Jessamyn

Excellent free zine about overcoming voting barriers. "Plenty of people hit a wall when they try to vote. Their name is missing from the voter list. The mail ballot never showed up. The signature on the envelope doesn't match. Someone at the door tells them they can't. None of that happens by chance. This guide covers the barriers that come up most often, and what to do about each one. English and Spanish versions are the same zine." From @monteiro@simian.rodeo and friends. https://howtovote.tips/

Dear quilting/library community, please enjoy this bookshelf quilt made as a fundraiser for the new library (in Belleville ONT). The books are all named after local people and organizations. https://www.flickr.com/photos/cabhc/55366630415/

@drahardja@sfba.social I work for Flickr Commons and we've got nearly two million copyright-free images. https://commons.flickr.org/

(re-posted from 2023) I asked why the library didn't have a #Juneteenth holiday. The response was "It's not one in the policy manual." I wrote to the trustees, they put it on the agenda, voted unanimously for it, and now it's a library holiday. When we talk about white supremacy and libraries, think about how a group of well-meaning but ultimately non-proactive trustees (and director) just kind of... didn't think about this for two years, just never put it on the agenda. That's how it works.

I have consolidated many of these suggestions into a document with a few other links. Anything major that I am missing? This is mostly for the types of users I interact with (mainly older adults) so I did not include things like Slack and I'm not sure about things I don't use much like Outlook or Facebook. Other suggestions for links about removing AI geared towards not-very-technical people? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nYLmQLYZy_Mg-Dh6iME6R61Jjh4L6sRrw1v2dLXs9aE/edit?usp=sharing

I've been using an app (CBT-i) for years. I manually enter my sleep details and it makes me some simple charts to see trends. Recently, I found a weird bug which I reported. Got SUCH a nice email back. 🥰 "This is a clear bug & one we were not aware of. Thank you so much for taking the time to share this & I will make sure it gets added to our fix list. Please be patient with us- our resources are limited, and it may be a while before this gets addressed, but I assure you we’ll fix it!"

@mhoye@cosocial.ca Yeah I deal with this sometimes. People who presume I'm a smart cookie so why am I still using various corporate stuff? And my answer is usually because I want to just USE the tool and not manage and maintain the tool. I manage and maintain my own Wordpress instances (on other people's servers) and it's already a lot.

I know folks get into their patterns so I mostly stay out of it but suggest he take a seat, not loom over her while she does this. We get the password updated and the account deleted but it takes maybe a dozen clicks and two codes sent to her email and the whole experience feels like a lesson in consent-override. Judy is a trooper. John chats with me until it's time to go. I had a good time, free snacks, and can't beat the view. EOM

Jessamyn's Maxim of Uptime says that the likelihood that your website will be up and running is in inverse proportion to the amount of media mentions that you've gotten in the past 24 hours. I did an interview with a person who works for an indie news outlet. I mentioned my work with Flickr Commons and my blog, librarian.net. Within 24 hours of the interview going up, both sites were down (and are both back up now. Here's the interview. I think it came out well. https://www.newsjunkie.net/article/jessamyn-west-interview

I have a tall stump in my front yard that I left when I had to take down a dead tree. it is right on the sidewalk. It is now home to some incredible massive wasps. They look scary but are harmless to humans. I have a laminator. I made a sign. (CWed pix of wasps in next toot)

The Mastodon web app has subtly changed the way their advanced interface works w/r/t seeing my own replies and I am now doing my bi-yearly "Are there other interfaces I might like better?" quest. Really pining for the Tweetdeck of yore (with an option for more columns). Anyone got one that they like? Note: not looking for iOS apps, just the web app.

Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I had some tree guys working early today and so I am even more out of it than usual in this election primary season. Going to try to regroup before the first of two candidate campaign kickoffs this weekend (I am not a candidate, phew) and see if I can channel my inner Chisholm. May we all be unbought and unbossed. Have a good weekend. Image credit: Library of Congress on Flickr Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/50888214191/

Book 54: I Contain Multitudes. Ed Yong is, of course, a treasure. I had somehow not read this book when it came out in 2016 and even though some of it may be outdated (though I don't know which parts) it was still a fascinating read about the various ways in which microbes define a lot of the things around us, and in fact define us in many ways. I really enjoyed the plan talking way he was able to describe pretty heavy science-y stuff, always answering the "Why would I care?" parts first.

John has issues printing Excel and working w/formatting but he mostly wants to talk about the hard work he's put in cataloging the library there. He used Excel for work before he retired (on a PC) his kids got him on a Mac, he's been using Numbers but then switched to Excel/Mac so he could share this work with more people. Joke's on him, no one else wants to share the spreadsheet work. He has issues printing with Excel but I think he wanted an excuse to go back to using Numbers, which I give him

Book 48: How to Die. This book is not about how to die. It's a collection of essays by Mike Monteiro who is an Old Web guy and a designer answering questions that people pose to him about life stuff. Simple questions like how to make a grilled cheese, or a mixtape, and more complicated ones like how to get your joy back. He writes these up for his weekly newsletter and this is a collection of them. If you've read his other work, you'll know if you'll dig this or not. Pulls no punches. Very good.

Bob has come to the library before. He wants to get Malwarebytes to stop nagging him that his subscription has expired. He does not have a subscription but I guess he was on a free trial of some of the premium features that has ended and sending him menacing notifications. We go into the Windows notification center and I ask him a few questions, he doesn't want ANY notifications from software and it's very satisfying to turn them all off.

Pat says she got a new Kindle because her old one "filled up with books and wouldn't work" which, ok. She wants to set up her new one. She has the Kindle App on her phone, is logged in, and there should be a magic way to link them. There is, but the new Kindle needs to get on wifi which was a step or two earlier than where she was. Turn it off and on again, presto!

Book 47: Platform Decay. This was just on the shelf at my library! I like the Murderbot books. This one had a bunch of characters which I wasn't totally familiar with and did not have the other characters I did know and like (for the most part). There's a lot of Murderbot "emotional growth" if you can call it that, but a lot of the logistics of the mission they do are "And then I hacked into THIS thing and made it work for me." Not enough ART. These feel more like serialized magazine stories.

Joan I know because she sold her house to our children's librarian when she moved here. She wants to get images out of her email and in to Photos. She uses Mail. I show her how the import feature works but it turns out (once we've tried that) that she'd prefer to do it one at a time so I show her the joys of right-click.

Bobbie uses an iPad and likes Apple News but sometimes it gets stuck loading stories and she isn't sure how to get it to start loading stuff again. I show her how to close programs on the iPad which often works for this sort of thing. We practice a bit to make sure she has the finger gestures right, they're kind of tricky.

Judy is John's wife and wanted to delete her Facebook account. Like many older people, she has two by accident so she wants them both deleted. I *think* we deleted one last time I was here so we figure out the other one. She has scraps of paper with what she thinks are her FB passwords and we try a few but after a while I'm like "Why don't we reset your password and then delete the account?" John is backseat driving the entire time.

Book 51: Kampung Boy. This graphic novel is a classic of the genre which somehow I had never come across until I found it in a local LFL. It's an excellent story about growing up in a rural village in Malaysia as a Muslim kid at the same time as the rural ways are disappearing. The drawing is goofy and expressive and there is so much going on in each page it was fun to flip through it. It highlights just how isolated rural communities were and yet how much was still going on in each one.

Tom has a serious tremor which has nothing to do with his tech problems so I ignore it. He is trying to get email to download when it's stuck only partially loaded. I've noticed this with the Mail app, it can sometimes give up if there's an iffy network issue. People who live here have their own private internet in their rooms and then there's public wifi so sometimes moving between them has this happen. I show him what I showed Bobbie, we practice, he's good.

@kissane@mas.to Thanks for this Erin. As someone in library work (also a lot of ordinary-people talking) this resonated.

@SecondUniverse@autistics.life @adhdeanasl@beige.party I am the same. I often miss a lot of references or don't know who a person is in an image and alt text can help me understand it. Or sometimes I have trouble figuring out why the picture is included, what I am supposed to be focusing on and alt text can really help with that. I use the Perkins School for the Blind tips if someone asks me (a librarian) about doing better alt text. They include that fun capybara image as well. https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/

Book 55: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. A book about the changing way of life in Pakistan. This is a collection of "linked" chapters ( they're all about the same general area and share characters but only just; I couldn't always figure out how they related) which were all about what I would consider class differences and longing. Some stories are about the upper classes, and some about the servant classes with stark divisions highlighted. A lot of misery but not always in the way you'd expect.

Book 50: Love, Misha. Misha doesn't feel that their mom has been supportive of their gender transformation. They are going on a road trip together (one that Misha doesn't want to go on) and get lost. They wind up in a spirit world, meet a lot of unusual creatures, some friendly, some not. Being lost is both true but also a metaphor for Misha's relationship with their mom as they work together to find a way back to their own world and get to know each other. Really well done and illustrated.

@Trenton_Hoshiko@mas.to There's been a rabid bat found one town over from me. Our state Health Department's advice is "Wash the affected area with soap and water and then call the health department or medical personnel and follow their instructions" If you get treatment you will be okay.

Blog post: Coupon. I went to a new library this week, all because I had a coupon. https://www.jessamyn.com/journal/2026/07/coupon

@jalefkowit@hachyderm.io I know it's hard to imagine but I think the answer is "As a period piece" and all the youth will look at the outfits and the cars and say "Imagine a time..."

@catsalad@infosec.exchange I have this on my car. It's a great way to meet people.

Book 52: The Keeper. Tana French's Cal Hooper series does not miss. An American ex-cop moves to a small town in Ireland, learning the ways of a place where everyone's known each other for generations. In this episode a young woman who is set to marry to local Big Man's son turns up dead. Trying to figure out what happened is a whole *thing*. Cal is folded more into the community as they unravel the story, this reveals some buried feelings of Lena's and everything disrupts and then settles again.

@linguistory@code4lib.social @overholt@glammr.us iirc they mostly do non-destructive scanning https://digitization.archive.org/digitization/

@TindrasGrove@infosec.exchange I teach people how to use technology in a public library and I see things like this (people needing to sign up for things, our local country fair is still blissfully offline for signups) nearly every week. Even just signing in to an email account or facebook from a new device or IP address (and we're the library so we're always a "new" IP address compared to someone's home) requires a hokey-pokey of multiple devices. It's a mess and it's dispiriting to people already struggling.

@glecharles@gardenstate.social I like them conceptually but they're really busy and I may have to cull them down into simpler steps. I liked your bit in Jane's newsletter today!

@zackwhittaker@mastodon.social we have a woman who is local in my county in Central Vermont who has been really leading the charge in the Vermont legislature to be a lot more rigorous about data brokers; the woman who's running in the primary against her has donations that are exclusively from out-of-state lobbying orgs. This is a really challenging thing to fight against, all this tech $$ but I'm glad she's doing it.

Book 46: Conversion Therapy Dropout. This is an achingly poignant story about a guy who grows up in a religious household trying to "pray the gay away" for eight years with conversion therapy programs all the while enjoying a very successful career as a social media marketer for the same churches which don't accept him. He eventually comes to a better place as a queer adult but it's a long slog to get there and he remains very religious, but within an affirming community and supportive friends.

Book 49: The Last Word. I went into this book, the last in the Harbinder Kaur series, with a bit of trepidation since the reviews in the little slip my library puts in the back for patron reviews PANNED it. I thought it was fine. Wraps up a few things nicely. The mystery is fine. I find the multiple-perspective writing a little tiresome since I want more Kaur and this was more about her group of friends and a mystery they encounter about a writers' book group with a very high mortality rate.

@badbede@deacon.social Yep the quilt is on display on the second floor of the Belleville Public Library

Book 45: Love by the Book. This is a story within a story of a platonic and yet also romantic (bot not sexual) friendship between two women. Remy is dealing with the inevitable aging-and-distancing of her best-friend group and she meets Simone who is pretty closed off but maybe open to being friends. Both women go through a lot in the short course of this novel. Remy is also trying to undo some writer's block after her first successful novel and decides to write about their friendship.

Book 53: Missing Sam. I'd read another book by this author that I had not remembered. Went back to check and it was a similar, sort of heavy but extremely well-written book. This one is about a woman who goes missing (white, history of family trauma) and her wife who looks for her (American, Muslim, family became distant when she came out to them). Really grim in parts, but there's love at the center of all of it. If you avoid trauma stories, avoid this one, otherwise, a very good read.

@linguistory@code4lib.social @overholt@glammr.us Thanks -- it's entirely possible I am not correct about that

@zer0unplanned Then this is not for you.

@rrb@infosec.exchange @cynblogger@sfba.social Yep was looking for something with maximum collaboration options and then I will probably self-host when I've got it more into its final form.

@Palleas@mastodon.social Yes it does, thank you!

With the help of a Mastodon pal, I think I got the domain redirecting properly. If you could let me know if http://NoToAI.org (or the https://NoToAi.org) does NOT redirect to a page on librarian.net, I'd appreciate it.

I rewrote my will this month because

• my old one was out of date
• I actually got some free psychic space to handle this
• I really like my lawyer and he works how I work
• I enjoy crossing things off of my clipboard

If you're someone who has been putting this off, please let this be a small nudge to do it. It may be a lot simpler than you think, depending on your jurisdiction. Nolo's got some good Getting Started stuff, as does GYST

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/wills-trusts-estates https://getyourshittogether.org/checklists-how-tos/