Too much content
I'm ending every day with a screen full of tabs, thinking I have something to say about each one, but I don't say something. Today I'm just going to dump the tabs right here. Let's see what it looks like:
A case study illustrating how the pandemic is revealing and exacerbating racial and socioeconomic disparities: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/10/learning-pods-greenbrier-elementary-charlottesville-divided-racial-lines.html
A research guide for voting rights resources in the UM Archives: https://lib.guides.umd.edu/c.php?g=993041
A spectacular bookstore that just opened in Chengdu, which is about as far away for me geographically as a place could be. These photos are magnificent: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/surreal-new-bookstore-opened-china
Aaron Gordon, from Motherboard, has been writing a newsletter about the USPS recently and it is good; however, he mentioned something this week about Goodhart's Law and misspelled the guy's name. When I searched to confirm the actual spelling I found this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
The eternal springtime of google maps: https://reallifemag.com/springtime-everywhere/
I have a huge sack of compliments for the Tenement Museum. Here is the first installment of the spooky thing they've put together for the season: https://www.tenement.org/blog/haunted-by-history-part-i-lost-souls/
Tales of the swamp, 5G flavor: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/politics/white-house-5g-spectrum-no-bid-contract-rivada/index.html
Sad but true, the google search has degraded over time, favoring revenue over discovery: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/19/google-search-results-monopoly/
This immaculate concussion story made me wince: https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-microwave-attacks/
An astonishing description of the RentAHitman operation: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/rent-a-hitman-wendy-wein-murder-for-hire-sting-operation-1066756/
The Foxconn bluster bubble: https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wisconsin-jobs-loophole-trump
Penguin poop: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969719352477
The smallest unit of time measures has the cutest name: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6514/339
These links I need for my discussion with B on the income gap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States - https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s/
And finally, there was an email question to a library list about adding visual novels to collections (not easy to do from a practical standpoint) and this guy's email is full of great stuff:
Matthew Murray thematthewmurray@gmail.com
Wow, so weird to hear people talk about this when my Readers' Advisory podcast just did an episode on visual novels last month! (Even if you don't want to listen to the podcast, that link contains a list of visual novels we enjoyed playing. Some of them are really good!)
For those that are unfamiliar with the term, visual novels are mostly text-based "games" that usually involve some degree of interactivity/choices, but don't have to. The text is matched to images that appear on screen at the same time. (Some of the fancier ones have voice acting or even full animation or video.) You can sort of consider them illustrated "choose your own adventure" style stories (or "interactive fiction") that are very dialogue heavy. Some of them feature no choices and are really just illustrated ebooks while others can involve many choices and be very complicated! Choices can include making decisions about where your character goes or what they say to another character.
I wouldn't describe "What Remains of Edith Finch" as a visual novel, but as a "walking simulator". In WRoEF you're exploring a 3d environment, whereas in a visual novel you're generally just reading text on the screen and choosing one of several dialogue options.
One of the issues with adding visual novels to your collection, is that the majority of them are available solely through download. A few (such as the Ace Attorney games or Steins;Gate) are available in physical formats for systems like the Nintendo Switch or PS4, though sometimes these can be "limited release" style things that it seems unlikely most libraries would acquire.
This is unfortunate because visual novels are often made by individuals or small teams whose voices are not represented as frequently within mainstream media. For example, there are a lot of visual novels made by queer creators.
(Another possible area in which libraries could work to develop collections of visual novels would be academic libraries' digital repositories that could contain visual novels produced as coursework or research. But that's kind of outside the scope of this mailing list...)
For my podcast I streamed myself playing visual novels every day in August and have continued doing it on Friday nights since then. All of the streams are on our YouTube channel, but if you're curious some of my favourite streams were:
- Dungeons & Lesbians - Try to date someone you play Dungeons & Dragons with
- Serre - “A visual novel about a girl and an alien drinking tea and falling in love!” (my co-host and I played this one in French and translated it as we played)
- Order a Pizza: A Visual Novel - Can you save your relationship with your daughter? Maybe the perfect pizza will help... (this one is weird)
- Were:House - It's Halloween and you meet some monsters, will you find true love or just a part time job?
Ack! What a long email.
Anyway, glad to hear people talking about these. Feel free to message me off-list if you want to keep talking : )
Guess what happened? I watched the stream of Order a Pizza and it was GREAT and now I want to hear his guests' podcast: https://finishitpod.com/
I think I'll sleep better having shifted all these tabs onto a post. Let's see.