Kylene's Stuff

Libraries run on statistics.

Every question I am asked gets a tick mark, and gets recorded at the end of the day.

Every book you take off the shelf? Don't reshelve it yourself... there's often a cart for "count use" or similar statistic... "This book wasn't checked out, which is automatically recorded, but it was used."

Check out not just books, but ebooks, movies, and anything we have to offer. I always say "the best thing about libraries is, if you don't like it, return it and all you've lost is time." Want to hate-read a conservative pundit's book? Check it out. Willing to wait for a movie to come to video? We got DVDs. On the go and want something to read or listen to? I can check books out of my local library on my phone from several states away. I've had "The Complete Tales of Peter Rabbit and Friends" on eaudiobook for pretty close to four years straight, because my daughter goes to sleep with it (and demands it if I don't have it).

If you want a book at another location in a big system? Put it on hold, so it will come to you (unless you need it RIGHT NOW). If we don't have it? Ask that we buy it. Show an interest and we might have space in the budget.

Ask about and use our databases. We get credit for click-throughs. You are already paying (pennies) for them.

Ask about our system for compliments from the public. Use that system to praise individual staff (especially me), and libraries that you love. As a manager, if I have positive letters from the public, I can better justify high review scores for my staff.

Go to programs. Ask for programs you want. Popular programs show the library is used. Tomorrow, I have a couple who have asked for some basic computer instruction... that's a program.

Vote, especially for people who believe in funding public services. But if your polling location is a public library, even better. And contact your local elections office, and try to get libraries made polling places... increased foot traffic helps non-library users become library users.

If your library has one, join your Friends of the Library group. I know our friends group is aging, so even if all you can do is schlep boxes for their book sale, it's a big help.

The more you participate in, and use your library, the more we can justify budget increases to improve services.

"or monsterfucker w/ her mom later" WHY IS THIS SO FUNNY I SWEAR TO GOF

There are 50K notes on this post and every variation of this response makes me very proud of myself as a writer.

If you’re an adult, do the stuff you couldn’t as a kid.

Like, me and my sister went to a museum, and they had an extra exhibit of butterflies. But it cost £3. So we sighed, walked past, then stopped. We each had £3. We could see the butterflies. And we did it was great. We followed it up with an ice-cream as well because Mum and Dad weren’t there to say no.

I was driving back from a work trip with 2 other people in their early 20s, and we drove past a MacDonalds. One of the others went “Aww man, I’d love a McFlurry.” And the guy driving pulled in to the drive through. It was wild. But it was great.

I went to a park over the weekend and I was thinking “Man, I’d love to hire one of those bikes and cycle round the park.” It took me a few minutes to go “Wait, I can hire one of those bikes!”

I guess what I’m saying is, those impulsive things you wanted to do as a kid - see the dinosaur exhibit, play in the fountains with the other kids, lie in the shade for 2 hours - you can do when you’re an adult. You have to deal with a whole lot of other bull, but at least you can indulge your inner 8 year-old.

I can take my ass to the zoo any time I have the time and cash for it. Which is a lot more often than I 2as allowed to go as a kid!

ZOOOOOOO! I fucking love the zoo! When we moved to the city after graduation we lived in sort of walking distance if you hate yourself and we bought the annual pass, which pays for itself after 3 visits, and we went ALL THE TIME in the horrible gap where we didn’t have jobs yet. But checking out the cool animals, especially the ones whose exhibits had been updated, was so much fun. And they were actively working on continuing to make the zoo better for animals.

Right?! Right?! It’s such a good investment! So much entertainment!

Our zoo has done so much work! I hadn’t been in years and then bought myself a zoo membership so I could go draw animals and get some exercise. It looks amazing now, the enclosures are so nice!

COVID ruined my heat tolerance though, and I live in a really hot place, so I didn’t renew.

BUT THAT WAS FINE!

I got AN AQUARIUM PASS instead!!! It’s all indoors!!!

I am an ADULT and if I want to spend a reasonable sum on a year of infinite fish, I can do that! I can go in and instead of having to beg a parent to give me the $3 for a paper cup of room-temp cocktail shrimp, I can just slap down the cash and go feed the little stingrays! I can go and look at NOTHING but the sharks. I can PET HORSESHOE CRABS! I learned their carapaces feel like plastic?!

I get to do all that! I can go look at animals ANY WEEKEND I WANT.

Do things like this. Take the kid who you were by the hand and take them out for a treat!

The kid I was always dreamed of having an arcade of his own. Guess what I’ve built in my house? Being an adult means we get to decide what being an adult means.

"Police got very mad"

Yall stop that

yeah i appreciate the sentiment man but i still feel worthless so idk what to tell you

Listen. Listen.

You don’t have to feel like it’s true. You don’t have to believe it. It doesn’t matter. I sure as hell didn’t. Don’t, even. Present-tense, some days. All the “it gets better” shit sounds like crap, and it never really stops sounding a bit phony, but here’s the thing:

“Better” doesn’t mean happy-go-lucky perfect, on top of the world forever and always. It just means “better”. One day you’re walking to a bus stop in the freezing rain after a bad day and realize you’re actually kind of glad you didn’t die in your sleep when you wanted to. You catch yourself excited for something and it surprises you, cause you didn’t think you could still feel excitement anymore. You fuck something up and manage to shrug it off instead of hating yourself, and you notice.

So you feel worthless. You’re probably gonna feel worthless for a long time. You’re probably gonna feel worthless tomorrow, and the day after that, and a week from now. Maybe in a month, or a year.

But, and speaking as a 🌟 clinically depressed nightmare🌟, that feeling isn’t real.

We invented the concept of “value” and “worth”, so it’s not a fact of the universe. It’s not an objective truth. If there is no cosmic force that’s decided you alone are special and the best, then there’s also no faceless void that has chosen you to be the worst.

You’ve been birthed into the cosmos without your consent and all you’re really obligated to do at the end of the day is keep your body running so you can fuck around. That’s it.

And step one of having fun with it is not regurgitating the self-hating crap your brain likes to generate.

Yeah, it feels true, but it isn’t, and saying it out loud or writing it down or reading it over and over again on a screen isn’t going to do anything but force you further into that belief.

I like to say I’m fantastic. I’m godlike. I’ve never done anything wrong and I’m never gonna die. I’m the big dick wizard of sexy man Nation and my grilled cheese could make the pope weep.

Is it true? Fuck no. But it’s fun, and it makes me laugh at myself, and if I’m gonna say things that aren’t true then why say things that feel like shit? Why not feel better?

So yeah, actually, I may have fucked up with that edit. Here’s a better one:

1. I got an email from someone, replying to something that I'd submitted to them with some self-deprecating wordings. In their response, they said "You are KB! And the B stands for BADASS!" I've been repeating that to myself A LOT.

2. I have a journal that has a daily affirmation space, "Today I am..." and the word I keep putting in there is "EXQUISITE" because I love the sound of the word. When I think "How am I going to do this thing?" my answer is "EXQUISITELY!"

drives me up a wall living in a very very red district, like “no democrat is ever going to win any local election, let alone a real leftist” district, like “our school board members ran on who was the most anti-mask” red, like “I pass white supremacist signs on the way to buy weed” red

and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote

the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work

going “okay, they’re both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position” or “they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough” like we don’t even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can’t.

and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn’t going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???

we didn’t build this system, we just live in it. we’re just trying to survive. a vote isn’t a statement of your values, it’s not an endorsement, it’s not a marriage contract, it’s a strategic play you make to keep alive.

the biggest mistake I see leftists making is overestimating their own popularity. “well but everyone would be leftist if they just-“ no, stop, 1) you can’t possibly know that 2) everyone will not just

I ran for a seat on the library board in my town, and a seat on the school committee. No one ran against me for library board, and my run for the school committee seat was the first contested election in a decade.

I lost the school committee election by nine votes. I won the election to the library board.... and within five months, I was the chair of the library board.

In the year I've been on the board, we've passed rules that make it very difficult to remove books already in the library. We've empowered our library director in a variety of ways too, and limited the ability of people who aren't residents of our town to complain about our circulating collections or our archives.

You don't have to stick to just voting. You can also challenge people for seats on the lowest levels of your town government... and remind them that their seat is not guaranteed.

Is it easy? No. But there are vacancies in every civic government, and in many states the Open Meeting Laws and Quorum rules are such that any board or committee may not be able to function without filled seats. And running for the seat cost me nothing.

😭 he brings all his friends to meals

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

Sometimes I recommend a book to someone and then forget about it and months or years later that person tells me "hey I've read that book you told me about and I loved it! great recommendation" and I'm like oh my existence has a purpose after all

FOLKS, PLEASE…DO YOUSELVES A BIG BIG FAVOR AND STOP USING TURBOTAX!  IT IS USELESS NOW!!!

THE IRS website will let you fill out and file your return THERE ON THE IRS SITE.  You pay like $12 for the actual electronic filing process, and THAT’s IT!

Unless you have tremendous amounts of Schedule D stock shit, TurboTax is NOTHING BUT A RIPOFF!!!

The IRS website is EXCELLENT.  They allow you to look up your past returns, and have every bit of information you MIGHT POSSIBLY NEED!

FUCK TURBOTAX!

LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM IT!!!!!!!

Friendly reminder as well that if you’re making less than $66,000 a year, you don’t need to pay to file your taxes and also all tax-paying softwares (eg rhymes with FurboFax) have a free filing option hidden in their websites. 

Have at it kiddos:

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-just-tricked-you-into-paying-to-file-your-taxes

You can also use Freetaxusa Very user friendly.

I often think I could be such a good writer if I were better at writing

Unfortunately, the only way to improve your writing is to write.

It really truly sucks that the only way to get better at something is to be bad at it first.

[ID: A photo of a white t-shirt [design by Arcane Bullshit, per the notes]. Against a green background of grass, hills, trees, and cattails, dark grayscale birds (including some kind of wading bird), dragonflies, and turtles are arrayed. Large black text reads "The only bank I trust is" across the top and "the riverbank" across the bottom. Smaller black text underneath 'riverbank' reads "I gave all my money to a turtle! It just swam away." /end ID]

Food Fun Facts for dad types!!!

•Adding butter or cheese or salt or whatever to your veggies so that you like them doesn’t change the nutritional content you get from said veggies.

•Additional calories eaten don’t negate the healthy benefits of food. And, stay with me here, low calorie foods are not more morally pure than high calorie foods.

•If making a food more palatable by adding butter (or whatever) is the make-or-break for someone to actually eat the vegetable, then the Brussel sprouts with butter are FUCKING HEALTHIER for you than the Brussel sprouts you don’t eat. A salad with ranch dressing is healthier for you than the dry greens you don’t eat. A sandwich with cheese and mayo is more healthy than the plain sandwich you don’t eat. The strawberry with whipped cream is more healthy than the strawberry you don’t eat.

•We actually don’t have to buy the bullshit that food that makes us happy or tastes good is less healthy.

Before and after staining the wood:

Source

I didn’t trust it cause I couldn’t see any grain zooming in so I looked up his name and,

No he’s just that fucking good. Hyper-realistic is underselling it my dude. This is some wizard spell.

WOOD?!?!?!

Day 702 of posting pictures of elephants.

Source: HERD