The Invisible Library

I’m headed off to Atlanta for a couple of days on Double Super Top Secret Library Business,* so now posting until at least Thursday night. in the meantime, here are a few fun links to hold you over til then:

Belle Warring has a great little post over at Crooked Timber regarding our iminant train wreck with Iran. You’l laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll drink yourself into a stupor just to have respite from the cringe inducing shenannigans of the Bush Administration. It’s fun!

Amanda Marcot over at Pandagon talks about why all us pissed off Lefties are so pissed off and how that’s a good thing, contrary to popular belief (and by popular belief, I mean Right blogosphere disgruntlement over the fact that we haven’t all submitted naughty-puppy-like to their stern rolled up newspaper of fascism).

And there’s always Boing Boing.

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* The Atlanta Campus of my Unnamed Southern Art School is tripling the size of the library due to the recent acquisition of an entire other, smaller Art School, including their library of 30K volumes. The Executive Librarian and I are going to check out the space, confer with colleagues and meet my Atlanta campus doppleganger.

A report in New Scientist shows that the Goth Subculture may actually help kids who self harm or have suicidal thoughts:

Researchers at University of Glasgow found that while most self-harmers started the practice at age 12 to 13, they did not become goths until they were a couple of years older, on average.

“One common suggestion is they may be copying subcultural icons or peers [when they self-harm], but our study found that more young people reported self-harm before, rather than after, becoming a goth. This suggests that young people with a tendency to self-harm are attracted to the goth subculture,” says Robert Young, who led the study.

“Rather than posing a risk, it’s also possible that by belonging to the goth subculture, young people are gaining valuable social and emotional support from their peers.”

The tone is cautious, as befitting a scientific journal but it’s a little too over cautious in some respects, for obvious reasons. Quick on the heals of a study showing that prayer is a load of crap, we have one showing the dreaded Satanic Goth Subculture actually may provide a safer, supportive environment for sensitive kids. What next, a study showing masturbation is good for you?

This study comes as no surprise to me, The Goth subculture allows people with rarified interests to meet like-minded folk, in a non judgemental environment.* Goths are a fairly open minded bunch, and even if you’re one of those RPG playing social outcasts, we still tolerate you. We may not talk to you or invite you to the Marilyn Manson concert with us, but neither will we beat the crap out of you simply for being different.

Link via Boing Boing.

* My wife and I met at a Goth Night at a local gay club, so, it’s really a sub culture two-for-one. Who says the gays are undermining marriage?

This question gets asked a lot. We librarians have criteria for evaluating a resource: reliability (Wikipedia is always there), authoritativeness (check out the recent study published a few months back in Nature), depth (1 million plus articles and growing daily) and specificity.

this last one is key. It measures how much a resource know sits audience, and how well the contributers provide that need. It’s a gage of how much passion the contributors have for their subject. So, how specific is Wikipedia?

Today I found this article: Gorillas in Silver Age Comics.

It’s that specific.

Regular readers will remember my ill-fated Wordpress blog from a few months back and what a mysterious end it met; one day there, the next gone. See, what happened was this: I almost lost my job from blogging. I panicked, accidentally deleted the blog and lost six months of posts. Luckily, I kept my job.

But for six weeks I was demoralized. One of my best-loved hobbies was gone and I felt like I was missing something, something I had, over the previous three years come to really enjoy. It relieved stress, kept me in touch with the world and other like minded and not so like-minded individuals. It allowed me to keep touch with friends in far away places (hay Kevin! Hay Jenny!). And generally made feel like I was part of a larger world, one I took active part in rather than just watched unfold on TV or news sites.

so, after six weeks of pulling out my hair, I went back online, starting up with my old Blogger site. I still had the archives from the previous two and half years and it was something.

Well, as you can see, I quickly became constrained by Blogspot (again) and decided to recreate the old-new blog. This time, it’s even better, as I’ve been able to inport my archives form the old site, so no more goofs, no more lost posts. It’s all here. All three years of it (minus some change).

So, just in time for my third anniversary online, her eit is: my new home. Blogging has been better and weirder than I ever thought it could be and it’s only going to get better from here. we’ve got an election coming up, a war to stop and anothe rpossible war to prevent. I have a novel to finish and books to read and movies to see. And I can’t wait to tell you all about every single thing that pops in my head.

And I promise, no more moving.

Cat pictures and even some thoughtful content are on the way– I’ve been getting over a cold and busy at work, as if that’s an excuse.

Meanwhile, I’ve been geeking out over the new Doctor Who series, which is now my number two favorite show on TV, after Battlestar Galactica. I don’t think it’s at all too early to declare a new golden age of TV sci-fi at hand. That both these shows are re-imaginings of classic series grown stale under their own weight probably has something to do with it.

I noticed this with Batman Begins; after years languishing in the hands of people who didn’t get the source material to begin with and produced rudimentary derivatives based on their own agendas, studio execs have wised up and decided to let the fans who grew up on these series have a go. And it’s paying off because the best work is done out of love for the ideas.