Affordable wood furniture.

Meme format of bearded blonde man seeing a Zodiac circle diagram and saying who actually believes in this stuff? And then seeing a circle of fifths and saying music theory, nice.

Literally me.

(Image stolen from Reddit)

I too would like to be Apple CEO when I turn 50.

My focus would be user empowerment.

I mean, "Why should Disney, Warner Bros, and Dr. Seuss Enterprises be the only ones making money off this racist imagery?" is a valid question.

What about racist imagery money for the little guys?

Oddly, racism BENEFITS from being treated as the worst thing ever. There's pressure to ignore it completely if it's not extreme enough.

(Same for sexual harassment actually.)

MOUSE: P.I. FOR HIRE is built on imagery with racist origins: just a fact. Everyone can choose their own personal reaction.

The 1930s return as a first-person shooter in Mouse: P.I. For Hire Simultaneously a tribute to 1930s cartoons and 1990s shooters, Mouse: P.I. For Hire examines the culture and politics of the Depression.

Nice to see a video game review acknowledge cartoon blackface.
"The animation style, while guilty of having racist origins like so many things rooted in America, encourages artists to follow their wackiest whims, and Mouse plays it a little conservative on that front."
www.avclub.com/mouse-pi-for...

Teens today are probably picking up Tolkien and wondering why it wasn't obvious to all of Gondor that Denethor having a *palantír* was a bad idea.

Recognizing Racial Bias in Storytime Materials YouTube video by Garren Hochstetler

Just in case you happen to be interested, here's that professional development training I mentioned a week ago. Sky Kids has a "Ten Little... Who?" cartoon series that I can't believe debuted in 2025.

youtu.be/AHGb98wB5KM?...

If something is largely bad currently and people are feeling it's been forced on them without any of that "measure or thoughtfulness" you mentioned, then why shouldn't they say "no" until/unless they are convinced that ethical uses exist at all?

It's our job to be convincing, not just patronizing.

This feels like people who get angry at individuals who choose to mask.

Both masking and GenAI refusal are such obviously ethical choices, even if it's not your own choice.

A woman is sitting at a table in a library. She is wearing dark glasses and is looking up and smiling while doing something with her hands on the table which is plugged in. Beneath the table there is a tan guide dog, wearing their harness, chilling.

It's National Library Week. Make sure that if you're sharing National Library Week images you include alt text because the library is for EVERYONE.

If people don't know what your image is, especially if it contains text, your post is not for everyone. Guidance:

www.perkins.org/resource/how...

Same for police abolition tbh

A lot of times, people trying to overcorrect are the only ones turning in the right direction.

Yep, this is how I feel about it.

The underreacting is SUCH a bigger & more harmful problem than the overreacting, that it's tricky to even say overreacting is happening too (even though it's true).

Purity is a vice.

* ask me if they can charge their monitoring bracelet
* ask if they can use a study room for a monitored child visitation

So excuse me if I think "talking like people" has more to do with being able to talk TO people than being scared of a word.

* ask me about the next warrant forgiveness workshop event
* explain to me that they lost books when they were arrested
* ask for help checking if their beloved dog is in a shelter that they lost when arrested
* talk to me about difficulties finding work with a record
/

Anyway, when I say I work with justice involved people on a daily basis, what I mean are people who:

* lost their photo ID to the government seizing and throwing away their belongings
* ask if a corrections photo ID will work, and flinch ready for for me to respond negatively
/

This sort of thing is funny to me as someone who has worked most of a decade as a children's librarian.

Kids aren't afraid of new words. Kids CRAVE new words.

I casually explain words to kids all the time and they look for an excuse to use those words before they go home.

It's like how I do say "unhoused" at times and "homeless" at other times. There are reasons for when one is more useful than another, but it's not a big deal.

It's... revealing when certain people ONLY want to hear "homeless" and get all angry about hearing "unhoused."

The summary of what the governor said gets it wrong too. It's not that "justice involved" is a drop-in replacement for "inmates." It's much broader than that.
The justice system is literally INVOLVED in some people's lives much more than others outside of "is an inmate." It's a plain speaking term.

I've heard it used and used it IRL. It makes sense with some contexts and audiences.

The right-wing bullshit, as always, is in claiming that liberals declare one newfangled term to be right and the use of any other terms to be evil.

It's a rhetorical trick to make you feel on their side.

Typical British nursery rhyme:

"There was an old woman who had three sons,
Jerry, James, and John:
Jerry was hung, James was drowned,
John was lost and never was found,
And there was an end of her three sons,
Jerry, James, and John."

The Nursery Rhymes of England by J.O. Halliwell, p. 21, 1843.

True. I need to dig into specifics, though. It might be the same legally, but I place a big difference on training using publicly indexable web content vs published artistic works. (Both are copyrighted.)

But at least that's the same issue as traditional web search.

In both cases, information literacy is vital. Simply trusting GenAI output is foolish. It's a pattern detector and generator, not a truth detector.

But the chaotic sea of patterns can take us to islands of primary sources that we would not have otherwise reached as a practical matter.

While energy usage is a favor, it's a factor in many things we do. I know my time spent repeatedly doing traditional search used far more energy.

As for search, what got me was spending days stubbornly trying to find something with dozens and dozens of crafted Google searches and then doing my first Google AI search out of desperation. Not only was it correct in one try, it pointed me at the human created reference page I was looking for.

The situation that got me on board with indexing was someone feeding long public meeting recordings in for a timestamped summary. This allows greater access for people to find parts of the meeting that may be of interest to them. So: an accessibility feature.

Alt-text generation of images fits too.

Both of these are about human access to human generated content.

Fallibility is acceptable when used as a heuristic and a person examines the content itself afterwards to confirm.

So I am trying to make a list of things AI is good at that are also within library professional ethics to use, if used certain ways.

So far I've got indexing content and search.

Cat in the Hat in the Middle. Goofy with blue hat and black stripe. A felt illustration of the Cat and little cats in Black. A minstrel performer with hat and band and big bowtie. Bugs Bunnie in blackface with a banjo. Another blackface performer in bowtie band white gloves. Al Jolson in blackface with big bowtie and white gloves. A Seuss drawing of a Black man with large lips or animal snout from an insecticide ad. The cover of a book titled Was the Cat in the Hat Black?

The Cat in the Hat and comparison imagery.