PANEM ET CIRCENSES

iveseenitinmovies

[edit: putting this here because it got lost in the reblogs]

lakemojave

Kendrick Lamar should write a song about being a young witch looking for their neighbor's lost cat in the alps

not-available-for-comment

So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

1. Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood
2. As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building
3. BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.

rouge-the-bat

"can we normalize-" NO!!!!!! we do not need to expand whats considered normal!!! we need to teach people to stop reacting judgmentally when encountering something new and weird!!!! things dont need to be normal to be respected!!!!!!!!!!

xenosagaepisodeone

newbie asked if we're supposed to look out for 'red flags' in interlibrary loan requests in reference to a request a patron had made for a book about cannibalism. she was looking expectantly at me like she was expecting me to be equally aghast at this........girl why would you work at a library if you want to play book police

drtanner

I'm fascinated to know what kind of world this girl lives in. For what reason are those books in the library at all if not to be checked out and read? Are they there as honeypots for Problematic People™? If you check out a Red Flag Book™, you've fallen into the Evil Person Trap™ and need to be taken in for reeducation, I suppose.

tanadrin

On the other side of this, I love the mental image of a guy who’d really like to get into cannibalism but doesn’t know where to start, so he heads down to his local library for some pointers.

tikkunolamorgtfo

#yeah don’t be weird about what they read — but like um — asking for a book on how to abuse your child is kind of a request that I#dont want to complete and I’m glad to not be there anymore#like I’m a mandatory reporter and have been asked to get a book on how to abuse children — um — conflict of interest no?#and this is not a case of my exaggeration — that book when searched had news articles and lawsuits because children died#it wasn’t in our system so I had to send it to the ILL person and it was their judgement call#but yikes

So I understand having a reaction like that on a gut level (I'm guessing the book was To Train Up a Child, as I've read several news articles about abuse cases in which it was mentioned), but here's the crucial thing that we learn in our very first semester of library school:

You do not know why somebody wants to read a particular book.

Is it possible they wanted to read it for terrible fundamentalist Christian parenting advice? Sure. But it's also possible they read the same news articles about the abuse cases that I did and were simply intrigued about what the book actually said. It's possible they were doing research on fundamentalism or abuse and thought it was an important piece of material to include. It's possible they suspected their own parents used were inspired by the book and wanted to have a better understanding about what happened to them as a child. It's possible they actually wanted How to Train Your Dragon and got the titles confused. You just don't know!

Like, I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody ask for materials on topics that I find unsavoury, only to learn later that said person was doing research on extremism, denial, etc. and very much didn't agree with the materials in question. Hell, sometimes I have students coming in saying "I need help finding scholarly articles on why vaccines are bad/gay marriage shouldn't be legal/Women don't deserve equal pay/etc," only to have it turn out the student is actually making the opposite argument in their paper, but were told by the instructor they need to have one credible opposing source.

The reasons people have for reading things are not cut and dry, and even if somebody is more inclined to have a certain viewpoint, you still can't know with any certainty what they'll actually think of the book once they've read it. They could agree with the premise. They could disagree with it. They could find it boring and not absorb much of the content. They could forget to read the book before it's due back and return it without even cracking the spine.

We cannot presume to know the intentions of our patrons based solely on the content they're requesting. That kind of logic is for cops, not librarians.

angel-derangement

“we live in an uncaring universe” yeah dude and I live in an uncaring house. and I shit in an uncaring toilet. but do you touch an uncaring lover? do you comfort an uncaring child? do you guide to sleep each night a cold and uncaring self?

angel-derangement

please hurry up in reblogging this I wanna jorts it before someone puts it in one of those heartwarming tiktok slideshows

tranzzitts

Analog horror series about your friend getting a boyfriend