Notices by Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)

@skinnylatte I love Oakland. It is the only part of the Bay area where I feel at home.

@skinnylatte Yikes. My Turkish friend was in Reykjavik all summer for a research fellowship and reached a point where he just stopped leaving his apartment for anything. I cooked for him while he was visiting and ended up leaving him a bunch of frozen meals because he stopped trying going to restaurants. If I got us takeout by myself we could eat.

@skinnylatte White people in the US love talking about Scandinavian liberalism, but Iceland is the only place I have ever been denied service in multiple businesses because I walked in with a Turkish friend. It was shocking. If people talked to us at all it was to warn me not to bring my friend to the public swimming facilities with me.

Oh wow, the British Library is hiring in 17th-18th-c collections. Makes me wish I had gone to library school. https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQH179/lead-curator-modern-archives-and-manuscripts-1601-1800

It's #Caturday and Dolores is purring *so* loud.
#CatsOfMastodon

@FlashMobOfOne I don't mind students using piratey sources to find books, but every time I suggest a non-legitimized option, that also means they need to be 40x more savvy about the quality of the sources they're looking for. In olden times, the university library was a pretty good proxy for legitimate/not-legitimate. But now that uni libraries don't provide anything that humanists need, students have to be way way more selective in what they are looking for, and that takes years of experience.

I am almost at the point at which it would be better to sit humanities students down with a pile of paper journals in a field and ask them to find articles relevant to their topic rather than letting them use digital databases. Search is broken to the point that I don't know how to teach it anymore. Even if they can find anything, results are so bizarre and inappropriately ranked that it takes more work to assess sources than to understand and cite them. They're worn out from failing at it.

Front row center for the Queer Big Apple Corps Symphonic Band

This is so fun and lively and inviting, and the family behind us is wildly uncomfortable with (1) music and (2) queers and is being unbelievably rude, loudly talking about how bored they are and falling asleep. They gave their child jingle bells to play along with the concert, in the second row. I don't even know why people leave their houses at all.

I know it is a Sunday matinee so we are asking for it, but my God. There is no bottom. Throughout the performance of "Take the A Train" this woman kept yelling "I think this is 'Take the A Train'! That's what the program says!"

Their relative in the band came out during the intermission and told them not to let the child play jingle bells during the concert. The mom is screaming that no one can hear, actually. No, she can hear from the orchestra! While playing!

Nothing says "We don't really support our queer relative" like coming to her concert and acting like monsters the whole time.

Oof: After intermission, the clearly drunk dad passed out and snored loudly. Everyone in the theater stood for applause at the end of a wonderful concert, but not them! That will show their incredibly earnest queer oboe-playing daughter. 😭

I woke up to that disgusting Vaseline-lensed NYT essay about how the world of Epstein was a long-ago different time when male power bonds emerged according to the ancient affective paradigms of NYC, lost in the mist of #metoo and I am desperate to know why no one ever thinks to look at the tremendous work on those affective paradigms written by those who could see them clearly at the time. Eve Sedgwick's Between Men (1985) will do nicely. She was declared dangerous for describing male affect:

She argues (beautifully, hilariously, enragedly) that patriarchy replicates itself by recruiting men at all levels of socioeconomic/political power to find themselves in brotherhood and solidarity through ritual, mutual humiliation of others (women, children, etc.). Even gay men can be invited into these emotional bonds, as willing participants, or they can become victims. Her great insight, I think, is that patriarchy is material but also emotional--a misty glorious past that is still with us.

If billionaires aren't taxed more and don't spend their money here, but do most of their polluting here, why would we want to live anywhere near them? I am a billionaire NIMBY. If you like them so much, you take them into your neighborhoods and find out what they're like.

Hi beloved c18.masto.host friends! It's time for our annual user drive to support use during 2026, when more of our colleagues may be moving over from other social media. I want to encourage new members while discouraging spam and AI accounts. Please invite people, and remind them to introduce themselves for an account!

Our costs for 2026 will be $474, of which I pay half, so our goal is $237. Please contribute via Venmo @johnsonians or via PayPal to carrieshanafelt@gmail.com.

Update: As of today, we have received $235 in donations to support c18.masto.host, including two donations from members of other instances! That is only $2 shy of our funding goal for the year, which I don't mind covering. I do think it is time for us to consider whether to boot the 200+ accounts that joined three years ago and have not signed in for over a year since. I emailed all of them earlier this month, and some did sign in to look around; most did not. But we can't downsize with them.

It's been too long since our Boardgame Rehoming ceremony. Let's get to it!

The games we are giving away are listed in this Google Sheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gk0PEoxL3u7HxAv6I_3qhe2IJQhQManLEwlGSDgdwUQ/edit?usp=sharing

If you live in the 48 contiguous US states, we will send you 3-6ish games (depending on sizes) for the cost of USPS shipping plus a little for shipping materials.

If you live in NYC, you can come get them from our apartment. (We can't hand-deliver them to everyone.)

Claim 3-6 games by responding to this thread with your choices.

I made the blogger's mistake of thinking those relationships were real. I did buy everyone's books, if I liked them online. I came to their Zoom book release parties, and attended their talks on panels. I even read their books, and shared them with students! But I think it was because my follower count was lower, that I was treated like a fan, not a colleague or a friend. That "fan" mentality is so poisonous to academic productivity. I'm a reader, not a fan, of my colleagues and peers.

I want to encourage people in my field to see that social media could be more than a "hot or not" test for nerds. When I post about an article I've published here, people actually click through. Some even read my work! My friendships here never feel like we're showing off an elite connection in front of wannabes. And because there's less vague cruel subtooting, I don't have battles to fight all day against perceived slights or whatever. That was exhausting.