanhood will become a gift strangers think they can bestow upon me (no thanks, don’t want, return to sender).
And this is actually a scary thought. Because, you know, with all this bathroom nonsense I’ve come to internalize the idea that despite being trans it is undisputed that I have a right to exist in the women’s bathroom and that the women’s bathroom is a safe place for me which I only avoided to sooth socially enforced gender dysphoria.
When I grow a beard that shits about to be disputed as fuck.
So glad to see the weight loss encouragement in literally the most unexpected place. It’s been a difficult battle but ever pound loss reduces my pain. I want being pain free to be possible and I’m pursuing every possible solution.
I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.
Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.
It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.
It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.
How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.
It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.
It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.
It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?
It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.
Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.
I was planning to cast my uterus in glass once I’m finally able to get my hysto, but if anyone wants to pay for my surgery $14k they can have it instead.