Hi! Friendly Asp here, with a link to a new resource I have put on Dreamwidth. This contains the crowdsourced reference links that have built up in my Discord server over the years, all in a public community now so that they can be accessed by people not in my circle!

I accept new links; the post I am linking has the guidelines for it. It also has all the categories I currently have pages for.

Please feel free to come browse, maybe leave a few useful things, and most of all -- please reblog this post so it is found by more people?

Categories include academic subjects, commerce links (mostly highlighting small businesses or minorities), crafting and art, fandom resources, food, health, internet and tech, life tips, writing and worldbuilding, as well as a link to the AO3 feeds currently existing on Dreamwidth for you to add to your circle.

Thank you for helping build a social net!

If you’re looking for research and studies on a particular topic, I highly suggest searching on frontiersin.org (at least to start). Frontiers is a collection of journals that seem to focus on really interesting cutting-edge stuff. I wanted to see what they had on chronic fatigue syndrome and damn, there’s some mind-blowing stuff there. There still seems to be no consensus but the research avenues opened here should hopefully lead to actual treatments in the future. Some interesting ideas I read included chronic low-level inflammation causing increased insulin resistance (and thus cells having to rely on lipid/protein metabolism for ATP production), low levels of T3 and higher levels of reverse T3 causing deficits in energy availability, overactivation of certain neural circuits causing dysfunction elsewhere in the brain, and increased production of ROS in mitochondria (which you can apparently treat by inhaling hydrogen gas??? Wild stuff).

Anyway, Frontiers. Give it a look if you have anything you need to look up in an academic journal.

if new information contradicts your sense of how the world works, you should not dismiss it out of hand, but fact-check it instead.

if something appeals to your sense of how the world works, it is even more important to vet that information before sharing it, because if it is misinformation then it is the misinformation you are more likely to share.

For all of my US followers for whom general public official election day is coming up (Nov. 7th) PLEASE do not become so disillusioned with the current state of higher power politicians that you skip out on voting for local offices; off year and local elections are already critically unemphasized but these are the people who have the most direct power over jails, police, school curriculum, etc. Do not let your grief be weaponized as a distraction from also continuing to fight police brutality, queer and bipoc censorship in schools, bodily autonomy, housing inequality, etc, on the smaller scale battlefields where every vote truly does count

It can be so frustrating to vote in small local elections because info is harder to find, but if you take the time to google vote411 and go to their website, get your personal ballot, and then look up the candidates, you will always find that two people are running for a local school board, and one is a lovely person who has slowly been effecting positive change for three decades and the other is a real estate broker who wants more money. And then you have the power to vote against the money asshole and for the nice person in a race that can genuinely go down to a handful of votes. Feels awesome, man. Vote out the bitch who voted against reasonable COVID measures in your local high school 3 years ago.

shoutout to the autistic bitches who write wholeass informal essays of meta/analysis/theories about their special interest media. you are the fucking backbone of our goddamned society

mansplaining isn't "man talks a lot about a thing" it's specifically when a man talks down to a woman about something he has no reason to think she won't understand. like if they both work for a law firm, and he starts lecturing her on email etiquette like he's talking to a grade schooler when like, writing emails is a major part of her job and there's no reason for him to think that she wouldn't know about it. not just a man getting excited about vide game and infodumping

Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This just applies to so many things in life. If you don’t know that you don’t know something, how can you ASK about it?

I think it can also be hard to understand- even for adults in their late 20s, like me, who grew up with LESS Internet if not the total absence thereof -that not everything is available online

on an extremely micro and innocuous level, I collect antique dolls, and the volume of reference material that just…has never yet been digitized? massive. there’s so much important and useful information that you’d never know if you weren’t friends with someone who owned a very specific out-of-print book from the 1970s. and you’d never even know said information existed to look for it in the first place

now imagine how much material, on every conceivable subject, must fall through the digital cracks that way

How to Draw Black People (2019)

How to Draw Black people is an interactive learning tool for artists looking to improve their understanding of Black culture and design methods for Black characters.

Learn how to take a cultural approach to character design and navigate the mores of Black culture. Build Black characters from the ground up, while avoiding tired and hurtful cliches. How to Draw Black People shows artists new techniques for rendering dark skin, drawing Afrocentric faces, and breaking through gender norms. With a digital component that includes brushes made specifically for African hair types and a library of sample files to practice on, How to Draw Black People is an essential resource for improving Black character designs in all media formats. Step by step tutorials and challenging activities centered on Black hair, skin tone, facial anatomy and so much more.

How to Draw Black People fills a void that is missing in art instruction by realigning character design with culture, instead of tropes.

by Malik Shabazz

Get it here 

[SuperheroesInColor faceb / instag / twitter / tumblr / pinterest / support ] 

This is why classes need library instruction

Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!

Me: Okay, what’s the subject?

Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.

Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?

Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!

Me:

I’m still mad about this because it happens frequently. Students at all levels of education need library and research instruction–they should get it before graduating high school, they should be getting it in several different classes in college, and there should be something in grad school–seriously, there are people in my master’s program who don’t know anything besides Google.

And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?

Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:

That said, this student did the right thing: they tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

They tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

I get goddamn professors pulling this shit, there is not one single level in the academy where research literacy isn’t lacking.  

Also: Everyone has forgotten how to browse the stacks. As in, find a book that’s relevant, go to the stacks, then look at what’s near it on the shelf. You will find stuff that way that would never turn up on a search. It really works and can be a useful supplement to electronic research even though it involves your corporeal form and books made out of paper. 

my law school requires a legal research class. you take it as a 1L, and it’s mandatory. you are signed up for it automatically along with all your other 1L courses. it’s a wise thing to do, because you’re fucked as a lawyer if you don’t know to find, you know, the law.

I have a library and information science degree, which I often refer to as a degree in google, and I’m only being a little facetious with that. I often impress people with my ability to find things online, but it’s only because I’ve taken so many classes in research methods that I know how to phrase a search well. It’s so important, not just in school! 

Goddammit there is so much information and so many way to access it that it burns my biscuits when we don’t give students the tools they need to succeed at this. Hell yeah all y’all above!

And here’s what I’ve got to add:  

Ask a Librarian

Seriously guys librarians are here to help. We would love to help you find the right resource for your particular informational need and we’ve been trained to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Nowadays you don’t even have to go to the library in person as many libraries offer online chat services as well as the option to contact via email. Further, and I think very importantly we are dedicated to our patrons rights to privacy. To quote the American Library Association the “rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”  

Search the Stacks

This is one of my favorite ways  to immerse myself in an area of study. While a good subject or keyword search will lead you to some good results sometimes is just as fruitful to go the library and plunk yourself down in section and browse all the books in a topic area. Libraries will label the (book)stacks based on whichever classification system they use and you can use the links below to figure out which area of the stacks you’ll want to look through.

Dewey: used in public libraries

LOC /Library of Congress: classification system used in university libraries

http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit03/libraries03_04.phtml

Online Books

Some websites like gutenberg project are dedicated to making public domain books accessible to the public. Using the search term public domain books is a good way to go about looking for more sources of them. Open sourced is another good term to use when trying to find freely accessible books online and that’s not just limited to fiction books but textbooks are also offered by various sites.

Project Gutenberg is an online archive of tens of thousands of  books that have enter the public domain that can be freely accessed.

Openstax is one website that provides access to Higher Ed and AP open sourced textbooks.

Libguides and Pathfinders

As stated above librarians are in the business of connecting people to resources. If we can’t do so in person then we also do so by creating guides that can be found and used when we aren’t around. These guides are filled with search terms, books, articles, reviews, lists, links, and anything else we think would be helpful for patrons trying to explore a particular topic area. 

Pathfinder is a particular term used for these guides. Libguides is a particular platform which to host these guides. Using either word at the end of your search terms online will bring up guides that have been created in that particular subject area. Or you can explore libguides directly with your search terms to find what guides librarians across the country have created.

Note: Using pathfinder in your search terms may pull up resources about Paizo Publishing’s same titled tabletop RPG series and while dragons are cool you can modify your search to library pathfinder to exclude these resources.

Other than using a search engine or libguides directly I find a great many pathfinders on university library sites. Usually what I do is find a university’s library webpage, find their pathfinder/research guides/guides section, and then browse through their lists of guides. These are generally organized by field of study so just pick the one you are interested in and look through the resources they have listed.

Some of the resources will be accessible for anyone while some might be locked for students of the particular university.  If the article, book, or resource is locked by a school portal you can either search for it online outside of the university portal or you can go to your own university/public library to see if they have access to the resource there. Even if they don’t have it currently in their collection libraries are often connected with other branches and may be able to request an interlibrary loan of what you need.

Online Reference Resources

Sometimes the problem isn’t finding information but finding good information. Below are two sites that I use regularly to help me with this issue when searching online for resources.

The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association gives a list of the best free reference sites on the internet

The Ipl2 is a good authoritative source to find general information on a variety of topics. Even though the website is no longer updating there are still a plethora of subject guides that can be explored.

Open Sourced Journals and Articles

Just as there are open sourced books and textbooks so too are there open sourced journals and articles available. Again  you can add the term open sourced when searching for these resources.

DOAJ is the Directory of Open Access Journals and you can search through here to find both articles and journals freely available to access.

Journal Article Tips

Finally whenever I’m searching through journal articles there are a few things I always like to keep in mind.

Build context. Once you find an article that is relevant to your search you can do this by exploring the citations. Both those that the article you are using references in its bibliography and those that reference the article itself. 

Every database is going to do this differently but generally with a few clicks you can find out who has cited an article that you have read. If nothing else try popping the title of your article into google scholar and you’ll see a blue ‘Cited by’ below the description. Also in some cases you can click on the author directly in a database to see what else they have written in the subject. Totally ask your librarian for help navigating the particular database you are using again they will be stoked to do so. 

Building this context of literature by finding and reading these extra articles is important to building a critical understanding of your topic and will allow you to build the best possible defense of your arguments. This will also allow you to see if the article you’ve initially selected is in itself a viable position or if it is an outlier of its field.

If you can try and find reviews of literature articles and special issue/special topic editions of journals. These are your best friends in the resource world as these types of articles and journals compile a great deal of information on particular topic in a tiny space. They are immensely helpful in building context in an area of thought and useful to finding out what to read further to be informed in an area of study. Add those words to your search terms to see if you can get some useful resources.

Goddamn…

We should be taught this in MIDDLE SCHOOL.

This is a more important skill than being able to WRITE COHERENTLY.

This is not just a writing or academic skill, this is a CITIZENSHIP SKILL.

Did…did they take this out of school? When I was in middle school we were taken By Class to the school library and the librarian gave a lecture on how to us the library and it’s resources. Of course, at the time all they had was the card catalogue, but we were taught how to read the cards. We were taught the dewey decimal system and how to search the stacks. Then the teacher gave us an assignment that made us go to the public library and use the knowledge we were given. I don’t remember if I was taught to look through journals then or if that came later, but I eventually learned it. Either way, I was taught that way back in the 80s…

WHEN THE EVER LIVING FUCK DID THEY STOP TEACHING THAT IN SCHOOLS? IT’S A GODSDAMN NECESSITY IN THIS AGE OF INFORMATION. INFORMATION IS FUCKING USELESS IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIND IT!

Gods…we are failing kids so fucking hard in this fucking country…

I was lucky enough to have great library education in elementary/middle school, university, and medical school, and it has made me LOVE my librarian friends so so so much <3

I didn’t learn how to do this shit until I taught myself as an adult.

Some people are lucky enough to learn it, but most people aren’t.

I still cannot believe that here in the year of our Lady 2019, you can watch entire incredibly fascinating college lectures for free on the internet, and people still choose to use this wonderful repository of human knowledge to be fuckin racists on twitter instead

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=college+lecture+textile+history

You can just. Go on youtube and put in “college lecture on ____” and find hundreds of gems like this

And some people choose to go be racists in comments sections instead

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=college+lecture+online

Lookit you can learn about anything from organic chemistry to a philosophy course on death to calculus to art history to anything you want to learn about, for free, from Yale and other fancy learning places, and some fuckers will go and argue about how they should be allowed to use racial slurs on twitter instead.

ok but

as a writer

90% of the time, when I’m trying to research x or y, what I actually need to know is what daily life went like.  Daily life of a person living in x region from y class during z time period.  How does a barley farmer spend their day in late September?  What tools are they using?  What are they using them for?  How hard is each task?  How much does a cooper earn in a day, and what can it buy?  How about a spice merchant?  What’s the procedure for tanning hide in Scotland during the 1100s, from beginning to end?  What does an alpine shepherd spend their time doing, when it’s not lambing or shearing time?  What do they spend their time doing when it is lambing season?  What sort of medical knowledge would they have?  How many people is a reasonable number for a minor lord to employ in this kind of castle, or in that kind of manor house, and how much food would they eat in a day, and how much would it cost?  How long would it take to build a house?  A palisade?  A wagon?  A brick wall?  A stone wall?  A road?  How many workers would you need for each?  How many people in a given town would know how to play the flute?  How many would know to make one?  How long would making one take?  How much would it cost to buy one?  How many could afford that?  For how long would the meat from each different animal feed a subsistence hunter?  How successful can they expect to be on any given day?  With a dog?  With traps?  In the rain?  In the snow?  In the autumn?  In the summer?  How far would they range?  How many chickens would a peasant own in medieval Brittany?  In Viking age Iceland?  In Roman Britain?  What would they have to do to care for the chickens each day?  If you’re travelling on horseback across the Eurasian steppe in the mid-1000s, what would you need to do to care for your horse over the course of a multi-day journey?  How much time would your horse have to spend grazing?  What would you carry and eat?  What would you forage?  How easy would it be, assuming you’d grown up being taught how, to find wild onions while travelling in unfamiliar country?  How long would it delay you to do so?  How would you carry water?  What sort of vessel would you cook in?  How heavy would it be?  How would you carry it?  How much weight could your horse carry?  For how long each day?  How did they carve stone in the ancient world?  In the medieval world?  In the early modern world?  Did cowhands in Europe ride ponies?  Wouldn’t that have made their jobs easier?  WHAT WERE THEIR JOBS EVEN, WHAT DID THEY DO ALL DAY, WHAT DID THEIR DAYS LOOK LIKE

but NO all the research that’s easy to find is about Big Important Events and Great Men and “FUN FACT DID U KNOW: maize and potatoes are both from the New World!!”  Ok great did they eat egrets.  How long does it take to pluck and clean and cook an egret.  What tools would you need to get an egret from point a.) “minding its own business in a swamp” to point b.) “fit for human consumption.”  How many people would one egret feed.  Do egrets live in Poland.  What color egret lives in Poland.  “Henwardric the XIVIVI conquered the—”  WHAT WAS HIS ARMY’S RANK STRUCTURE LIKE.  HOW EASY WAS IT TO GET PROMOTED.  HOW DID HE KEEP THEM SUPPLIED.  WHAT DID HIS FORAGERS’ JOBS ACTUALLY ENTAIL, DAY TO DAY AND HOUR TO HOUR.  HOW DID THEY DO THEIR LAUNDRY.  WHAT DID EACH SOLDIER CARRY ON THEIR PERSON AND WHAT WOULD GO IN A SUPPLY WAGON.  WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL DREW THE SUPPLY WAGONS.  WHAT DID YOU NEED TO DO TO TAKE CARE OF THE ANIMALS.  HOW MUCH OF YOUR DAY WOULD BE SPENT ON IT.  WHAT ABOUT A CENTURY EARLIER.  WHAT ABOUT A CENTURY LATER.  WHAT KIND OF SHOES DID THEY WEAR.  HOW OFTEN DID THEY NEED TO BUY NEW SHOES.  HOW LONG DID IT TAKE A SHOEMAKER TO MAKE A PAIR OF SHOES.  HOW MUCH WOULD THEY COST.  HOW MANY DAYS’ WAGES WAS THAT FOR A SOLDIER IN HENWARDRIC’S ARMY.

& I just don’t know where to find these sorts of answers & it’s driving me up the entire wall

These days historians really are trying as a discipline to move away from great men and great events. That said, there are several reasons why these sorts of details are hard to find:

When training as an historian, so much emphasis is put on making an argument. This technology was important because. That event was important because. What were the causes of x? What were the consequences of y? And we’re also trained to look at detail and say, “So what? How does that advance my argument?” And if the answer is “It doesn’t, I just thought it was interesting,” that’s what gets cut when we go over wordcount (we always go over wordcount).

The exception to this is the technique called ‘thick description,’ which I assume we stole from anthropology or possibly sociology. Thick description is a technique for historical writing that piles on all of the details, in the belief that you need as much context as possible in order to understand an historical event or decision.

If we have the sources—and a lot of the time we do—historians can and often do go into great detail about the daily life of people in whatever time at whatever place. But this sort of detail, while commonly included in historical writing, is not usually easy to find. It’s supporting evidence for some other point, not the point itself, which means it won’t be in the keywords or title. So, I know Peter Wilson’s doorstopper Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Year’s War has quite a lot of information about the organisation, weaponry, food, payment and clothing of the armies involved, and the occasions on which they lost their shoes or resorted to cannibalism, but that’s because I’ve read it. It’s not going to show up as the first result in a search for any of those things.

Then there are the paywalls. There’s some great stuff stuck behind some hefty paywalls. Enough said on that one, though if you have a university library account you might be in luck.

So.

Then there’s search engine techniques. The first thing I’d suggest is what I think of as ‘broaden and backstop.’ You break down the question in bits. So for egrets:

‘Egret recipe’ gave me a recipe for ‘Heron Rosted’ from 15th century England which suggests roasting a heron in the same method as a crane (one must look elsewhere for how to roast a crane) and serving with a sauce of ‘gynger, vynegre & Mustard.’ ‘Egret distribution’ gives me Wikipedia, which tells me egrets migrate, so their availability in Poland will depend on the time of year. ‘egret weight’ tells me the little egret is about 310g, so one egret would probably only feed one person. And ‘taboo eating egret’ tells me that eating egrets was taboo in Irish and Bantu culture, but brings me nothing specifically about Poland, suggesting that it at least wouldn’t have been seen as sacrilege to eat an egret there.

‘Stonecarving tools archaeology’ gives me the website ‘The Art of Making in Antiquity: Stoneworking in the Roman world’, with many essays and videos on the processes involved.

‘Medieval soap recipes’ led me to the works of Susan Verberg, who has collected, tried and published a number of soap recipes, including medicinal, cosmetic and laundry soap, explaining the purpose of each ingredient.

For my own fiction research, I’ve spent a lot of time on wikipedia looking up the geographic distribution and common names of various animals & plants. I spent a lot of time looking at anthropological texts from the nineteenth century about Māori and Pasifika myths, legends and cultural practices. A lot of it is written by terribly superior 19th century White Academica, but the information is still useful. The New Zealand Electronic Texts Collection–a database run by Victoria University–has an extensive collection of digitised texts. I’ve also looked at a lot of early twentieth century labour history, trying to develop a rhetoric for a fictional group of radical political activists, and here as well I’ve had more luck looking at pamphlets published by early twentieth century radicals than at history books.

Or some slightly more in-depth information about salt mining:

Keep reading

I am… so in awe & so grateful

ACTUAL SCENES TAKING PLACE IN SALT MINE, HERE WE GO

she ain’t wrong 🤔

Im so????

What asshole drew this?? As if we don’t have the very recent, devastating shipwrecks of the Costa Concordia (2012) in which video from firefighters helped prove the captain abandoned his ship in a disaster that resulted in 32 fatalities

or the sinking of the Sewol ferry in Korea (2014), in which over 300 people, mostly middle school students, were drowned, but not before many sent footage of the ferry’s announcements telling people to stay seated and not evacuate, proving the negligence of the ferry’s crew. Many of them were able to get final goodbye messages to their friends and family before they drowned. 

Ability to send final messages aside, documentary archival video footage is PRICELESS in situations like this. After any kind of public event, you bet your ass police are asking for any and all cell phone footage from the area. 

anyway, in conclusion, that artist can fuck off 

And WTF, there were people literally sitting in the lifeboats on the Titanic sketching it. That’s where that iconic fucking image of it COMES FROM, you WOMBATS.

What the HELL did they do to the White House website?

Okay we’re going through this bit by bit.

First of all, this is the first thing that pops up when you visit the website:

But wait, it gets worse.

Once you get in, you see that Trump’s inauguration takes up the entire main page. You know what? I’m fine with that. I mean it makes sense.

What I’m not fine with is this:

As of yesterday (I’m on the Wayback Machine), these are the issues that the Obama Administration listed, leading to pages which went into detail about these issues and what the Administration was doing about them.

Again, that’s from the Obama Administration.

This is the current Issues Tab under the Trump Administration:

No, I haven’t cropped it. That’s it. That’s the entire list. All of those are the issues that Trump’s Administration cares about.

The civil rights page? Gone. Climate change page? Gone. Health care page? Gone. Disabilities page? Gone. It’s all gone. Everything is gone.

They also completely took away all of the pages on Obama’s initiatives, all of the pages on internships and involvement in the White house, all of the pages on different ways to protest (other than the We The People petitions), and for some reason, they even took out most of the pages in the history section. The famous virtual tour? Gone. A detailed history about the architecture, the decor, even theee customs and traditions? Gone.

 But here’s the best part.

Most of the ‘Briefing’ section has been cleaned out as well and the tab for weekly addresses has been completely removed.

Well isn’t that just…disturbing?

It’s worth noting that this happens every presidency, the Obama administration’s whitehouse.gov will be archived and none of this was taken down by Clownstick himself. Not that it makes me feel ANY better about the next four years, but for once it’s not on DOFUS

So just for you, I spent the past half hour tediously searching through the Wayback Machine.

This was the page Obama had right after he took office after Bush:

Notice how, even though the website changed overnight, he still put in a huge list of issues including virtually every one listed on the website yesterday?

But wait, there’s more.

I went back and looked at how Bush’s page looked before the Obama Administration changed it. And guess what? Bush had an entire list of issues that resembled the ones listed on the website yesterday.

But wait!

There’s more!

Back when the Internet was new and the webpage was just a bunch of text, Clinton had an entire list of issues like the ones listed on the website yesterday.

So, no, this isn’t something that always happens. The website changes but the issues have always stayed the same and they’ve always been prominently displayed.

Until now.

Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.

Mostly for ebooks

Not as often as I want to. Libraries are always relevant. 

Like learning how to make infinite chocolate, for instance.

I feel like this is a good time to point out the problem of trusting crowd-sourced information. Over the years wikipedia has become more reliable, but that comes at the price of it being heavily monitored—even then it frequently has errors in it.

Tumblr is not monitored. Anyone can say whatever they want, and there’s little to no consequence to saying it. That’s social media. Nobody posting here has to get a PhD in what they’re talking about; it’s all exactly as casual as posting status updates on Facebook.

This can lead to many good things, like spreading information about under-reported horrors (Ferguson, for example, would’ve been most definitely swept under the rug and forgotten if not for the combined efforts of all social media). However, it also leads to a dangerous climate for learning.

Everyone assumes that whatever they see on Tumblr is true so long as it has enough notes. Last year, for example, a text post grew wildly popular because it accused the creator of Five Nights at Freddy’s of being anti-abortion and a hardcore Christian, something which the OP heard from someone else, didn’t bother fact checking, and posted. This got out of hand quickly, with thousands of social justice-minded people reblogging and spreading the word. By the time that the real information got out, the damage had been done.

Treat Tumblr the same way that you treat wikipedia: it is a starting point. Do you see a post with NO source claiming that ___ is problematic/bad? Look it up on google. If you can’t find any non-tumblr sources, it just might be the highest form of bullshit.

Tumblr is not a place to “learn more”. Entire chunks of Tumblr are dedicated to claiming that teachers are evil for getting pissed off that you’re talking in class, or that parents are “ageist” for establishing a curfew, or yes, that you can somehow make infinite chocolate. It’s a springboard: you need to go to reputable sources with experts in the field to get the actual information.

EVEN if what you’re looking at isn’t something that is talked about at a reputable level, it is ALWAYS a good idea to look for multiple voices. If one source-less, proof-less person is spouting nonsense and literally nothing else meshes with what they’re saying, you might not wanna accept that as the truth. That’s how the anti-vaxx movement got so batshit out of control.