Notices by Jessamyn (jessamyn@glammr.us)

@jik @wronglang My sister (also in MA) went through the exact same thing a few weeks ago. In her case, the doctor was able to schedule a specific meeting for an appeal and it was all fine but it meant that her approved leave time at work got cancelled and she had to fill out all new e-paperwork to get it reinstated. And they wound up approving it anyhow, it just amped up the chaos level for everything.

@drahardja I work for Flickr Commons and we've got nearly two million copyright-free images.

https://commons.flickr.org/

Visited a library today which was named after a rich guy from Harvard (class of 1834). Discovered, through very minor research, that the money given to the library (claimed to have been left in his will) was, in fact, given by his sister, the sole beneficiary of his $$ after he left no will at all.

After correcting the Wikipedia record on this point, I have now gotten lost reading about The Harvard College Rebellion of 1834 which is about as ridiculous as it sounds.

https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol11/iss3/4/

@evan YES, thank you for the reminder.

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.

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 I had somehow not read this book when it came out in 2016 and even though some of it may be outdated (though I don't know which parts) it was still a fascinating read about the various ways in which microbes define a lot of the things around us, and in fact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.

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 56: Charity & Sylvia. Really not sure if I didn't click with this book because of The Discourse around it or because it was just not my jam. You'd THINK I'd love this story of women living companionably together as partners in early Vermont but there was just a lot going on, no real through line narrative, and the author admitted she made some of the story up for dramatic reasons and I couldn't stop wondering what was made up. Tillie is a treasure, this book was only okay.

Book 57: The Unquiet Grave. I just finished Tana French's Cal Hooper series and remembered this read-alike, the Cormac Reilly series. Cormac is a local (unlike Cal) but he does sometimes feel out of step with what's going on around him in Galway. He's contemplating moving to a different job, his second in command may be moving to Australia, and his ex is back, pregnant with a missing husband. Also maybe someone hacked the lottery. Lots going on, a well-crafted mystery novel that lays it all out.

Book 58: Bury Me Already. I haven't read any other books by Wertz but I will track some down. This is a long pregnancy memoir which encompasses not just her pregnancy/birth/motherhood but also her own relationship stuff, family issues, concurrent crises of people near her. It's warts-and-all in a way I found refreshingly frank without being complainy. I learned some things and really liked Wertz's style and storytelling abilities. I say this a lot lately but "Usually not my jam but very good"

Book 59: Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. This was a fun sort of meta-mystery where the author is fully aware they are writing a book about the curious case of a dead guy (and then a bunch more dead people) while his somewhat argy bargy family is having a family get together at an Australian ski lodge during the middle of a storm. A lot of breaking the fourth wall type of things, a good amount of humor and a story at the center of it which is compelling. Worth tracking down.

Book 60: Ignore All Previous Instructions. A lot going on here! An autistic likely-lesbian is a scriptwriter in a world where GenAI owns the copyright to everything and sort of "owns the narrative" of all the culture's stories. But! Maybe there's another way. She reconnects with a person from her past who is now a man and envisions a different future. Alternating timelines from her growing up "different" to being a grown-ass lady with a job... and a desire for something different. In space.

Book 61: The Island at the Center of the World. This took a long time to finish. It's a dense history of the Manhattan area and environs from when the Dutch arrived and set up shop until about when the English took completely over. Thanks to some newly-translated early Dutch documents, there's a lot more known about this time in history. The author discusses what went into New Amsterdam which later became New York and how its origins can still be seen in the way the place works. Good history.

@evan That seems like a leading question, please let me know if I am misreading you.

I can outline many ways in which Fediverse posts are not collected the way items would be in a library and how we determine ownership or lines of stewardship differently from how a library would.

As others have said, if posts are collected even if a user has them set to auto-delete after a certain amount of time (a mechanism baked into the Mastodon platform for example), that seems like overreach to me.

@evan No but it would be nice if it was an option for people who affirmatively wanted it but it should be opt-in and specifically revocable.

@nemo @evan Obligatory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w59e20ijOpE

I did not write this (mostly) @richlitt did, but for those who are really interested in taxonomy, metadata and the historical record of same might enjoy this little article about preserving interpretive metadata in the sciences.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27271

@HauntedOwlbear That looks really cool and once I watched the YouTube video I actually understood how to use it.

RE: https://mastodonapp.uk/@taoish/116884161402249680

One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides "what is taking up all my cloud storage??) is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don't want it. I'm going to make a handout that explains how to do some of the basic AI-removal or AI-avoidance things.

Would appreciate links which give simple steps to do this for the most-used (Siri, Alexa, Gemini, Copilot, Firefox's AI nonsense &c.) so I can collate and synthesize. Thanks!

Book 7: The Treasure of the Black Swan. A graphic novel about a shipwreck and the drama trying to figure out who was legally entitled to the treasure. It involves diplomats, lawyers, treasure hunters and US, Peruvian and Spanish jurisdiction. Based on a true story (which I did not read up on until afterwards) it's an interesting and well-told and easy to follow story even though it was clearly a pretty convoluted situation at the time.